It grossed more money than the GDP of France. But is Avengers: Endgame a good movie??
Genre: Superhero
Premise: The Avengers team must go back in time to prevent the Thanos snap in Infinity War from ever happening.
About: Avengers Endgame made 350 million dollars this weekend at the box office. That’s 100 million more than any movie ever. I’m going to try and cut through the hype and give you a balanced review of the movie.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (based on the comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby)
Details: 3 hours
SPOOOOOOOOILLLLLLRS!!!!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!!!
Let me start off by saying I realize this is the most unique writing assignment maybe, ever. No writer ever has or ever will have to write a script quite like this again. So I’m not going to pretend like there’s some obvious way to do things. The whole screenplay is operating in unchartered waters.
But I mean… a little Screenwriting 101 could’ve gone a long way here. Whatever happened to the Screenwriting Bill of Rights rule “come into the story as late as possible?” Basically, the first hour of this movie is backstory. And I don’t know how you even do that since it’s a sequel. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a quick plot breakdown.
In the last movie, Thanos snapped his fingers and half of all living beings in the universe disappeared. Endgame starts with Captain Marvel showing up and saying she wants to go kill Thanos and get the infinity stones back. They do kill Thanos, but unfortunately, he destroyed the infinity stones. We then cut to five years later, where the world is really depressed because half the population is gone and people dock their boats at the Statue of Liberty.
Ant-Man then gets spit out of the Quantum Realm and rejoins the team, which now, for reasons I cannot understand, include a smart Hulk, destroying the entire point of the character. But anyway. Ant-Man says to Tony that the Quantum Realm is sort of like time travel and you’re smart so maybe you can figure out how to time-travel back and stop Thanos’s snap before it happened.
Tony tells Paul Rudd time travel is impossible but that night he’s bored so he plays with some numbers and in a couple of hours, figures out time travel. Yes, that happens. The plan is to go back and retrieve all the infinity stones before Past Thanos can get his hands on them. This splits them into several teams that must cover several planets. Of course, Thanos, who’s alive again because it’s the past, learns of their plan and goes to stop it. Big battle. The end.
I’m going to say the last thing I expected to say coming out of this movie: The only good thing to come out of Avengers: Endgame is Captain America. He was my least favorite character of the Big 5. But the only moments myself or anybody will remember about this movie in six months are the ones with Cap.
I wondered why that was and then it came to me. Cap’s weakness as a character, which is that he’s so one-dimensional, is actually an advantage in this film. There are so many characters and so much time travel sorcery nonsense that Cap acts as a stabilizer. We always know where he stands. We always know what he wants. So whenever he’s onscreen, we feel a sense of purpose, like the story’s on track. Not to mention, he’s got the best scene in the movie, when he fights himself.
As for everyone else, I’m disappointed. Everything is too messy. Yes, Tony’s death was a powerful moment. But it had nothing to do with the movie. You’ve already proven in this franchise that death means nothing. Loki is alive again after dying in Infinity War. Gmorrah is back after her dramatic death. Hell, you kill Thanos and bring him back IN THE SAME MOVIE. Death in the Marvel universe might as well be a nap. My emotions were more a reaction to this being the end of Robert Downey Jr. playing the role. Because if I’m going off the movie only, Tony’s storyline was awful. Who the hell cares if he goes back and sees his dad? I don’t know his dad. I don’t care about him. This is the reason this movie was so freaking long, because everybody had to meet their dead dad.
Then there’s the Hulk stuff, which infuriated me. It’s a total cheat so that they don’t have to do the hard work of writing a controllable Hulk. Ant-Man was only there to eat tacos and crack jokes. The Big Lebowski Thor joke should’ve lasted one scene. But for some reason they decided to make him Jar Jar Binks for three hours. Captain Marvel only shows up when she wants to, I guess. Then flies away on space vacations to get bad haircuts.
Maybe the worst choice was giving Blue Chick, literally the most unlikable character in the history of the universe, more screentime than Thor, Hulk, Ant-Man, or anybody else not named Tony or Steve. I’m not sure what they were thinking on that one.
I’m still trying to figure out why everyone’s giving this movie a pass. Nothing happens for the first hour! It’s just superheroes sitting around talking about stuff! If this were any other movie, there would’ve been a revolt. Then I realized that Endgame had a secret weapon that no other movie in history had – the biggest superhero battle ever put to screen. When everyone knows they have that waiting for them, they’ll watch anything. They’ll watch Thor picking his nose for two hours, which is basically what we got.
And then we finally get that battle. Was it worth the wait? Sadly, no. There’s only one good moment in these giant cinematic army battles, and that’s the moment right before the fight. The line-up of the armies. The shots of all of our favorite heroes preparing. But once they start fighting, it’s a giant mess. I had no idea what was happening. Not only was the CGI bad, but there was too much going on to appreciate any of it. I can’t remember a single memorable moment from the final battle. If you pinned me down and forced me to pick something, I’d say the Scarlet Witch – Thanos fight. But is that why I came to Avengers Endgame? To see Scarlet Witch fight Thanos?
There’s a bigger discussion to be had here about where high budget filmmaking is going. It’s becoming increasingly clear that actors aren’t in scenes together. You could tell in this battle that many of these characters were on their own, no other actors, green screen behind them, a low-energy set, with a tired director telling them, “Okay, now yell to Iron Man, who’s going to be up and to your left.” Everybody is copy-pasted in and it leaves the action scenes feeling emptier than I ever remember them.
And then, on top of that, everybody’s getting de-aged and re-bodied. If you don’t like your actor clean-shaven, give him a digital beard! Why not? So everybody looks weird. Their eyes are floating around on their faces in the wrong place. Or their skin is too smooth. It’s like watching an animated movie. This is the stuff everybody warned us about when Lucas started doing it in the prequels. And they were right. I don’t feel like I saw a single shot in this movie of the actual world. Every single frame was altered in some way.
Could this screenplay have been fixed? Well, they definitely overthought things, particularly the time travel. They have something in their mythology called the “Time Stone.” I’m assuming that’s because it can alter time. So just build the story around that. They get the Time Stone, which allows them to go back in time, and then you don’t have to spend hours expositioning the Quantum Realm. From there, I wouldn’t have sent our characters off to different planets in the past. That was a bad choice. The stuff on Thor’s planet was some of the weakest in the script. The stuff on the dark planet was even worse. This is what happens when you try and make a story too complicated. You get all these messy threads that nobody cares about. The cool stuff was in New York. That’s where we should’ve spent all of the past scenes.
In the end, I wasn’t entertained by this movie. Sky-high expectations didn’t help. But I liked Infinity War waaaaay better. This was messy. It had too many unnecessary scenes early on. The final battle payoff was weak. You go to this movie for two reasons. Captain America and Tony’s death. Outside of that, this was a disappointing end game for the Avengers franchise.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me :(
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Big battle scenes are almost always big boring scenes. We think we want them, but once they begin, it’s just a bunch of context-less action. — For battle scenes to work, you must bring structure to them. You do this by having your characters lay out a plan ahead of time. This plan gives the audience a series of steps to engage in, which provides the sequence with structure. One of the best movies to do this is Braveheart. Braveheart has several giant army battles and in each one, William Wallace has a plan beforehand that he lays out for his army. And they’re often very simple. For example, one of his plans is to tell his cavalry to flee right as the battle begins (“And let the English see you do it,” he tells them). He then says, once the entire English army has committed to the battle, to ride around and flank them. And that’s what happens. The armies clash, and then the Scottish cavalry comes around and flanks them, putting the finishing touches on the English. This is so much better than sending two armies at each other and having a big generic battle.
