Avengers: Endgame, of course, is the final installment in the Infinity Saga of the MCU, and stars everyone from the last movie post I did plus Paul Rudd, Jeremy Renner, Evangeline Lily, Brie Larson, and Michael Douglas.
A few weeks after Thanos (Josh Brolin) snaps half the universe out of existence, the remaining Avengers meet up with Captain Marvel (Larson), who, in characteristically confident fashion, figures that with her around they can take Thanos out. And indeed they do, but he's already destroyed the Infinity Stones, so Thor (Chris Hemsworth) beheading him seems an afterthought.
Five years pass, and the world (indeed, the universe) is limping along and learning to cope with the mass trauma of the deaths. And then Scott Lang (Rudd) reappears from what, to him, was only a few hours in the quantum realm, convinced that there's a way to control the time-shifting properties, go back in time, and stop Thanos. Of course, that works, but there are costs and twists and turns along the way. I ain't gonna summarize the whole thing, there's too much.
So, we pretty much knew after Infinity War that time travel was going to be involved here, and we pretty much knew after Ant-Man & the Wasp that Scott was going to bring it all together. What I wasn't expecting was how well the Russos put it all together. I said before that they managed to make Age of Ultron and Iron Man 3 better in Civil War by contextualizing them a little, and here the same thing happens with Thor: The Dark World. We get to see the characters way back in Avengers and see how they've changed - Captain America (Chris Evans) goes from his forthright, energetic, intense freedom fighter to the somewhat more jaded and world-weary fellow we see here, f'rex.
As with Infinity War, the relationships make it, but we get to see characters move on. Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) marries Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) and they have a daughter, Morgan (Alexandra Rabe). Hawkeye (Renner), having lost his entire family in the snap, goes on a worldwide criminal-killing rampage. Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) takes over as coordinator and leader of the Avengers, trying to fix the world as best she can. Thor has become depressed, drunk, and fat, wallowing in his failure. And so on.
Like I said, it's a big movie and there's a lot happening, so there are three bits I want to touch on. First the Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). He goes from not being able to coax the Hulk out to fight to merging with the Hulk in this movie, and makes a fleeting reference to "18 months in a lab", but we never get to see any of that. Now, Professor Hulk needed to be here in order for him to wield the stones and snap everyone back, sure, but it still feels like we glossed right over Hulk's resolution of, well, his whole thing. I understand why it happened, it's just a niggle.
Second thing: Natasha's death. I've gone over this in my head a lot since the movie came out. It bothers me a little that the two characters sacrificed for the Soul Stone were the two main female characters in the MCU (before Wasp (Lily) and Captain Marvel showed up). And, yes, they were ideally suited because they had strong enough relationships with other characters that they could be the sacrifice, and, yes, Natasha made the most sense because she was set up for a redemption arc waaaay back in Avengers (Whedon did not with that arc in Age of Ultron, but y'know, Whedon). And yet...still bugs me. It's not fridging, because she wasn't killed to motivate a male character, but it still feels like the strangely obvious choice. Killing any character would be tricky, of course; it has to be someone that the universe can lose (and therefore who isn't still under contract), and it has to be someone important enough that there's some emotional weight, so of the characters who were alive to be that sacrifice, it's pretty much gonna be Natasha or Clint. I get all that, and it still bugs me a little.
Final thing: Cap and time travel. We're told that you can change the past to change your future. We're also told that if you do change the past, you create an alternate timeline (although watching the movie again, what we actually told is, according to the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), if you remove an Infinity Stone from the timeline you create a split, but anyway). So when Cap goes back in time and stops in 1942 or so to stay with Peggy Carter...holy shit, right? That changes so much. The Russos have since said that he lived in an alternate timeline and then somehow jumped back to the "prime" timeline to give his shield to Falcon (Anthony Mackie), but that's not remotely clear in the final cut. I'm hoping that the Loki TV show at least addresses that a little, because Cap's whole arc is that he can't ignore a situation going bad. There were, um, a lot of bad situations from 1940s to present.
But with all of that said, the movie is amazing and tighter than it has any right to be. The final battle scene is worth many rewatches, and seeing Cap wield Mjolnir is always an uplifting experience.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Bad Times at the El Royale
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