************************This review contains spoilers****************************
Over the past decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has come to define modern blockbuster film-making and dominate pop culture. Their serialized, television episodic style changed the way we view movie franchises and how movie fans expect stories to be presented onscreen. While its success is unique, the content within the movies themselves has been anything but with much of the franchise’s popularity owed to the familiarity its repetitive style presents to audiences. 2017 saw a slight deviation from this pattern with Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, with Avengers: Endgame hoping to cap off the decade-plus of hits with a bang.
Avengers: Endgame begins amidst the fallout of Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) successful quest to balance an overpopulated universe by using the Infinity stones to erase half of the populace from existence. The remaining Avengers Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) are left to pick up the pieces. After Ant Man (Paul Rudd) returns from the quantum realm, a bit of hope is regained for the heroes and a way to reverse time and bring back the fallen is discovered. But on their way to reversing history, Thanos discovers their plan and one final showdown for the fate of the universe must be had.
Endgame’s first act is a well done exploration of the fallout of “the snap” and how the world has been left to adjust to the sudden disappearance of half its population. Each of the movie’s main ensemble is given screen time to explore how the sudden disappearance of family, friends, and colleagues has affected their emotional state and the lives they’ve attempted to recreate in the aftermath. The MCU has typically run short on character moments, opting instead for bombastic action set pieces and quippy jokes so the use of the beginning of the movie to delve into the psyche of the main ensemble is a welcome change of pace that serves as a different kind of world-building than we’re used to from Marvel Studios. The survivor’s guilt that eats away at Black Widow establishes her arc that develops well throughout the movie and pays off later on. For a character who has seen and experienced what she has over the life of the franchise to suffer emotionally the way she does in the first act drives home the gravity of the situation. Likewise, the post-apocalyptic environment of the Earth in this phase of the film is well-established and portrayed, such as Ant-Man’s jaunt through San Francisco and its abandoned neighborhoods and erected monuments to the disappeared. You are really immersed in the idea so much has changed in the world and despite time moving on, many people have been unable to.
While the first act was a welcome departure from standard MCU fare and would seemingly set up an emotional climate that the rest of the movie would capitalize on, Endgame’s second act falls into familiar bad habits that have hamstrung the franchise since the first Avengers film. Slow paced and devoid of any substantive plot threads, this third of the movie focuses on nostalgic, pandering fan service, eschewing meaningful story development for a collection of scenes that trade on nostalgic what-if scenarios. “Oooh, what if 2023 Captain America ran into 2013 Captain America and they fought each other! Cap versus Cap! Oooh, and what if we had a rehash of the iconic elevator fight scene from Winter Soldier only this time, Cap knows S.H.I.E.L.D. is secretly Hydra! And oh, here’s the opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy again but from an outsider’s perspective. Haha, Quill is such a lovable idiot!” While these cheeky nods may be a sugar high for longtime fans of the MCU, as an element of cinematic storytelling they are woefully inadequate in crafting a movie that can stand on its own without exclusively servicing insiders. Instead of focusing on quenching the thirst of longtime fans, the time spent crafting these random moments would have been better spent closing the numerous plot holes within the film, mainly in the film’s messy handling of time travel. For instance, it was somehow daytime both in Central Africa when Thanos first completes his snap in Infinity War and in America when Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) sees his entire family fade away from existence. Endgame also sees Gamora, who was sacrificed for the Soul stone by Thanos in Infinity War come back in her 2014 form through time travel, but Hulk explain that try as he might, he could not bring back a past Black Widow even with the assistance of the Time stone which itself can reverse time, or the quantum realm portal left over in Ant-Man’s van. We are at once told that time travel to erase a previous death is both possible AND impossible. This blatant disregard for the film’s own rules it has set is the very definition of a plot hole and the ignoring of its existence by my peers in film criticism to instead breathlessly report on mega-corporation Disney’s opening weekend record setting profits is pure malpractice. But as is its trademark, it is just as important within the MCU to set up the sell for the next movie (Gamora will be back for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) as it is to service the movie that you have actually paid to sit and watch at this moment. Movie as commercial for the next product (movie) has been perfected by the franchise and is its true revolution. Perhaps nothing serves as a better example of this than the post-credits scene, popularized in modern times by the MCU. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) was sold to audiences as the ultimate Thanos neutralizer, teased in Infinity War’s post-credit scene. And while that commercial for both her movie and Endgame successfully turned her debut into a billion-dollar grosser when it otherwise wouldn’t have been, in the end, she actually turned out to be little more than a footnote in Endgame. And therein lies the issue; movies as commercials for the next movie, with little effect on the actual stories and plotlines.
All of these aforementioned flaws are meant to be overlooked due to the bombast and spectacle of a third act filled with as much action-focused fan service as the second act was with emotionally and nostalgically charged service to the fans. But following more than a decade of bathos undercutting any gravitas or dramatic moments within MCU films, when the time arrives for the ultimate emotional payoff of this saga, any emotional resonance and connection we’re meant to have with the characters doesn’t exist. The preceding missteps lead to a lack of feeling for their struggles and sacrifices because the groundwork for such empathy has been paved over throughout the years by the cinematic equivalent of a candy coated road; snappy one-liners that immediately follow serious scenes and trample over any semblance of vulnerability. The evaporation of Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is presented to us as a heavy weight and burden to bear for Tony Star, yet when the two are finally reunited after Parker’s return, their first conversation is played for laughs during the climactic battle devoid of any emotion from his resurrection or sense of urgency surrounding the fact that a battle for the fate of the universe is happening around them. Seeing this emotional thread wrapped up would’ve completed the arc between the two characters that the story seemed to be building toward, but instead, we get the fan service of Captain America wielding Mjolnir as if that were of any consequence.
In a move of contrived cynical corporate activism, the audience is treated to a shot of the film’s supporting female heroes lined up to head into battle together. The moment is played for “hashtag Girl Power!” cred but rings hollow and comes across as exploitative from a franchise that waited over 20 films to feature a female hero in her own film, and also failed to give any of the heroes in the #TheFutureIsFemale moment anything substantive to do until it was time to nakedly assemble them for a manufactured moment. One would think that such disingenuous usage of the thirst for greater representation for an underserved demographic would be taken as an insult from viewers, but true to the rest of its flaws, this one is also seemingly accepted and shrugged off since it is served to us from the Marvel juggernaut, as this is the second straight film where the studio settles for empty, beat you over the head symbolism over substantive steps forward for its female characters.
Avengers: Endgame ends what producer Kevin Feige has dubbed the “Infinity saga” in a manner befitting what this historic franchise became over time; a collection of cool moments that indulge fan fantasies rather than a cohesive, compelling film narrative. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has treated gravitas as an insult, opting to lay character development and conflict to the wayside for one more smart-assed fat joke and wink & nod at the audience. Films like Captain America: Civil War and Thor Ragnarok have hinted at substantive deep dives on themes surrounding the consequences of the Avengers’ heroism and colonialism and its fallout respectively, but in true MCU fashion, any attempt at examining these themes were passed over for pubescent fart jokes. And this is the problem facing modern cinema; the inability of audiences to grow alongside the material presented to them, encapsulated by Marvel’s dominance of the cinemascape. A generation ago, adults films and popular films were one and the same. Best Picture Oscar winner Rain Man was also the top grossing film of 1988, and the majority of the top ten was adult oriented fare. But as the modern 25-49 demographic usually considered the sweet spot for adults with disposable income suffers from a state of arrested development for a multitude of reasons, this delayed ascension into adulthood is reflected throughout our culture. With film, the dominance of children’s movies at the box office, the fact that even adult audiences don’t watch much else, and the disconnect between what’s popular and what is recognized as most artistic is becoming a larger issue, much to the consternation of those institutions responsible for gatekeeping the culture. Taking a look at popular culture can provide a glimpse into what makes a society tick at that moment, like the Godzilla movies being a display of Japan’s residual trauma from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the dominance of the MCU’s all fluff and no substance style will already be the calling card of our current era; our current social media age values hype and collective experience over actual product; quality is not in style. We can only hope it remains confined to the here and now and is not a sign of where film is headed permanently.
Image: Marvel Studios
