Avengers: Endgame Cold Hot Take

I remember being on a bus home at night with a friend from high school and reading from my phone that Joss Whedon would direct The Avengers. We squealed. Neither of us were fans of the comics, but we loved Iron Man, Firefly, and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog. It’s been ten years since then, and we— like many, many others — have been MCU devotees the whole time.

In 2018, I got shivers walking through the swinging doors of the cinema on the way to see Avengers: Infinity War, hardly believing that movie had finally arrived. By the end, Infinity War sat firmly in my top tier of favourite MCU movies, comfortably placed alongside The Winter Soldier, Ant-Man, and the original Iron Man.

Then, last year, Avengers: Endgame was released. It is currently the highest grossing film of all time and is among the highest critically rated films of the MCU franchise according to Metacritic. But my reaction to Avengers: Endgame was at odds with these facts. And while I know I’m not alone in my misgivings, I also know I am in the minority.

When I arrived online (my usual post-cinema stop-off) I only found reports of elation and smiling satisfaction, which is annoying when you’re looking for some solidarity to help process your feelings.

I wrote down my thoughts, but before I published anything I wanted to reflect, perhaps watch the film again, and eventually give my fully considered, crystallised opinion. But I just reread my original review and thought, “Fuck it.”

Therefore, fourteen months later, this is my frozen-cold, spicy-hot take of Avengers: Endgame.

Written April 2019:

I left End Game [sic] empty. Not in a positive, at-peace-with-all-things way, either. There are movies you don’t want to end, and movies you want to see again, and movies that fill you with a need for a sequel. End Game? … Nothing.

After an hour into the film I already knew it was going to end up an hour too long. I was right. But it’s more than those three hours: it was the other films. The Iron Mans, Captain Amercias and Avengers — the ones for which End Game was a finale. About 10 films in all — I started watching them when I was 16. I’m not using words like “wasted”, but… as I say, I’m empty now. Left worse than if I hadn’t bothered to watch End Game at all?

In The First Avenger, scrawny Steve tells the bullies in the alley that he can “Do this all day.” He says the same thing to Iron Man in Civil War — he’s not that scrawny any more, but he’s still fighting above his weight-class. I think he says it some other time, too, probably in The Winter Soldier… anyway, each time he says it, it’s meaningful. Now, in End Game, Steve is fighting a past version of himself. It’s a pointless fight, but the really aggravating part is this:

Past Steve tells present Steve, once again, that he can “Do this all day.” Present Steve is exasperated: “Yeah, yeah” he says.

He’s heard it before. And it was better then.

That’s my reaction to this whole movie. End Game is not a film. It is a collection of references to other films arranged in a vaguely competent manner.

When “the dust settles”, as they say, when we’re over the hype, I think we will watch these movies again and realise that End Game is structurally kind of a mess. You can break this movie into the following parts:

• intro — heroes kill Thanos in the present
• mourning — a short segment of the heroes trying to come to terms with their current situation
• time heist — they go get the stones
• battle
• conclusions

The intro and the mourning segments are really good. The intro is some epic Greek tragedy shit, they go across the universe to get revenge on the man who ruined their world, and when they get their they get their revenge and realise it was pointless. (Tony is the star of the show across both parts, by the way, absolutely acts the shit out it, and Clint is great in the first scene too). The mourning period is almost the start of a good science fiction story, but it is cut short when Scott-fucking-Lang shows up with his time heist idea.

I say “Scott-fucking-Lang” — look, I loved Ant-Man, but he’s just not right for this movie in my opinion.

The time heist is a waste of good screen time. We all know they’re going to get the stones, and all the scenes are familiar ones lifted from the previous movies. Fan service of a sort, I guess. Seeing the scenes from The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy from a different angle is cool for about a second, but only a few clever things are done with it.

Plus, the film just explained to us that whatever happens in the past doesn’t effect the future. Isn’t the glorious, horrible tension of time travel movies the idea that you can temporally or existentially fuck things up? Maybe my understanding of End Game’s time travel rules isn’t perfect, but I don’t feel that the movie leaned into this time travel tension nearly enough.

Oh, and did I mention that those time heist scenes take up about an hour if not more, of this movie?

The time heist is a replay of Thanos’ search for the stones in Infinity War. This is the heroes doing the same thing, even in some cases facing the same challenges that Thanos did. If that doesn’t sound tedious enough already, the acquisition of each stone was done better when it happened in Infinity War. In that film, each of the heroes had to reveal some character flaw in order for Thanos to win. Here, it’s just counting down minutes of screen time to reach a foregone conclusion. Five stones. Either you get all five of them or you don’t, and I don’t know where the story goes if you don’t. Why didn’t this mission work compared to Thanos’s quest, or to Inception’s mind heist? I don’t know yet. More digestion of this plot-element needed, but the bottom line is that I did not find this set-up compelling in the least.

One good character moment in the mix was Tony and Steve deciding to go further into the past together, escalating the danger of their mission but also asking them to work together once again, which they haven’t done effectively since before Civil War. “Do you trust me?” Tony asks Steve. Steve replies yes. I’ll give the movie a point for that one.

Then there is Thor — how the heck did Thor manage to get the most character development in both Infinity War and End Game? He has a beautiful final scene with his Mum (much more poignant than their scene in Thor: The Dark World) some real parenting magic of the sort rare in cinema, with Thor as a wreck of an adult man but Frigga still there to support him. (Maybe the movie is talking to its manchild fans. Ha.) Anyway, what does she say? “Don’t be the man you’re supposed to be, be the best man you are.” The film has a few inspired lines like this, and it’s just a shame it doesn’t follow those theme-threads, instead of relying on callbacks to other films in the series.

In fact, I think the “Do you trust me” line is also line from another movie, too. Another MCU movie, I mean, not Aladdin. I can’t remember which one. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, because honestly almost every line in this movie is a reference to another movie.

“On your left”. That one makes a comeback. “I am Iron Man”? Yep, that one too. Tony and Peter get a little repeat-and-reverse of the much referenced scene in Infinity War where Peter Parker drifts away into dust. In fact, the more the movie goes on, the less original it gets.

As with that scene between Tony and Peter, the “snap” has also became a meme. In End Game, bizarrely, snapping your fingers seems to be the only way it is possible to use the Infinity Gauntlet. Funny: that’s not what Infinity War implied! Mostly, the gauntlet was used by Thanos by him closing his hands and making a fist. The “snap” was a metaphor — as in, he can end half of all life as easily as a snap of his fingers. In End Game, the snap is a magical motion, like Doctor Strange spinning his wrist to create portals: snapping is a component of the “kill half of everyone” spell (and the reversing of that spell), and that’s a bit silly. The snap is attempted at least four times in this movie. This feels like fan-fiction. Like a fan-film.

On that point: sheesh, the CGI in this movie. Not great. “Professor Hulk” is the worst treated. They should have done better by him: he gets a decent chunk of screentime, he has a role to play of universal consequences, and he’s also changed the most out of any character between his last movie (Thor: Ragnarok) and this one, and that made it feel like he deserved more attention.

For the films in the MCU that focused on one character, the special effects could be smartly rationed. What’s the most important visual effect in Iron Man? The suit. Doctor Strange? The magic. The Iron Man suit in Iron Man looks metal and the magic in Doctor Strange looks otherworldly. In End Game, both are generic and homogeneous, effects for necessity rather than art or spectacle. When 95% of the movie is CGI, what gets priority? I’d say Hulk needed more attention than he got, but I’m not a producer.

There’s a Hulk-related joke when the team go back in time to the battle of New York (from the end of the first Avengers film). The “Hulk-of-the-past” storms into the scene like a monster truck and smashes up the street. Then “Professor Hulk” tries to mimic his old self to blend in, and halfheartedly and reluctantly throws a bike a short distance. That feeling is basically the difference between old-MCU CGI and current-MCU CGI: flat, low-energy, fake-looking.

Not a single joke landed in this movie. Wait, I think there was one — I think I laughed once. Oh yeah, right at the beginning of the movie: Stark is patiently teaching Nebula to play paper football while stranded on the Benatar to try and maintain their sanity. That was amusing. Oh, and I liked when Scott Lang’s burrito get’s excavated by the air-blasts created by the Benatar landing. People chuckled a little at fat Thor. Everything else, though, fell flat. Not for lack of trying: Ant-Man is constantly jabbering about time travel movies, War Machine’s entire character is to make “well that was dumb” reaction faces, even the climactic battle silly-shit like the past (more evil) version of Gamora kicking Star-Lord in the nuts (“You missed the first time but got them both the second time”) — the cinema remained quiet throughout it all. I suspected that past a point the audience found all that trying hard a bit awkward.

That’s laughs. What about tears? Before the movie screened, there was a trailer for The Lion King. I got a pretty nostalgic, felt my chest rise, thought to myself “I’m in an emotional mood. At some point during End Game I’m probably going to have to try and look like I’m not tearing up.” When Hawkeye is with his family and you know they’re about to get dusted, and when Tony kicks off in malnourished delirium at Cap for letting him down, I felt like this movie was driving somewhere new and none of us had seatbelts. But it only maintains that illusion for a little bit, and before long the usual MCU facetiousness overtakes it. What a waste.

The final battle was the same shit that I hate in almost all MCU movies, but more of it.

There’s no sense of space to this battle, no sense of strategy, no threat. It’s a hodgepodge, a maelstrom of CGI characters and laser effects against a brown background, randomly spliced rule-of-cool action shots and a barrage of see-what-sticks quips. I didn’t like the action finale of the first Avengers film. Now we have ten times as many major characters but the sense of cinematography and storytelling in these battles has not improved, so it’s more of a mess than it ever has been before. They do some Olympic torch shit, passing the Infinity Gauntlet from hero to hero to get it to a magic portal (always a magic portal). This goofy relay race takes place in a CGI food fight. It’s childish nonsense.

Is it cool when Captain America picks up Thor’s hammer? Yes, that’s cool. Is it dramatic when Clint and Natasha fight to stop the other from sacrificing themselves for each other (that was a hard sentence to write)? Yes, it was.

When I was a kid, my dad and my sister and I would go and see a film and afterwards talk about our top five bits, or our top ten bits, things that made us laugh or we thought were just cool. Avengers: End Game would definitely satisfy those discussions. It has characters moments and action moments that are fine and good in isolation. But it doesn’t coalesce into a strong film.

I think a lot of the praise is carryover hype. Incredibly, a lot of the reviews I have seen indicate that the reviewer did not realise End Game was going to be a time travel movie. I thought that was a given based on the trailer. Perhaps their surprise meant they had more patience for the long, tedious time travel plot than I did. Also, a lot of people talk about how emotional they were about Iron Man and Captain America leaving. Again, perhaps those people had more patience for the movie’s indulgences (Tony meeting his dad, Steve reunited with Peggy), or had an emotional reaction that allowed them to forgive the so-so writing of these characters. I certainly didn’t, though.

Endgame is to Infinity War what Civil War was to The Winter Soldier. You, dear reader, already know which of those Captain America films you prefer, so the comparison in my previous sentence will tell you whether you will agree with me about Endgame. But to me, Civil War was the bigger but less coherent sequel, and The Winter Soldier remains the more triumphant piece of cinema.

Endgame is ambitious and full to bursting and some of it is good and some of it isn’t. But The Last Jedi was the same and it’s a miscarriage of justice that everyone considers that perfectly awful and this film perfectly good. I can’t do this film justice, but I can offer my take to the scales.