Mark Reviews Movies: AVENGERS: ENDGAME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 25, 2019

So much happens in Avengers: Endgame that the movie barely has time to breathe. When it does, though, pausing to consider what has come to pass, there are moments of unexpected gravity to a narrative that's entirely and predictably about undermining and then dismantling the universe-shattering stakes of the previous movie.

The establishment of those stakes in Avengers: Infinity War felt rushed (While the franchise had 18 previous movies to build up to the ultimate showdown, they were a little busy introducing, establishing, and occasionally subverting their own characters and stories). The characters were pretty much pawns, moving across a vast chessboard while tossing out one-liners between exposition and action, so there wasn't much room for growth.

Despite those issues, the movie's climactic moment—the annihilation of half of the living universe with a snap—did possess a certain power. It's rare that a superhero story allows its villain to win—and almost unthinkable that one would allow such a decisive victory. That feeling, though, came with the pragmatic realization that there could never be a sense of finality to the heroes' defeat. Some of those heroes were among "the vanished," as this follow-up calls them, with further adventures to undertake (and, if we're being bluntly honest, billions of dollars to make).

This was always going to a problem for the filmmakers. In a narrative universe in which such devastation can be undone, does the concept of dramatic stakes even exist? To their credit, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely give us a first act that allows us to consider the possibility that, perhaps, ruin on such a scale is final. Inevitably, though, the filmmakers go ahead and put their story on the most obvious path, with only the means of getting there coming as a bit of a convenient, contrived, and entirely rushed surprise.

The survivors, of course, include Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner)—all of whom, in an act of randomly cosmic convenience, made up the original Avengers. About a month following the apocalyptic snap, they set out, with the other superhero survivors and the recently returned Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), to find Thanos (Josh Brolin), take the Infinity Stones from him, and return the vanished to existence.

As it turns out, though, such a relatively simple solution is impossible. In a Pyrrhic victory, Thanos is vanquished, but his act of bringing balance to the universe is now a reality.

At this point, the story jumps forward in time, finding the world still attempting and constantly failing to adjust to the new normal. In such a world, the concept of a hero has shifted. Getting through the day with only a single crying outburst is an act of heroism. Steve has become a grief counsellor of sorts. Tony has settled into family life. Only Natasha is still doing the whole superhero thing, overseeing a new Avengers team as they deal with natural disasters throughout the galaxy.

This is easily the best section of the movie, with the characters being forced to reckon with the consequences of their failure. Within it is the potential promise, not only of seeing these characters in a new light (We do, albeit briefly for most of them), but also of the filmmakers defying what seemed to be the inescapable route of this story. Then Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) returns from a trip to the quantum realm with a ludicrous solution to what Thanos wrought: time travel—more specifically, a "time heist" to steal the stones from the past.

It's difficult to tell what to make of this plot, since it adds levels of convoluted paradoxes, alternate realities and timelines, and a series of rules that seem to be made up on the fly. None of that seems to matter to the screenwriters or directors Anthony and Joe Russo, who are far more concerned with using the conceit as a means of giving us a series of callbacks to the franchise's greatest hits—replaying famous sequences from different angles (making it at times feel like one of those dreaded clip shows that once were so popular on TV programs), revisiting alien worlds, providing cameos for assorted characters of varying levels of significance.

Nostalgia is the name of the game here, and after more than a decade and—with this one—22 movies, that impulse is understandable. It also feels a bit too easy, a little underwhelming, and more than a pinch manipulative. In a way, the move offers an unspoken admission: This particular story always has had one, unavoidable conclusion, and if that's the case, we might as well have a trip down memory lane to pass the time until that end arrives. It doesn't help that the plot's major conflict, in which an earlier or different version of Thanos catches on to the plan, also feels hastily nostalgic, with a heavy dose of anticlimax in a big, visually garbled battle.

With this entry, at least the Infinity Stone stuff is finished. Avengers: Endgame completes that story, and maybe more optimistically, passes the baton (literally, in a sequence involving a glove) to a new collection of heroes. May they have less obvious adventures than this one.

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