Jeremy’s Tophunder №78: Avengers: Endgame

10 min readJun 1, 2020

I only have two movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe on my list. The first one was Iron Man. I knew the other was going to be an ensemble movie, because those bring along a sense of scale that just isn’t found in movies anywhere else these days. So, I knew my options were one of the four Avengers movies, or Captain America: Civil War (which might as well be an Avengers movie). Ultimately, I went with Avengers: Endgame for two main reasons:

It represents the end of a story arc that took 10+ years and a staggering 22 movies to complete. Sure, some of those movies are skipable, but it remains an absurdly ambitious undertaking that has never been paralleled in movie history. The MCU took fringe actors and turned them into legitimate A-List movie stars (too many to name here), and has completely re-defined how Hollywood approaches movie-making, for better or for worse. Simply put, the MCU has been -the- defining Hollywood presence over the last decade.
It fucking rocks.

I’ve talked a few times in this space about how I usually prefer movies early in a series rather than the series’ conclusion, especially if there is some feeling that the Good Guys lost and the Bad Guys won. For that reason, I obviously gave a lot of consideration to Avengers: Infinity War for inclusion on the list. I remember seeing it in theaters, watching the last 10 minutes as half the cast crumbles to dust, with Captain America collapsing to the ground in despair, then cutting to Thanos sitting triumphantly in his garden, looking over the new universe that he has “corrected.” And then the movie ends.

And I remember thinking to myself, “holy shit, they actually did it.”

I never expected them to actually do it, especially not this way. I was expecting either a cop-out ending, where they stop Thanos from getting all the stones, but maybe he escapes to set up the next movie, or what I’ll call the “Goldilocks” ending (not too depressing, not too fan-serving) where everything happens just as it does, but instead of the movie just ending, there’s another 15 or 20 minutes where the remaining Avengers re-group and formulate a plan and go after Thanos.

The M.O. of Marvel had always been to have folks leave the theater on a high note. Even in a movie like Captain America: Civil War, which had a more complex and nuanced climax (Steve Rogers and Tony Stark have a pretty bad falling out), it still comes back around to have Captain America break his allies out of jail and Black Panther catches the bad guy (Daniel Bruhl’s character) and delivers him to the authorities. Infinity War was the first time they had ever delivered a truly heart-wrenching ending. The only reason to have any hope at the end of Infinity War was because you know it’s a series of movies that are ostensibly family-friendly, so obviously we know the good guys will win in the end.

I thought it was the best movie that Marvel had ever made. And it was.

And then they made Endgame.

When I saw that Endgame had a running time of just over three hours, I got pretty excited, and as soon as the movie started, I knew I was getting what I wanted out of it. One of the reasons they made the movie so long is because they wanted to make the audience sit with the loss that the characters and the world had experienced. We had already been sitting with it for a year since the end of Infinity War, and they were forcing us to sit with it some more.

The Avengers kill Thanos 20 minutes into the movie, yet they’re still no closer to achieving their ultimate goal — bringing back everyone they lost in the snap. We flash-forward five years, and they still aren’t any closer. We see Steve Rogers running and/or participating in a support group. It’s a half-hour into the movie before we get any semblance of hope, when Scott Lang (Ant-Man) emerges from the quantum realm to let them know that they could theoretically use the quantum realm to travel through time and fix things. But they need Tony Stark’s help, and Stark isn’t interested. They finally get Stark on board, but then they need to go track down Thor and Hawkeye to get the whole band back together. It’s not until an hour into the movie that the fully realized plan is actually put into action.

That first hour is basically a prologue to the movie that we all knew was coming — the surviving Avengers find a way to bring back all the people that were lost in the snap, and then defeat Thanos. But that prologue is important. It sells the hopelessness and despair of the world. In the support group scene, director Joe Russo makes a cameo as a grieving man who recently went on a date, where both he and his date cried at some point during dinner, and they talked about how much they miss the Mets.

The line about the Mets was kind of a random throw-in, but it actually might be more important than it seems at first. Are you telling me that it’s five years later, and professional sports haven’t bounced back yet? Think about that for a second. In my lifetime, entire professional sports leagues have been put on hold for external reasons only twice. First was in 2001, when the NFL and MLB postponed games for about a week following the September 11th attacks. The second is right now, due to the Coronavirus outbreak. The current situation clearly has more of an impact on pro sports, and I’ve heard some people say that we might not see professional sports return to “normal” normal until 2022, but does anybody think that we’re still not going to have sports FIVE YEARS from now? That would be (literally) unheard of. It puts the Thanos snap into some perspective.

It potentially gives an answer to a question that I had — when Thanos killed half of all life in the universe, what counts as “half” and what counts as “life”? What does “half” mean? Is it 50 percent of everything on each planet? Or is the 50 percent randomly distributed across the universe? Is it possible that one planet was affected not at all and another planet was entirely wiped out? And what life was affected? Based on the end of Infinity War, it doesn’t seem like anything happened to plants (I didn’t see any trees or shrubs crumble to dust), so does that mean it’s just sentient life, or are animals affected as well? If animals count too, then the numbers look even crazier — there are 7 billion humans on Earth, but there are approximately a quadrillion ants. That’s one million billion ants. Ants out-number humans by a factor of about 150,000 to one. Mosquitoes have been estimated to out-number humans by a factor of ten million to one. Are we assuming that the population each organism is halved? Or are all organisms treated as random individual lives?

When the camera pans across New York City, it looks like a ghost town. That seemed strange to me, because its a city of over 8 million people, 23 million in the metropolitan area overall. Even if half of those people suddenly disappeared, it would still be a bustling city five years later, wouldn’t it? Unless -substantially- more than 50 percent of Earth’s human population was snapped out of existence. That would explain why it’s five years later and the streets still look empty. If all life is treated equally by Thanos, it’s certainly possible that Earth’s human population was abjectly decimated. -That’s- the world that I think of when I watch the first hour of Endgame.

The next two hours deliver in ways that make the whole journey worth it.

I’m an absolute sucker for time travel, or any movie where time is manipulated. By my count, there are a whopping eight movies in my Tophunder that deal with time travel, alternate timelines, alternate realities, or characters’ perceptions of time being manipulated in some way. My thoughts on the theory of time travel have changed a lot over the years, but I think I’m actually pretty satisfied with how Endgame handles it. They throw out all of the rules that we learned in Back to the Future and Terminator, where time is linear, and changing something anywhere along the line affects everything that comes after it. Professor Hulk, however, explains how changing the past doesn’t change the future:

If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future. And your former present becomes the past, which can’t be changed by your new future.

Going back in time to four different points — 1970, 2012, 2013, and 2014 — in five different locations — S.H.I.E.L.D Headquarters, New York City, Asgard, Morag, and Vormir — and collecting the six Infinity stones creates a countless number of alternate timelines that eventually need to be closed by returning the stones to their original timeline. It’s also worth noting that the 2012 space stone was grabbed by Loki, which he used to escape (necessitating Stark and Rogers to go further back to 1970 to locate a different version of it). The Infinity War timeline has been corrected, but something tells me that Marvel will have a deep well of alternate timeline stories to explore if they want to.

The final battle with the 2014 version of Thanos is nothing short of epic. It has so many amazing moments, from the opening volley of fire from Thanos’s ship to destroy the Avengers’ compound, to Captain American wielding Mjolnir, to Thanos’ army descending down onto the battlefield, to what looks like Captain America’s last stand (featuring probably my favorite shot in the entire marvel series), and then, the portals.

Holy shit.

There’s even more, from Tony Stark’s reunion with Peter Parker, Peter Quill’s reunion with past Gamora, which runs right into a cascade of characters carrying the gauntlet across the battlefield like it’s a rugby match (maybe my favorite part of the whole sequence). That gets interrupted by Thanos’ ship raining fire down over everything, until Captain Marvel returns to destroy the ship and take the handoff of the gauntlet.

Who’s going to block for her? Oh, that’s right, it’s all of the other female characters. Is it cheesy? Yes. Is it forced? 100 percent. Do we love it anyway? Of course we do. There are some bad-ass, no bullshit women in this universe, and they’re here to kick ass and take names.

Thanos manages to get a hold of the gauntlet, and looks like he’s about to be victorious again, in a much more permanent way, only to be thwarted by Iron Man, bringing an end to a protracted 35-minute battle scene, featuring some of the best action sequences the universe has ever put together. It really is incredible, and probably worth the Disney+ subscription all by itself.

Avengers: Endgame (and the MCU in general) really earned the emphatic exclamation point finish that ended the Infinity Saga, but perhaps the part of the movie I like the best was their choice to not just high-five each other and go for beers after saving the universe. They made two bold choices, effectively retiring the two characters that have been at or near the center of the Infinity Saga arc — Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. From certain nods that the movie makes in the last half-hour, it seems like Iron Man and Captain America will continue to be characters, but their original alter egos seem to be done. It makes for a bittersweet ending that they didn’t have to go with. Given how Infinity War ended and how the first hour of Endgame played out, I don’t think anyone would have been upset with even a rather cliche happy ending.

I have Endgame as my highest-ranked Marvel movie, because it’s the one that just has the most stuff going on. It’s the most emotionally challenging movie in the Marvel Universe, and for my money, it has the best action sequences. If you’re new to Marvel movies, first of all, congratulations on being the only person alive who has never seen them, but second, it’s not really a movie you can just put on and dive into. There’s a lot of backstory that you’ll be missing that makes all of the more emotional moments of the movie worth it. But if you’ve seen enough to know what’s going on, I’m not sure how you could come to the conclusion that anything besides Avengers: Endgame is the pinnacle of what Marvel Studios has done. I have it ranked at №78 for right now, but it’s only been about a year since it’s come out, and I’ve only seen it a few times. I have a feeling that it could be climbing whenever I next tinker with my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring