MCU Assemble! (For One Last Time)

What do you get when you cross The Force Awakens with the MCU? A film that is both emotionally satisfying and maddening

(Thanos may demand our silence but I have an Infinity Gauntlet so this article is riddled with major spoilers)

(No joke. Don’t read this unless you’ve seen Endgame. It does make a difference.)

It’s been a year since I last wrote about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and Avengers Infinity War. Which means it’s been a year we’ve had to wait to see how Marvel was going to get itself out of the mess it left us in with 50% of all living things eliminated in addition to tying up a whole mess of loose ends it has produced over the past 11 years and 21 films.

Does Endgame undo the snap? Yes, but screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely chose a path to the undoing that ignores significant MCU precedents.

Does Endgame tie up all those loose ends? That depends upon which loose ends you are expecting to be tied up and even then some of the tie ups fall a little flat.

Is Endgame worth the money? Hell yeah.

Avengers Endgame is, above all else, a fan-centric film. It is a love letter from Marvel to the fans; the payoff to 11 years of MCU build up. On that level it succeeds, to a fault. Casual observers of the MCU should enjoy it but it’s aimed squarely at the fan base. I’ve never seen a film with this many Easter eggs and callbacks. Markus, McFeely and directors Joe and Anthony Russo packed everything but the kitchen sink into this film. Amazingly, almost none of them leaked ahead of time (save for Tilda Swinton’s and John Slattery’s cameos).

Just like about everyone else who has followed this franchise, I never thought I would see Natalie Portman in an MCU film again (technically, we didn’t since they used cutting room floor footage from The Dark World but added a new audio track). After two Thor films Marvel ran away from the Jane Foster character faster than The Benatar can do a space jump. I wanted to kvetch about not having Jane interact with Thor at all but it was more important for the story to have him interact with Rene Russo’s Frigga.

The attention to detail in these fan-centric scenes is scary good. Robert Redford arguing with Tony Stark and Thor about handing over the Tesseract and the Strike Team along with Jasper Sitwell doing a riff on Steve Rogers’ elevator fight scene from Winter Soldier despite the fact that this particular time jump is an Avengers 1 callback. A callback inside a callback? And the phrase Rogers used (Hail Hydra) is a callback to the infamous Marvel Comics Captain America issue that led to the comic series Civil War II which polarized readers and put Marvel Comics on the defensive. So it’s really a callback inside a callback inside a callback. Crazy.

Incidentally, that Redford cameo was probably the biggest surprise of all the cameos — bigger than Natalie Portman’s — since he retired from acting last year and said The Old Man & The Gun would be his last film. That could be true if he shot his Endgame scene before The Old Man & The Gun.

Some cameos went way off the grid (Ty Simpkins from Iron Man 3 and James D’Arcy from the long ago cancelled Agent Carter. Yeah that’s the first Marvel TV show character to be referenced in the MCU). One cameo was out of place; Thunderbolt Ross appearing at Tony Stark’s wake appears inconceivable (I’ll explain why later). And this would seem to be the proper point to segue into Endgame’s Achilles heel.

The more you know about the MCU, the greater the payoff in Endgame…until a certain point is reached when knowing too much makes you start silently screaming at the movie screen “This can’t happen! It runs counter to MCU mythology!”

Here’s where I invoke JJ Abrams and that reference to The Force Awakens at the top. Like that film, which I torched for hitting the right emotions while simultaneously betraying George Lucas’ legacy, Endgame goes for the emotional payoff while conveniently ignoring things along the way where engaging in the slightest scrutiny would cause the film to collapse on itself, something that isn’t present in other Russo brothers/Markus and McFeely MCU films (though a credible argument could be made…and has been made…for Zemo’s story arc/revenge plan in Civil War being preposterous).

To wit:

• Ross at the wake. This is the man who said something along the lines of, “The world’s on fire…and you show up and you think all is forgiven?” in Infinity War when he should have been glad to see any help. How can this man not want the whole team under lock and key now? It makes for a nice touch doing a Titanic putting almost everyone consequential from the Avengers and Stark’s MCU history in the scene in a CGI stitched together single take for Stark’s wake but this one inclusion’s appearance being problematic from a realism standpoint was conveniently forgotten.
• Pepper Potts as Rescue. Ok, it’s in the books so there’s that caveat and Tony was working on that suit before all this happened. But Pepper’s MCU character arc up until now (save for Iron Man 3 possibly) has been for Tony to be a homebody and she wanted no part of the fighting. In Infinity War she was pleading for him to get off the space ship and now she’s suddenly flying around in battle? It’s a fan pandering moment to be sure and it got its cheers in the theater every time, but it’s nonsensical to her character’s movie arc.
• This one next one is complicated. Short version: Most of the people going after the Infinity Stones in this film would be incinerated the moment they make direct contact with them. Clint Barton, anyone?

Long version: This was definitively established in Guardians of the Galaxy, first when The Collector’s slave grabbed the Power Stone and was incinerated and second when Quill grabbed it at the end of the film and was nearly incinerated until the rest of the Guardians joined him and even then, as was explained at the end of the film, the fact that Quill wasn’t entirely human was the thing that allowed him to hold on to the stone and not get incinerated.

The Tesseract took the Red Skull and eviscerated him when he grabbed it back in Captain America: The First Avenger; eventually banishing a shade of him to Vormir for all time.

And yet Clint Barton is able to hold the Soul Stone in his gloved hand?

Clint Barton.

War Machine and Nebula each held on to the Power Stone with metal; Nebula’s bionic arm and War Machine’s armor…so technically not direct contact and therefore not incinerated.

Tony Stark grabbed the Tesseract with his armored hand and Steve Rogers had Loki’s scepter so he wasn’t making direct contact with the Mind Stone.

Rocket grabbed the Ether/Reality Stone via extraction into a tube so no direct contact there…though why the Ether didn’t respond negatively to the “attack” as it had with an infected Jane Foster during other parts of Thor: The Dark World, which is the period when this time jump took place, is another one of those conveniently forgotten “put your brain in park” moments in Endgame.

Bottom line: Rocket shouldn’t have been able to get the Ether because the Ether would have fought back and probably killed Jane Foster in the process. The only way Thor could go after the Ether in The Dark World was after it willingly left Foster’s body to go to Malekith. It’s not going to willingly go to Rocket’s contraption.

Thanos was a powerful being and capable of holding on to one stone easily (but for more it would require a gauntlet).

You could make an argument that The Hulk could hold on to the Time Stone because of his Gamma radiation infused body. I wouldn’t consider it a good argument — it’s more of a “way too convenient” argument — but you could make it. Endgame itself makes it when justifying why The Hulk might not disintegrate after putting on the gauntlet.

But there’s nothing special about Clint Barton. He should have been incinerated the moment he touched the Soul Stone. His glove would not be enough protection.

Between Barton not being strong enough to hold on to the Soul Stone without dying and The Ether remaining true to itself based on the events of The Dark World and fighting back against a woefully overmatched Rocket, the Avengers realistically would have been able to grab four of the six stones. Mission failed. End of story. Fade to black.

You may call all these examples nitpicking. I find it indefensible that a movie that stakes so much of itself on sweating out its fan-centric details to the degree it does, just blithely ignores inconvenient truths as obvious as that. There are so many ways they could have written that scene to have Clint wind up with the stone or found another way to get the Ether without violating established MCU mythology.

I should have been crying with Clint at Natasha Romanoff’s sacrifice. Instead I was wondering why he wasn’t dead himself.

And, yeah, I saw it coming. From the moment Clint and Natasha left Rhodes and Nebula and headed to Vormir, I saw it coming. I hadn’t felt a moment like that since they played the tape in Civil War; that sense of dread knowing exactly the direction things were going to go and knowing I was going to have to sit through it. The writers were clever to put the Vormir scene at the end of the series of heists. Those of us who figured out where things were going would be tortured. And I was.

Before they made the jump to Vormir, I knew. One of them was going to die. I quickly did a playback in my head of all the shots I’d seen in all the Endgame trailers and TV spots and concluded it was Natasha. She wasn’t seen in clips of the final battle and Clint’s scene in the exploding underground passageway had yet to appear so it had to be her. I hoped, prayed I would be wrong and it wouldn’t be her.

Going into Endgame, of all the Avengers she was the one I wanted to see make it through the movie alive the most. Clint would have been #2. The other Avengers have all had major arcs in their own respective movies save for the post Avengers 1 version of the Hulk which we know is currently an impossibility due to rights issues with Universal. But Natasha and Clint have been consistently relegated to second or third tier status throughout their MCU run. To paraphrase Steve Rogers in Age of Ultron: They both deserved a win.

Natasha’s suicide hit me harder than Thanos tossing Gamora over the side in Infinity War, which I didn’t see coming at all when that death happened. Natasha was always the soul of the team for me. Stark may have been its brains and Rogers its heart but Natasha was the mother hen. She was the glue, the grounding force that bound the team together in a post-Coulson world.

Seeing Clint fall apart after getting the stone and then fall apart again after coming back to the present, soon to be followed by Banner and Rogers, just killed me. It was scenes like these where that hit home the strongest because we are emotionally invested in these characters. We’ve been exposed to them for a long time; a quarter of our lives or longer, depending on your age…

I suppose that was the whole point from an emotional narrative standpoint. The sacrifice had to be real and had to stick with the audience. Sure, the audience is going to be bummed no matter who goes over the side at Vormir. But some will resonate more than others. If it was Steve Rogers the reaction would be different. The reaction was definitely different when Tony Stark died.

The only thing that would have stuck the landing better in closing out Natasha’s arc would have been to have Bruce meet Natasha in the Soul World after he did his snap, just as Thanos met Gamora there after his snap. Tony too. I am curious as to why the team behind Endgame chose not to go this route, seeing as they established it during Infinity War. Certainly it couldn’t have been flow considerations because that wasn’t an issue for Infinity War.

I’m over Tony being dead. I’m over Steve Rogers becoming an old man. I’m not over Natasha Romanoff dying the way she died and how that scene played out. It’s going to take a while for me to watch that scene and not get emotional. I may never completely recover. It’s been 37 years and dozens upon dozens of viewings and I still get choked up with Spock’s death scene in The Wrath of Khan. When a death scene is done really well and you are emotionally invested in the character, it leaves a mark.

I would be remiss in not noting an opposing view on Romanoff’s death that has quickly emerged. Both Rosie Knight in Esquire and Laura Bradley in Vanity Fair have written scathing articles on Romanoff’s death and while the two articles vary on the periphery, they are in lockstep at their respective cores…

Sadly, this moment falls into the most classic of comic book tropes: Women in Refrigerators, wherein female characters are maimed or killed to push forward the narratives of men. Coined by comic book writer Gail Simone, the phrase was inspired by an issue of Green Lantern where Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend is found dead in a fridge. It’s become a rallying cry for thoughtful comic book readers who want better for the characters that they care so deeply about. In killing Natasha, the Russo Brothers forced Black Widow into this unenviable archetype and destined her to a fate worse than death: being infinitely sidelined for Clint. It was an unnecessary continuation of her arc from Age of Ultron which painted her as a woman obsessed with her inability to have children. If we follow that arc, then here as Natasha throws herself off the mountains of Vormir it’s hard not to feel the implication that Clint had more reason to live due to his family, whereas Nat’s life was somehow worth less because she thought she couldn’t have a child. No matter her flaws, Natasha Romanoff deserved better than that.

I am not going to dispute this opinion because it is a valid criticism to make when you look at it from that angle. Romanoff deserved her own movie long before this and having her serve as the one to always play sidekick to someone else’s story did the character a disservice.

That said, I don’t view this as Natasha thinking that Clint had more to live for than her. Certainly Clint didn’t think that as he said later on, “It was supposed to be me!” Instead I’m looking at this through the lens of Natasha finally wiping the red out of that ledger she referenced to Loki back in Avengers 1. Clint was sent to kill her and he made a different call. She owed him. And he was her best friend (and she his). She knew about Clint’s family well before the rest of the Avengers as referenced in Age of Ultron.

Regardless of Natasha’s feelings about motherhood or her worthiness vs Clint’s — things we can argue for hours about the importance and weight of — there is an established mythology for the MCU version of Natasha Romanoff and that mythology is of one looking for two things: family and redemption. The Avengers became her family. And the redemption was making the sacrifice to validate that the decision Clint made way back was the right one. You don’t achieve the latter if you let Clint die instead of you.

All that said, I definitely agree with the criticism that Natasha deserved a better memorial than a bunch of shell shocked men standing by the water in various states of anger, sorrow, and denial. Having Clint and Wanda reference Natasha (and Vision) at Tony’s wake was a nice touch but it should have been more…everyone who fell should have been memorialized there and not just Tony.

I can guarantee you that Dark Phoenix won’t be evoke such a response from the audience, as Natasha’s death did, when Mystique gets killed and that X team is in shock. The only sour note was Thor’s incongruous denial reaction when everyone else outside was emotionally destroyed. It was out of character for Thor who, serial drinker or not, has been around the galaxy long enough to know that it was irreversible.

You could hear the sniffles in the theater at the first three days’ showings I attended.

Thor was off kilter in a not good way during Endgame for most of its run. This was the Thor from Ragnarok and not the Thor from Infinity War. I had thought that the excesses of Ragnarok had run their course with Thor’s character but with Endgame they came roaring back. I’m not talking about the beer gut though that did strike me as overkill. No, I’m talking about the general silliness that ensues when you take Thor too much out his character’s natural lane. It hurt Ragnarok and it hurts Endgame.

Call it the Bannerization of a character; you take a character as straight up serious, as Banner was as of Avengers 1, and then make him progressively sillier with each successive film. Watching the selfie scene in Endgame, while cute from a certain point of view, made me as uncomfortable as the other Avengers were at the table during that moment…and that wasn’t even the worst “Professor Hulk” scene in the film. The movie would have benefited from that scene being played straight without the bathos.

Well this has now happened with Thor. His comedy bits worked in Infinity War when he was with the Guardians because that’s the way a Guardians scene goes so it’s expected. I’m not going to re-hash Ragnarok’s comedic failings again except to say that it took Thor too far out of his lane into the ridiculous. The same thing happened in Endgame with Thor aping Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, Brad Pitt in some of his early 90s work, or even, dare I say it, Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man 2.

Marvel has long been accused, with justification, for its over-reliance on bathos to end a scene to the point that it appears as a sign of cowardice and lack of belief in the original material that Marvel has to go for the cheap incongruous laugh to sell the scene. This is a totally separate issue from the comedy that can be adeptly sprinkled throughout an MCU film for maximum effectiveness (or, in the case of the Ant-Man and Guardians series, dominate it). I’ve been reading people say that Endgame isn’t as funny as Infinity War was (or, to put it another way, Infinity War had more comedy in it). I don’t know what version of the films these people are seeing but the five times I saw Infinity War in the theater there was nowhere near as much laughing at the screen or silliness and bathos coming from the screen as I saw the first three nights with Endgame.

Cap’s multiple bad word usage, him marveling over his butt…things like that are the kinds of cheap easy laughs the MCU has been repeatedly pilloried over. They aren’t needed in Endgame but Marvel, even after a decade of churning out big money hits, still uses them as a crutch in lieu of going with more subtle, less bathos-y humor that better fits the situation.

Cap saying to himself, “I can do this all day” and having him respond to himself, “Yeah, I KNOW!”…that’s the kind of humor that works because it’s funny to the audience and the characters stay in character. Cap staring at his butt saying, “Yeah, that is America’s Ass”…that’s not in character at all.

Marvel, keep the former and strive to eliminate the latter going forward. Please. 11 years of bathos is enough.

One area that Endgame does dominate over Infinity War is character development. It was Infinity War’s biggest deficiency; too many major characters had half page story arcs. Or less. Not this time. With a few exceptions, everyone gets quality character time. This more than justifies the film’s half hour longer running time (not including 10 minutes of credits); all the more remarkable when you consider the action scenes are not as pervasive as they were in Infinity War thus it’s not just 30 minutes extra time to add to the total character time…it’s 30 minutes plus the time the movie gains from having less fights. After the second go around and eventual decapitation of Thanos, there isn’t another fight involving any of the principles until Barton makes an appearance as Ronin.

Infinity War may have been Thanos’ film but Endgame is Clint Barton’s. Jeremy Renner gets the meatiest parts to chew on and gets to display the biggest emotional range in this film. Conversely, Thanos gets relegated to bit player status with little character arc to speak of. Because of all the time travel hijinks, we’re dealing with a 2014 Thanos. He knows the Avengers a bit but isn’t as interested in being as talky with them like his 2018 self was.

Speaking of the action scenes, I didn’t find them particularly compelling overall. I hate to say it but I thought the best fights were Cap vs himself and Clint and Natasha. The final showdown, as others like Forbes’ Scott Mendelson have already noted, looks more like something out of Ready Player One than a Marvel MCU film and I just didn’t feel as invested in the battle as I have in other big showdowns. Maybe it was because the scope was just too big, too much, too many characters appearing at once that I was overwhelmed with the spectacle.

Or, maybe it was due to things like Captain America wielding Thor’s hammer AND his axe. He’s done it in the comics and Thomas Bacon over at Screen Rant makes a plausible argument for why it’s feasible for him to do it in the MCU. While the worthiness factor and documented MCU mythology might be applicable to Steve Rogers wielding Mjolnir, though I do question the dearth of on screen evidence to support Steve going from barely able to budge Mjolnir in Avengers 1 to being able to suddenly wield it in Infinity War, that application doesn’t extend to Stormbreaker which was forged after Odin’s death and, therefore, has nothing to do with worthiness and Thor himself told the Guardians in Infinity War that none of them were capable of wielding it…including Quill who once held an Infinity Stone and lived to talk about it. You put an Infinity Stone in Steve Rogers hands and up he goes in a poof of smoke…

Oh…and, yeah…then there’s also that little matter of the whole mythology Odin established in Ragnarok about how the lightning came from Thor himself and not Mjolnir which was there as a means to focus the lightning and not be the source….so…uh…how is Steve Rogers shooting out lightning from Mjolnir and Stormbreaker?

I put Steve Rogers sudden ability to wield Mjolnir with lightning right up there with Rey going from 0 to lightsaber wielding Force savant over a few days time in The Force Awakens. It got one of the biggest cheers in the film every time I saw it so the writers’ gimmick worked and the audience was properly manipulated but it’s still a credibility killer that hurts the film.

What does give credibility to the film are the finality of its deaths. Someone was going to have to die at Vormir and the writers deserve credit for picking the second mostly likely person to sacrifice themselves after Steve Rogers and one of the ones whose death would hurt the fans the most. Just to drive home the gravity of it all. But it’s not just Romanoff dying, it’s not bringing Vision back. Though that does raise the obvious question of how Disney+ is going to do its Vision+Scarlett Witch series with Vision dead (yet another prequel!?!?), it would have been a cop out to try and bring him back without the Mind Stone.

I think everyone, including myself, had Steve Rogers pegged for death so seeing Tony Stark make the sacrifice play…yet again if you are keeping score since Rogers challenged him over that very thing in Avengers 1…was a surprise. But not so much because he died but because he didn’t have to die. He wasn’t in a Kobayashi Maru moment. A snap to wipe out Thanos and the invading force was not under any circumstances the only available option. He could have just flown off with the stones to give enough time to defeat Thanos, who was beatable without them. And there were other stone based options available that wouldn’t have meant the ultimate sacrifice.

I don’t have a problem with Tony getting killed off. I do have a problem with Tony getting killed off unnecessarily. They should have written it so the snap was the only option if being taken out by the snap was their intention. Otherwise have him killed some other way.

I had already surmised that the Gamora of Infinity War would stay dead back when that film came out so, for me, it had become a question of how they re-introduce the character. What they settled on makes sense and also creates new possibilities for Guardians 3 whenever that film comes out, though I’m sure there will be some who will be miffed that this puts the Quill/Gamora romance on the back burner, if not completely snuffs it out.

I guess the biggest thing that surprised me about the deaths in Endgame is that more people weren’t killed. Banner lives. Thor lives (and is inferred to be joining the Guardians of the Galaxy?!??!). Marvel wouldn’t kill anyone in Civil War and only manages to kill two in Infinity War (four if you count Loki and Heimdall, which I don’t) and two in Endgame. That’s a low body count for a movie with stakes this high.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have misgivings about the method of Steve Rogers’ exit. As Scott Mendelson put it in his review, they stuck the landing at the end including a musical callback to Winter Soldier to close out the film. But it rings hollow for one important reason.

Pairing Rogers up again with Peggy Carter was on MCU fans’ bucket lists…probably near the very top. And Marvel served them exactly what they wanted by ending the film with Rogers going back in time and getting the girl, the dance, the kiss, and — if the inference is right — the marriage as well. Given the deaths of Romanoff and Stark, MCU fans couldn’t have asked for a better end to Endgame.

However…

The very thing the fans wanted, which Marvel finally delivered on, does the very thing that the film over and over preached was the one thing the team shouldn’t do. Rogers interfered with the past. Worse, if we go by the rules set down by Endgame, he created a divergent timeline which, according to the movie itself, would make it impossible for him to wind up back on the original timeline the way he did as an old man at the film’s end. The Wrap’s Phil Owen goes into greater detail than I care to on this subject.

Then there’s the dicey and completely-not-addressed-by-the-film subject of how Steve Rogers could live out his life seeing “a situation going south” (to re-use a famous line from Civil War) and not do something about it AND have Peggy Carter live out her life at SHIELD without constantly reminding Steve, “You were meant for more than this, you know” as she did in First Avenger.

Both Steve and Peggy would have to break from character and suppress their natural instincts the remainder of their lives.

Does anyone believe such a thing is possible? For either of them?

Again, like Force Awakens, Endgame’s goal of fan service means emotional payoffs trump any supporting logic behind said payoffs.

Then there’s the matter of what Endgame does to the next MCU film, Spider-Man: Far from Home. Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos and Todd VanDerWerf explain it thusly…

See, Far From Home centers on a trip Peter Parker and his classmates take to Europe, which implies they’re all still in high school. But if literally any of Peter’s friends fell into the 50 percent of people who weren’t dusted by Thanos, then they would be five years older than their peers and, as such, in college or even working at their first job. The only way the plot of Far From Home works is if everybody Peter Parker knows was Thanosed.

And look, sure, if that’s how Far From Home wants to play it, we’ll go with it. But my goodness, the probability of Peter, Ned, MJ, Betty, Flash, and Liz all getting dusted is 1.6 percent. (Thank you to Vox’s Alvin Chang for this calculation.) Obviously, it’s possible, but it’s going to rankle just a bit. (Or Far From Home will just ignore the whole “it’s technically 2023” thing and do whatever it wants, which is what I would do.)

This is probably why Kevin Feige says that Far From Home is the end of Phase 3 and not Endgame…because of the time jump. Next year will see the launch of Phase 4, or whatever Marvel is going to call it, with The Eternals, Shang-Chi, and Black Widow’s standalone film in theaters. Eternals and Shang-Chi are new franchises and Black Widow is all but certain to be a prequel because 1) she’s dead, and 2) that’s what all the leaks up to now point to. So the films coming out in 2020 don’t have to worry about that time jump affecting their stories from a credibility standpoint.

Part of me wonders if Marvel (finally) giving Black Widow her standalone film is a make up for killing her off in Endgame (as the Renner Disney+ Hawkeye series is probably a make up for not giving him his own film in addition to launching the next Hawkeye after Clint). We’ll finally get that Black Widow film we’ve wanted but it won’t be the Natasha Romanoff who’s trying to wipe out the red in her ledger and we all knew and loved the past decade. It’s the Romanoff who is putting the red in her ledger…and without her Avengers comrades. Prepare to be taken out of your comfort zone. Marvel may have built up oodles of goodwill with the fans after churning out success after success for over a decade but this film is something of a risk. The danger is that this film could turn into the MCU’s Solo…

This isn’t to say that Marvel tied everything up with Endgame. No, it left some stuff dangling…

• Bucky and Tony. Well Tony is dead and Marvel made darn sure that the two never encountered each other on the big battlefield so that Civil War plot thread will remain loose forever. Bucky can keep on blaming himself for the rest of his life. Steve’s an old man and Tony and Natasha are dead. Nobody’s left to help him lift that weight off his shoulders except Sam whom he has a Lethal Weapon like relationship with. Thanks Marvel…
• Bucky’s atonement. Then again, maybe this will be dealt with in the Disney+ Falcon and Winter Soldier series…though maybe that should be renamed to Captain America and Winter Soldier after Steve handed Sam his shield?
• Natasha and Bruce. This will remain Marvel’s biggest unresolved mis-step in the MCU. I know some people hated that romance plot thread but I felt it worked. After setting it up in Age of Ultron, the studio ran away from their romance and the closest it ever came to touching it again were a couple of glances during Infinity War. Endgame should have addressed this…the five year time jump meant there was time to address this, if only to say why pursuing the relationship was a bad idea. Ducking the issue entirely, as Marvel has, was the worst possible outcome.
• Why wasn’t Erik Selvig at Tony’s funeral? The last time he was seen on screen he was running around Avengers HQ at the end of Age of Ultron so he was inferred to be part of the team. It was documented in Endgame that he was one of the vanished so he should have been there. They had Thunderbolt Ross there, who probably wanted to toss the lot of them in jail. They even had Harley Keener who hadn’t been seen since Iron Man 3. Yet no Selvig? Surely it must have been a behind the scenes issue that prevented Stellan Skarsgård’s appearance in the film than an oversight on Marvel’s part.
• Just how much the Ancient One knew about the future? This isn’t an old dangling plot thread but one that was created by Endgame itself when it revealed that the Ancient One knew Strange would figure in her life in the future when Banner found her five years before Strange was at the New York Sanctum. Which meant that she knew she was going to throw Strange out of Kammar-Taj and then let him back in as she did in Doctor Strange. Which meant she was going through the motions when she let Mordo “convince” her to let him back in to Kamar-Taj which…uh…doesn’t make much sense actually.
• How can a sorcerer open a portal all the way from Titan to Earth? I never would have considered that big a jump possible based on what happened in Doctor Strange and in Infinity War Strange asked Stark if he could “fly us home” which infers there was no way he could get them home with his powers. Nevertheless, Endgame established it when Strange and the Guardians jumped from Titan to Earth. Fan-service over established mythology.

I already highlighted Jeremy Renner’s performance in Endgame but I need to talk about Scarlett Johansson’s. She bests her performance in Winter Soldier which was my previous favorite of hers in the MCU. Watching her come unglued five years after the snap was totally in keeping with Natasha Romanoff’s character. One of the reasons her death hit me hard was because that scene was flawlessly written, directed, and acted. The serene look on Romanoff’s face as Cliff is holding on to her hand and she says, “It’s okay” and kicks loose to her death…there wasn’t a better way to play that moment. And that’s all Johansson. It’s a long way from where she was and what she was doing in her Iron Man 2 debut.

Avengers Endgame was the payoff the fans wanted, though the methods used to get there sometimes left something to be desired. It’s not going to crack my top 2 MCU films. I still would put at least Captain America: Civil War and Captain America: The Winter Soldier ahead of it. Maybe Marvel’s The Avengers too. When you serve the fans as much as this film does, sometimes you forget to serve the film and that happened here a few times. The action scenes are not in the top 5 of the MCU and while that shouldn’t be too surprising given the emphasis of character over action in the film, it is surprising with the final battle being not very cohesive. As an example, all the female heroes lining up to help Carol Danvers get the gauntlet through the battle lines? Talk about contrived beyond belief. That scene was totally gratuitous.

Fan-service and emotion above all else. That’s Endgame in a nutshell.

Then again, Endgame saw Black Widow die and her sacrifice struck a chord and rocked me which doesn’t usually happen for me in franchise films or in movies in general no matter how much of a fanboy I may be.

Mission Accomplished, Marvel…