Unpopular Opinion: Endgame Has Some Major Problems And We Need To Talk About It (SPOILERS)
Tristan Young @talltristan
Before we do this let’s just throw up a MAJOR SPOILER WARNING banner. If you haven’t seen the film yet, beat it. I’ll be here when you get back.
We good? Okay let’s do this.
There is a scene in Avengers: Endgame in which Tilda Swinton’s character from Dr Strange explains to Bruce Banner that by removing the infinity stones from their native points in history as he and his friends intend, or changing anything at all in the past, they will create splinters and rips in the time space continuum. Rather than having any effect on their current present, or the future of the events they wish to manipulate, altering the past merely creates a different dimension in which the concept of the present is transformed. Their own present however will remain unchanged. I bring this up because I fear that at some point between the pre release reviews of Endgame and actually seeing it, such a time space tear was actually opened and I am in fact in a different dimension. One where Endgame is actually not that great a movie. I can’t believe I’m even considering the thought, but it makes about as much sense as the glowing reviews for the film spanning the entirety of the internet. Also, The Ancient One is in these things again. Like I said stop reading if you haven’t seen the damn thing yet.
Despite sometimes having more academic and cerebral film going appetites, and drawing a firm line at garbage like the Transformers films or some of the earlier DC abominations, I tend to think I fit comfortably in the target demographic for Endgame. That is, a casual marvel comic fan that has more invested in the films than the actual source material. I thoroughly enjoy pretty much every marvel film. The more inane or dull affairs like Thor: The Dark World, or the first Captain America are still fine by me and I adore the crowning achievements like the first Avengers, Guardians of The Galaxy or Thor Ragnarok. I have seen Infinity War an inordinate number of times considering it’s only a year old. I’m not overly anal retentive when it comes to continuity errors such as they are and ret cons like the location of the Tesseract in Captain Marvel are easy enough to let slide as long as the core cast has good chemistry, which oh man did they ever in that one. What I’m saying is I’m a fairly undemanding Marvel fan. As long the characters are charismatic and things blow up/get punched in creative manners, I’m good.
Endgame should have been an easy sell for me in that case. Indeed, it could have been. I certainly was expecting as much after key phrases kept popping up in so many reviews: “poetic”, “immensely satisfying”, and the like. Yet somehow that’s not the impression I got from the film. Don’t get me wrong there are some fantastic moments. Most of the big climatic fight is darn cool. That “on your left line” from Sam has got to be one of the most low key incredible things in the MCU. Tony Stark’s final line does indeed carry a beautiful narrative symmetry. Fans of Captain America and Thor will reasonably lose their shit over how hardcore the two of them get towards the end. I’m fine with the overall thematic language of hope and sacrifice the film communicates in. However, I remain baffled by the choices the Russo brothers made, the choices they didn’t, the opportunities they missed, and a frustrating emphasis on so many unworthy elements.
Our problems begin at the same point where so many other movies that rely on time travel do- at the time travel part. In order to undo the Thanos’ Snapture, The Avengers split up into groups and travel into the pasts of the previous MCU films to collect the infinity stones and use them to bring back the trillions of lives that were dusted. This all sounds like a very tough thing to do! Before the timey wimey action begins (and even in the midst of it) the film takes several stabs at establishing its rules and terms of how time travel works. In a somewhat insipid and condescending manner, the film essentially calls out classics like Terminator and Back to the Future as bullshit. They deride the notion of changing the future by altering the past as adolescent fantasy. Considering this is all fiction at least those films adhered to a sense of fairly well defined logic. Endgame, conversely, insists that our past cannot be altered because by entering the past, we are already in our future. By making any changes what we are actually doing is creating an alternate timeline where things are different. This is how Loki is maybe alive still after stealing the Tesseract in the past, but still dead when our heroes return to the present. Our present remains the same while new and alternate dimensions exhibit any potential changes, but those have no bearings on our heroes. As far as I can tell this is somewhat similar to how time travel worked in Lost. I’m sorry for bringing up Lost.
This is problematic for two reasons. First, for all the expositional hand wringing, its lazy writing. By insisting on rules where nothing they do in the past affects the present means the film can brush away any logical incongruences. Rather than having to sit down and think about the cascading ripples of consequences for any action in the past, Endgame essentially says ‘ehh, let another dimension deal with it’. Second- and this one is more critical- it completely deflates any sense of stakes or interest. The part where Captain America fights Captain America is a well choreographed and expertly executed fight scene much like his first confrontation with Bucky in The Winter Solider. So why then did I think the Winter Solider fight was awesome and this one was dull? Because based on the films own opaquely designated ground rules, nothing happening in scenes like this matters. Not to our characters in our continuum at least. This is not the kind of paradox you want to create when fucking with time travel.
Maybe those risks of time travel paradoxes are what made Back to The Future Part II so riveting- all of the scenes where Marty is stealthing his way through scenes from the first one is great. Here in Endgame, however, it’s awfully meandering. The film takes us through a greatest hits tour of sorts of past MCU films. The climatic victory over Loki in Avengers, a return to Morag from Guardians of the Galaxy. It goes on like this for quite a while. Seeing these moments for the first time is varying kinds of awesome, but here it seems like cut out B role. The boring bureaucratic aftermath of the cool stuff. There are scenes that take place after the battle of New York where The Avengers argue with Shield over who gets custody of Loki. Our heroes spying on Star Lord’s iconic dance through the ancient ruins of the power stone. This is all very tepid. We have seen this before and it was better the first time.
The scene on Vormir with Black Widow and Hawkeye is by far the most egregious. It’s been barely a year since we saw a devastated Thanos reluctantly kill the only person he ever loved on that cliff side; are we really doing the same sacrifice scene again in this one? This is how they want to move this story forward? Some points are given for the creative back and forth between Black Widow and Hawkeye, but still- we just did this. It was really good the first time; I don’t need to see it again, certainly not so soon.
These questionable decisions are maddeningly persistent beyond the time travel aspect of Endgame, but to properly articulate my opprobrium let’s roll back to Infinity War. One of the best aspects of that film, and to some people also a bit of a liability, was it’s absolutely mollifying number of heroes and characters on screen at once. It was overwhelming. I say ‘some people’ merely because I disagree, I thought the excessive gauntlet of character balancing was great. Furthermore, the conclusion of Infinity War, one that deleted half of the universe including many of our heroes, created the potential for a fascinating contrast with Endgame. If Infinity War had a damn near obnoxious numbers of characters and relationships to focus on, Endgame had the opportunity to be hyper focused on just a few specific characters, namely our core Avengers. Nothing excited me more than the prospect of a scene with only Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, sharing a quite moment together, finally healing the wounds they had inflicted upon each other, finally acknowledging what they mean to each other. Or what about a moment between Thor and Banner where they reflect on the strange journey they have been on together, one that has allowed an equally strange but no less beautiful friendship to blossom from it.
We get very little of that. What we get a lot of is Thor’s mom, Tony’s dad, and The Ancient One. These are characters we either don’t care about or who’s story lines have been completely tied up or abandoned years ago. Why are we spending so much time on them? Why are chances for richly resonant dialogue between our heroes that was honestly the best stuff of the first two Avenger films dropped for our heroes suffering extend bouts with the most tertiary of characters? I’ll never understand the emphasis on how our core cast feels about these people instead of how they feel about each other.
There is perhaps no greater missed opportunity in this regard than the handling of Thanos. It can’t be overstated how fantastic he was in Infinity War and how underwhelming he is in Endgame. By the end of Infinity War Thanos had been on life changing cosmic journey, sacrificed his daughter, fought bitterly and ferociously against our heroes (at least team Iron Man), and bore the physical and mental trauma of the snap. During his brief hallucination (trip into the soul stone?) where he encounters a young Gamora she asks what did it cost him. “Everything”, he replies. Good lord does he sell that line. For a genocidal manic of universal proportions, you really can’t help but feel for him.
The Thanos of Endgame, one brought forward from a point in time when he had barely begun his quest to complete the Infinity Gauntlet, carries none of these memories or emotional weight. He doesn’t understand what it will truly cost him, nor how it will change him. The original present day Thanos could have carred all the pain and suffering he endured into the film’s climax with him if he hadn’t been taken out. After everything he had been through he would be emboldened with an urgency and passion to stop at nothing to prevent the Avengers from undoing his work, the thing he had suffered so much to achieve. But the Thanos in Endgame can’t carry any of these experiences into battle, because he hasn’t experienced them. It makes his contributions and motivations comparatively hollow, especially compared to our heroes.
When we see the core three face off with Thanos, they do so with the mental, emotional, and physical scares inflicted upon them by him. They hate him, they fear him, they know what he is capable of, and what it is like to lose. Their state of being is in part defined by their experience with Thanos. It should have been the same for Thanos. Facing off against the one person he actually acknowledged was a formidable warrior and worth remembering, the one that nearly killed him, the human that somehow- even to Thanos’ surprise- could almost hold his own. Instead Thanos doesn’t even know these people. Rather than individuals that nearly prevented him from fulfilling his destiny, they are unknown opponents that are merely in his way. This drains the final conflict of emotional resonance. It makes its stakes lopsided and unbalanced. Captain America’s view point was the antithesis of Thanos- “We don’t trade lives”. I would have loved to see them contest their points of view. Stark and Thanos were intrinsically tied to each other. Before the final show down I wanted to see an acknowledgment of that. But Endgame makes it impossible to do so. All of it feels empty.
There are other issues, like Iron Man being frustratingly sidelined during much of the final battle, or depriving us of the good haircut version of Thor, or Gamora and Quill not being together any more which makes me very sad. I’m mad that they leaned so heavily into Professor Hulk instead of showing us the moment where he gets his groove back. However, at that point I’m just being nitpicky. I can understand others not caring about that stuff. What I can’t understand is why this film is constructed the way it is. My issues with Endgame are not overly esoteric and could have been easily avoided. That the film makes the decisions it did will forever confuse me, far more than the obfuscating use of time travel. Nor can I fathom why no one else seems to take issue with this kind of stuff. I feel like a watched a different movie than everyone else, one that gathered a very different set of values and impressions than I did from the MCU. I don’t feel like I watched a grand in satisfying conclusion to 11 years of films. Maybe there’s an alternate dimension out there where I adored it as much as everyone else. I’d like to think so.