Avengers: Endgame is the conclusion to the 21 films that came before it. It should be apparent by now that if you haven’t been keeping up with the last 11 years of Marvel Studios movies, now is the time to catch up, or give up. If space wizards, evil planets, and super soldiers sound uninteresting to you, then don’t watch it. For those who are into it, here it is. It’s not holding anything back. Things get wild. And since the trailers almost exclusively shows off the first 30 minutes of the movie, there won’t be any spoilers in this review. But there will be spoilers for the other movies before it.
Here’s a quote from Prestige that I found relevant: “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called The Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called The Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call The Prestige”
The heroes in these movies are the pledge. the snap or the “decimation” is the turn and Endgame is the MCU’s attempt at a prestige.
Endgame, in my opinion is the second half to a much larger movie that was started by Infinity War. Despite its 3 hour runtime, it feels incomplete from a pacing and story and structural point of view, it feels weird. I’m not saying that the story doesn’t feel completed, because it does, but it’s the equivalent of watching the two parts of Deathly Hallows separately. But, if you were to watch this as one giant five and a half hour movie, it would feel like one complete thing. It’s not a flaw, just a feeling I got while watching it. I really like where things go from a character standpoint which are the more slower parts of the movie. When things go to 11, that’s where the movie begins to lose me a bit. The plot, although interesting, causes a lot of logic issues especially when it tries to explain the pseudo-science behind it. Honestly, the plot was broken when they introduced time wizards and quantum-bullshittery to the equation and this movie doubles down on all of that. Though the results add up to a few hours of great callbacks and fan service (which I like). But then it eventually feels super repetitive and the way things go do seem to have consequences but it’s a blockbuster Hollywood franchise that has a bunch of sequels and prequels planned. Of course, most people will know deep down that there’re gonna be sequels to Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and probably Avengers: Endgame. A lot us want to see how they perform this epic prestige and it works, kind of. I was expecting sound logic but it didn’t really turn out that way. That I didn’t like too much.
What I do enjoy is the emotional story it’s telling about its characters and how they all deal with grief and failure. And it’s backed by some of the best performances by Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Chris Hemsworth, Paul Rudd, and Karen Gillan. There are also some returning faces that will blow your mind. Unfortunately, one character I was disappointed with was Captain Marvel. The way things have been set up, she feels like an afterthought and she’s just kind of there to be convenient and badass and weirdly enough, she’s more fun to watch in this than she was in her own solo movie. With the exception of Robert Downey Jr, no other cast member read the complete script before and after they shot their scenes. A lot of them didn’t even know who there were sharing scenes with until the day of. This was also Brie Larson’s debut performance and she did the best with limited time and context that was given to her, I think. It’s like a weird art house film experiment that costed $356 million. It’s interesting but I don’t think it benefited Brie Larson’s performance in any way.
Endgame is also a funny movie but I’m so sick of Marvel humour at this point that a lot of the jokes, although funny, ended up undermining the dramatic tension (especially for one scene in the middle). Some people will be fine with this but it really bothered me and the moment didn’t affect me as much as I thought it should’ve. The last hour or so of the movie is bananas and is everything fans have imagined but more. It’s at times even too much and it’s quite exhausting. I love and hate the set piece at the same time. On one hand, it’s a lot of CG effects happening really quickly. On the other hand, the payoffs and interactions left people cheer in the theatre and really got the blood pumping. FUCK! IT’S SO INTENSE!
It’s really hard to talk about this movie without spoiling anything but in the end, I liked it. At its best, It’s a very emotional, character driven odyssey. At its worst, it’s a wonky pseudo-sci-fi fantasy movie with explosions and CG people beating each other up with weird sudden tonal shifts. The performances are excellent, the score pays a lot of homage to past scores and tackles the Marvel music problem for the better and the ending, although dramatically perfect, creates… Problems... It’s a weird one. But a worthy closing chapter to one of cinema’s longest running storylines.
