Avengers: Endgame

The MCU long ago cemented itself as one of the most important blockbuster film franchises in cinema history - standing amongst the likes of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and James Bond (who, let's be clear, is also a superhero.) But the degree to which this 11-year, 22-film project feels of a piece, and for it to come to such a massive, climactic conclusion (even with the promise that this is not the end,) is unprecedented.

Endgame is unprecedented in just how big it feels, which is impressive given that there's actually not a ton of action. Indeed, one of the real strengths of the Marvel movies is that they've known that the best action movies do the legwork to earn that action (with some exceptions that are almost pure action, like Mad Max: Fury Road.) The thing that's kept us invested in this utterly ridiculously massive franchise is the characters. We like Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and the rest just as much if not more than we like Iron Man, Captain America, or Black Widow.

It's something that a lot of imitators, trying to create their own cinematic universes, haven't been able to nail - they like the idea of the big, interconnected meta-series (and the obscene amounts of money that such a thing earns) but they don't have the mastery of coordination and the discipline to drill down to the core and ensure that at the very center are the human characters.

Naturally, everyone will find quibbles with any artistic project, and some will simply be disappointed that it wasn't the movie they had imagined in their head, or perhaps no movie could have lived up to their expectations.

But for me, and I imagine for the vast majority of people, Avengers: Endgame sticks the landing, giving us an epic, emotional culmination that feels powerful. So often, the endings to this sort of epic wind up feeling vaguely underwhelming for one reason or another. But you can feel the weight behind Endgame, and that it lands where it does is a remarkable feat.

Let's spoil things, shall we?


We begin watching as Clint is teaching his daughter to shoot a bow. He looks away for a second and then in an instant, his family is gone - all dusted in the Snap. We see Tony adrift in space with Nebula, getting ready to die of asphyxiation as the power in the Guardians' ship is running out, only for Carol Danvers to show up and carry it with her on the way back to earth.

The Avengers and Captain Marvel manage to trace Thanos to his retirement world and confront him, only to find that A: the arm he used to snap half of life away has shriveled to near uselessness, and B: he used the Infinity Stones to destroy themselves in an effort to prevent his work from being undone. Thor decapitates him with Stormbringer, but the damage appears to be done.

And so we cut to 5 years later.

Thanks to some - as it turns out very important - mice walking over the controls to the Quantum Tunnel from Ant Man and the Wasp, Scott is ejected from the Quantum Realm. What felt like 5 hours to him has been instead 5 years. Realizing that they might be able to use this effect to travel through time, Scott goes and finds the Avengers.

In the intervening years, Steve has been running support groups for people who lost loved ones in the snap, Tony and Pepper have been married and had a daughter named Morgan, and Natasha is trying her best to keep what remains of the world safe, coordinating with Okoye, Rocket, Rhodie, and Nebula.

When Scott appears at the HQ, he begins to convince the Avengers that they might be able to actually travel through time, and after Tony refuses out of fear that in fixing things he'll un-make his own daughter, they get Bruce - who has, in the intervening time, managed to fuse his own intellect with the Hulk's physical size and strength - which means we get what my friend's caption machine described as "Smart Hulk."

Tony eventually figures out how to make it work, and so the middle act of the movie begins:

The plan is that they have to go back in time, before the Infinity Stones were taken by Thanos, and retrieve them from various points in the movies' history. So we get a team that goes to New York to get the Tesseract, the Mind Stone, and the Time Stone from the immediate aftermath of the Battle of New York. We have Thor and Rocket head to the period in which Jane Foster had the Reality Stone in her, in which the Thor who has really let himself go revisits Asgard and gets to have one last conversation with his mother. Then we have Nebula, Rhodie, Natasha, and Clint go back in time and out into space to get the Power Stone and the Soul Stone.

Some complications occur, naturally, like Tony and Steve accidentally losing the Tesseract to Loki, but rather than chasing him, they instead go back to 1970 to just get it at a SHIELD bunker, where Tony meets his father.

Other problems arise from the Soul Stone and the Power Stone. Just as in Infinity War, the only way that one gets the Soul Stone is to sacrifice someone they love. Clint and Natasha are there, and these two best friends have to decide who is the one to be sacrificed. Ultimately, it's Natasha who falls from the cliff, and Clint is left to carry the stone and lose maybe the last person he cared about in the universe.

To take a moment to go back to my opinion on the movie, Natasha's death - which seems to be truly permanent - is maybe the one serious misstep of the film. Given the weight the other big character death (which we're getting to - seriously, if you're reading this and care about spoilers, um... don't?) this feels underplayed, given how important a character she has been in this series. It's heavy, but I'd have liked to see her get a better send-off. Anyway, back to plot.

The biggest complication, however, is that Nebula's cybernetics allow the version of her from that time period to view some of her recorded memories, and Thanos deduces that the Avengers - characters he already knows about, given their resistance to the Chitauri Invasion - are trying to undo what he will have done, and plots with Past!Nebula to prevent them from doing so.

Ultimately, even though Gamora hasn't witnessed the reparation of their sisterly relationship, our Nebula reaches out to her Gamora breaks her out.

With the Stones recovered, they use an Infinity-Gauntlet-like device that Tony has constructed and have Hulk do the snap, and it appears the snap has been undone - bringing everyone back, but not rewriting the timeline so that the past 5 years are also preserved.

And it's at that moment that Thanos' ship arrives and destroys the Avengers headquarters, brought through the time machine by the evil Nebula.

This, then, is basically the endgame of Endgame. Thanos and his forces attempt to wrest the... let's call it the Iron Gauntlet from them, and we get first a battle between Thanos and Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America. It's a rousing battle, especially when Steve Rogers proves himself worthy, and manages to wield the time-travel-copied version of Mjolnir. But Thanos is still very tough, and ultimately he shatters Steve's shield right as he summons the vast army he has at his back.

And then, maybe the most rousing thing in the entire MCU happens. Magic portals, summoned by Doctor Strange, begin to open up. All the snapped heroes are back, and with them, an army of Sorcerers, Asgardians and Wakandans.

Freaking everyone shows up. It's absurd. Pepper shows up in her own Iron Man suit. Valkyrie rides in on a pegasus. Spiderman gets to use the "Instant Kill" mode he so wisely avoided in Homecoming.

And even when this part of the battle starts to go south, as Thanos has his ship rain fire upon the battlefield, killing ally and foe alike, suddenly the ship's guns turn to fire at a new target - but it's Captain Marvel, who does a few destructive loops through the ship and destroys it.

All the while, the Iron Gauntlet is being passed around from hero to hero, trying to keep it away from Thanos, but eventually Thanos gets it, and after Iron Man tries to pry it off of his hand, he tosses him aside, preparing to wipe out the entire universe this time and simply create a new one. But as snaps his finger, nothing happens except the sound of metal on metal.

Tony has taken the stones from the gauntlet and affixed them to his own Iron Man gauntlet. With a snap, he destroys Thanos' army, his ships, and ultimately Thanos himself.

But as we've seen, even for beings as strong as Thanos or the Hulk, using the stones all at once is far too much for a mere human. The power that has coursed through him fatally injures him, and Tony stumbles across the battlefield, slumps down, and in Pepper's arms, he dies.

As Tony is memorialized, the responsibility of returning the Infinity Stones to their proper points in time - lest it create timelines where, for example, Dormammu succeeds - falls to Steve. Using the time machine, he travels back, but while it's supposed to be only five seconds until he gets back from the modern frame of reference, he doesn't.

Instead, Bucky and Sam see, to their shock, an old man sitting out by the lake near the Starks-Potts home. They approach and quickly realize that it's Steve, now over a hundred years old (though looking pretty good considering, presumably because of the super-soldier serum.) Old Steve has lived the life that he lost when he got frozen, and as he passes on the shield and the title of Captain America to Sam, we then see, in the movie's final shot, that he did, finally, get that dance with the love of his life.

Hoo boy.

This is a big movie, and even if the MCU will still be around, it definitely has the feeling of a finale. While Far From Home is officially the end of this "phase" of movies, it'll be really interesting to see what happens in the next phase. So much of what has made the Avengers movies in particular interesting has been the development of the relationships between the characters that were first assembled in the first Avengers movie, which of course built off their personalities in their solo films.

Now we're left to wonder who future crossover movies will focus on, and then what dynamics we're going to see develop between them. It'll be a tough thing to follow up, but given the popularity of some of the newer characters and movies, I think that if anyone could pull it off, it's Marvel Studios.