Avengers: Endgame (Spoilers)

So I wanted to wait until I had seen Avengers Endgame again to do this review. After the first viewing, I knew it was something that I'd need to see again to soak up all the goodness Marvel threw into this movie, but I also felt like it was an opportunity for me to think about this movie honestly and not just fall prey to the nostalgia haze that Marvel is very good at casting over its audience.

That being said, it's a 3 hour movie. It's basically an evening to go see this movie that I've already seen. As much as I don't mind making an evening of it, I have had responsibilities that have pushed out my ability to go see this movie again. I've seen people who say they've gone to this movie 3 or 4 times. That's 9-12 hours I don't have unfortunately

However, I did take some spoiler notes the first weekend and I do remember the highlights I wanted to talk about.

From the top, I loved how they handled Thanos in this movie for multiple reasons. At the beginning of the movie, Thanos has won. He's doing his farming on a random planet and hangs it up.

So even when the Avengers (now with Captain Marvel who saves Tony, which despite what I'll say about Captain Marvel in this review, was I think probably one of two of the best uses for her in this movie) show up to try to get him to undo the snap, he simply says that he can't. The stones are reduced to the quantum level and there's no undoing the snap.

Right before Thor cuts his head off. I can't speak highly enough of this cold open because it is strong. It sets up all the characters, and sets them on the path for where they'll be when the movie jumps forward 5 years. If you're looking at this movie and Infinity War as one 5+ hour movie, this is where the Avengers are at their lowest. I know people have said that this movie doesn't display Thanos as masterful as it did in Infinity War, but you still get the villain vibe from him in the beginning and the display of his real strength later in the movie, which I'll get to later.

And then the movie jumps 5 years into the future.

What follows is a phenomenal and unique progression of what these characters go through in the five years after the snap. Captain America remains mostly the same but runs a support group to help people cope with the losses from the snap.

Black Widow runs a form of the Avengers but one that spans across the galaxy, which is a really interesting idea. Rocket and Nebula as a team and Captain Marvel help other planets who suffered the same losses while War Machine and Okoye and Wakanda try and maintain order on Earth. Does it make sense that Rocket and Nebula could come back for the Time Heist and new short haircut Captain Marvel couldn't? No, but again, I'll talk about Captain Marvel in a little bit.

Bruce Banner has a reconciliation with the Hulk and the two come together. I wasn't expecting this. I get the feeling that people could guess that that happened but I really liked it nonetheless.

I think it gave Mark Ruffalo a little bit of a different angle to approach his character and I think that's great. He never did a bad job or ever got boring, but I think that's a really great character arc overall and at the end of the day, that's kind of what this movie is about, completing characters arcs.

That's why the character progression of Thor was definitely for me by far the weakest part of the film.

Up until Ragnarok and Infinity War, Thor was a pretty boring character. His movies were probably at the bottom of people's lists and it wasn't until Taika Waititi came in that they figured out that he could be utilized for some really funny comic relief. However, I felt like they took that comic relief to an extra level and at certain points kind of left the character in a stagnated course.

Thor's arc in Ragnarok and Infinity War was kind of about getting his mojo back and while I enjoyed the comedy that came out of thick Thor, I think it reached the level of being overplayed at a certain point in the film and it just got annoying.

This movie is hard to cut down, but I think if there were any moments that I would have cut, it would have been some of the moments with Thor. The scene in Asgard when they return to the time of Thor: The Dark World where he's having a pep talk from his mom is by far the slowest scene in the movie and I recognized it the minute it happened. It was in the second act where things were moving fast and I felt like that scene really slowed down the movie. It was bad.

Also, I think it was weird that in the final battle he stayed fat and had a John Travolta Battlefield Earth look going for them. I'll talk more about Thor when I talk about what's gonna happen after Endgame, but overall, I think if there was a weak link from this movie, it would be Thor.

Hawkeye is back and I swear, every time Hawkeye isn't in a movie, we all think to ourselves, "Why did we have Hawkeye in the first place?" And then he comes back and we're all like, "Oh Yeah, that's why".

He's by no means nobody's favorite, but we kind of forget that Jeremy Renner is fun and does a good job in these movies. I really liked him and Black Widow being reunited and I liked how he was the every man that was affected hard by the snap.

The scenes with him and Black Widow are probably the scenes that most people will forget about because while they're good, they're a little more subtle and you kind of forget about them a little bit in the movie.

That being said, I really like these two and it works really well when the two are essentially fighting over who is going to sacrifice themselves to get the Soul Stone. While I've noticed that Hawkeye doesn't exactly change his ways after being sent down a dark place after the snap, I still liked the dynamic between these two and Black Widow's death actually surprised me.

The crux of the story, as it's always been was the story lines of Captain America and Tony Stark.

I thought the fact that they gave Tony a daughter and actually made his experience from the snap not that bad made for a really intriguing dynamic. If the timeline of the movie took place right after the snap and everyone knew they could go back in time, everyone would have gone back in time right away and changed the past. However, Tony's one and biggest condition to coming back into the plot is that they bring everyone back, not change the past because he doesn't want to lose his daughter or anything he and Pepper have built in the past five years.

From the beginning, the relationship with him and Steve Rogers is phenomenal and I remember thinking in multiple moments of this movie that I wasn't ready for these two to be done with this role. They're both so good and have defined the character far more than I think anybody imagined.

The execution of time travel was done incredibly well. The cynical side of me thinks that time travel could be seen as a cop out but I loved how it was used. Especially since the movie is essentially a really story driving recap of the greatest hits of the last 22 movies, I think time travel was important and I loved it.

Does it make sense? No. But Time travel never makes sense in movies. It doesn't matter what the subject is or how they handle it, there are going to be contradictions. How does the present Nebula live if she shoots 2014 Nebula when she comes to 2019? How does Thanos get to the point where he snaps half of existence away if 2014 him travels to 2019 and gets snapped out of existence himself? How do you return a Soul Stone to Vorimere? How does bringing the soul stones back save timelines from going screwy? There are too questions that you could care about but... why would you? It's the freaking Avengers?

On the return to the topic of Thanos...

Thanos only becomes cooler in this movie. Maybe not more compelling as a villain who doesn't see himself as the villain, but more in the sense of defining him as the villain that Thor, Captain America (with Thor's hammer, I won't go too into depth on that, but that was pretty rad), and Iron Man could barely get the better of without the Infinity Stones.

And Thanos had scary or tense moments. When 2014 him figures out that he succeeds and they're trying to undo his work, there was a new level of intensity that got me pumped for the finale.

And oh boy, that finale.

I'm going to tie this part together with the ending because this is going to be a long rant to begin with. Somehow, Marvel was able to give everyone their moment and show the wide breadth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a way we probably won't see for another decade.

From the awesome moments of all the resurrected heroes coming through the Doctor Strange Portals (a moment that had people in my theater cheering), to them playing hot potato with the new gauntlet, to the admittedly a little contrived female Avenger shot, this scene was just pure adrenaline and gave everyone their moment and it felt one hundred percent earned. Everyone on screen was someone you had formed at least a little bit of a connection with and while the fight jumps from character moment to character moment very quickly, no one feels like they didn't need to be there. Even Captain Marvel had an awesome moment and utilizing her powers probably giving the best measure of her powers to that moment.

And on a quick side note, I do need to talk about Captain Marvel because I'm still conflicted on her. On one hand, I don't think she's at all necessary to the film. Everything she does in the film could be replaced with quick script adjustments and her role in the film is very, very small. On top of that, there's still not much of a character there. Now I don't think that's Brie Larson's fault. I'm willing to defend her on that. I still think she's a good actress, I just think the character of Captain Marvel is just an outline of boxes Marvel is checking what they think a female superhero should be. They check as many boxes as they can, but without that content that they've been so good at fleshing out in past iterations, all you see is an overly strong, but really hollow character that is poorly written.

Honestly, you could take Captain Marvel out of the film and it wouldn't make much difference. Now to be fair, that can be said about a lot of characters in this film, especially those who show up just for the battle at the end. However, the difference is that the other characters were snapped in the previous film and were more there to represent people who really liked their film and show how they got back, or they didn't have a previous solo film and were just a fun cameo.

Captain Marvel was built, even in this movie, as the thing the Avengers needed to defeat Thanos and that's just not true. She has one moment in this film where I saw a little bit of that personality that I only saw glimpses of in her movie. It's the scene where she gets the gauntlet from Peter Parker. I kind of liked that.

I do want to go back and watch Captain Marvel again because I know there are some redeeming qualities about her and that movie overall wasn't out right bad. But I would find it interesting to study how that movie fits into the larger MCU and whether or not Captain Marvel will continue to just have that off feeling. How much of that alienation is troll hate, and how much of it is poor planning and writing. I'll let you know.

The ending was nothing short of epic and really got me in the feels. Everyone showing up from Doctor Strange portals, to the fight with the trio of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, to Captain America using Mjnoir, to Scarlet Witch being such a bad ass that Thanos thinks he needs to nuke his own people to survive, to Tony sacrificing himself and being lulled to rest by Pepper at his side and Spider-man losing it.

Tony's funeral, to his hologram telling his daughter he loves her 3000, to Captain America going back in time to return the infinity stones and deciding to stay. Man, it was just so well done! I'll talk about Thor and the future movies they kind of allude to in another post because this one is getting too long already, but if anybody had issues with the first two acts of the film, the third act makes up for it all.

If I had to change anything, it would have been to have an actual end credit scene at the end where Ryan Reynold's Deadpool is sitting in a theater, wiping away tears and giving a slow clap. He gives one quip and its done. It doesn't need to allude to a particular movie, just acknowledge that that's our future right there. I know they probably didn't have the time, but man was that the only risk they didn't take in this movie and that's why I don't have a lot of bad things to say about this film.

I'm finding with this movie and the final season of Game of Thrones that I'm sure there are things that I could complain about but I don't really see the point. We all have our expectations of what these movies and TV shows look like, but when there's so much time that has gone into these movies, I do think they deserve a little bit more praise that criticism. I'm probably going to go see it again on Friday and I am so excited!

Overall, it's just a great movie. I didn't talk about a lot. I didn't talk about Ant-man, or Nebula (that was something I could probably add a lot more about). I didn't talk about how Black Panther's only real contribution to this movie was looking bad ass and dropping the gauntlet 4 minutes after he took it from Hawkeye who had been playing keep away for like 10 minutes and crushing it.

 I think I've made it pretty clear that I think this movie is pretty special. Is it a perfect movie or worthy of an Oscar? No! But it's pretty great and it's an event that I'm not sure we'll see something the likes of this for at least another 10 years. That's something to really feel accomplished of.

Well done Marvel, and Thank you.

But those are my spoilers thoughts on Avengers: Endgame. What did you think? You can send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get upddates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for readin!