Ok, as I said in the previous post, Avengers: Endgame was an incredibly well-executed finale to what has essentially been a 22-movie series - or, as my friend put it, the end of a 50-hour movie. It was suitably epic without losing sight of the characters and giving us enough fun and humor while still keeping the stakes the highest they've ever been.
You could hardly ask for a better ending to this saga. But, though hardly, there is one major flaw I see in with it. I don't want to talk about that flaw until after the cut, but there is a certain matter of emphasis that feels skewed. Let's just get into spoiler territory.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Two of the original six Avengers are dead at the end of this movie, and a third is now so old that he's gone into permanent retirement.
Let's talk about the deaths.
In order to get the Soul Stone, much as Gamora was sacrificed to attain it in Infinity War, here Clint and Natasha fight over who is to be sacrificed (naturally, being heroes, they're trying to make sure the other one survives) and ultimately, it's Black Widow whose body is broken at the foot of the cliffs, while a grief-stricken Clint awakens clutching the stone.
Later, at the ultimate climax of the movie, Tony manages to pull the infinity stones from the gauntlet right as Thanos reacquires it. Using his own Iron Man suit's gauntlet as the focus for the stones, he snaps Thanos and his army out of existence, but in doing so is charged with such incredible primordial power that his body is overwhelmed and he shortly thereafter dies.
We get a long denouement in which the Avengers mourn Tony, and we get a funeral in which all the people whose lives he has touched come to pay their respects.
And that's appropriate, as Tony Stark is a character who we've spent 11 years with. The thing that's weird about it is that we got none of that for Natasha.
Indeed, Black Widow didn't even get to participate in the final battle - one of the biggest (if not just the biggest, at least in terms of named characters) - clashes ever on screen. In a fight in which basically every character from the MCU is fighting (even Gamora, given that we have a time-travel duplicate - and it appears that's just going to be the only Gamora we get from now on - barring some way in which the Soul Stone can put the original's consciousness and memories in the new one...) Natasha is gone.
Despite never having her own solo movie (though that's going to happen later - as a prequel, one presumes) Black Widow has been one of the most popular characters in the MCU.
Now, I get that Iron Man in particular is important to these movies. It was the first Iron Man that kicked off this utterly crazy cinematic experiment, with the inspired casting of Robert Downey Jr. a large part of its success. So there is something poetic to having this character be the one whose ultimate sacrifice saves the universe.
But while he gets the big moment, Natasha's sacrifice is just as necessary and pivotal, and yet we don't see the same weight put on it. Again, it's not to say there's no weight - just that it feels weird that the movie mourns Iron Man more than Black Widow - and naturally, given the MCU's rather absurd slowness in getting female-led movies (just one so far, in fact,) it feels of a piece with the unfortunate sexism that has undercut these movies.
Indeed, there's a moment during the big battle in which Captain Marvel tries to get the "Iron Gauntlet" as I've been calling it across the battlefield and basically all the female superheroes show up to back her up. The moment feels like it's trying to show off how many great female characters the MCU has - and it's true that it does have a lot of great women - but it also feels self-congratulatory in a way that the rest of the movie, despite being stuffed to the brim with fanservice, oddly doesn't.
Admittedly, as a dude, I recognize that my opinion on this matter is ultimately secondary. I certainly don't begrudge anyone who was thrilled by that moment, and I think that when you're so used to representation in these movies (being both white and a dude, I was just happy to hear that Chris Evans is from Boston, my home town) it can be easy to forget how important that representation is. It can be easy to ask for perfection when you don't know what perfection would look like because you're chasing an ideal that means different things to different people - if that makes sense.
I think it's just that it bugs me that, of the characters who were really emphatically removed from the picture, we got one example of a heroic sacrifice in Tony, then an example of the "ultimate happy ending" with Steve getting to grow old with Peggy back in his own time, and then oh right, another sacrifice with Natasha.
Tony and Steve get a fair amount of the denouement to grapple with the ends of their stories (albeit posthumously for Tony) but after Clint returns from his time-trip, we touch on Natasha's death briefly, and then get a couple lines after Tony's funeral, but not nearly as much.
I hate to focus so much on this, because in nearly every other regard, Endgame was exactly the movie it was supposed to be, and I would still stick with my assessment that they stuck the landing with this massive franchise, pulling off something no one has ever done in film history.
But it bears mention. Marvel's issues with race and gender are something they're clearly trying to work on, which is good, but we're trying to get to the baseline here. I wish that Endgame hadn't implied Natasha wasn't as important as Tony.
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