Avengers: Endgame Is an Unprecedented Achievement in Cinema, Not Just Superhero Cinema

Stop and consider the magnitude of this achievement for a moment. Avengers: Endgame is not just a film. It is not just the “season finale” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is the culmination of eleven years of multifaceted storytelling, somehow managing to balance dozens of characters, tie off story threads that have stretched and intersected over the past decade, and craft a final challenge worthy of being the capstone to this mega-franchise. That it happened at all, let alone that this saga ends on a note so poignant, funny, and exhilarating, is an absolute miracle — or at least, if you’ll pardon the expression, a marvel.

Rest assured, if you’ve never seen an MCU movie before and decided, for some inexplicable reason, to jump in here, then you will be helplessly lost. Those hoping for a standalone feature, one fully accessible to the uninitiated, will be frustrated with this film. But one of the best features of Endgame is how intricate-yet-modular it is.

If you’ve only watched the Avengers team-up flicks, you can still keep up with Endgame given its easy-to-follow structure and its brief explanations of how we arrived here (which are usually filled with wisecracks to help the medicine go down). If you’ve dipped into the other big MCU movies here and there, you’re likely to appreciate the cameos and connections that make this installment feel as much like a reunion as it does a finale. And if, like yours truly, you’ve watched the whole series from beginning to end, you’ll love the little callbacks to past moments and personas, but also the way the film expertly weaves twenty movies’ worth of relationships and personal developments into one impossibly satisfying tapestry.

***CAUTION: The remainder of this review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Avengers: Endgame***

Endgame can essentially be divided into three parts: (1.) the hangover from Infinity War (2.) the self-described “Time Heist” and (3.) the final confrontation and epilogue. For a film with as many characters and stories as this one, that structure helps keep the movie from feeling ungainly. There are clear goals and shifts in objectives from hour to hour that keep the film manageable, even nimble, as it bundles so many plotlines and personalities together.

"Apparently Thanos also snapped away half of my haircut."

The first hour of Endgame is easily the most heartbreaking though. The film’s most commendable choice comes from the way the Russo Brothers and their team take time to show our heroes coping with the unimaginable loss of the last film. Endgame certainly takes a page from the first Avengers flick, spending much of its first act getting the band back together. But before that, it deals with what split them apart.

It’s fairly daring too. The film’s opening twenty minutes see the good guys killing Thanos, only to discover that all hope of reversing his grim deeds has been lost. That’s a smart decision which immediately pumps the brakes on the audience’s expectations, and provides good reason for tensions that have been bubbling up between the Avengers for years to froth to a boil. Before the film dives into making things right, it stops to process what went wrong.

That means taking stock of where the original Avengers are five years after the events of Infinity War and exploring their pain and efforts to heal. There’s something heartening in seeing Steve Rogers still leading support groups and trying to make life easier for others. There’s something piercing about Natasha keeping the lights on for The Avengers while still feeling the loss of her wayward best friend. There’s something funny but sympathetic about Thor wallowing in distractions and simpler pleasures as he copes with his belief that he failed. There’s something touching about Ant-Man reuniting with his now-grown daughter who thought she’d lost him for good. There’s something bitter about Hawkeye turning into a slaughtering rōnin after the devastating loss of his family. There’s something encouraging about Bruce Banner finally finding a balance with “the other guy.” And there’s something oddly right about Tony being able to set aside the Iron Man mantle and accept the quiet life only after his worst fears have come to fruition.

Savvy viewers know that the dusting at the end of Infinity War is destined to be undone, but Endgame doesn’t shy away from showing the effects it had on the survivors in the ensuing five years. It’s a decision which makes those losses matter and serve as meaningful motivation, even if we know they’re unlikely to be permanent. But, of course, a blockbuster film can only permit itself to wallow for so long. After everyone is reunited and convinced that Scott Lang’s longshot effort to right what went wrong is worth a try, the fun, and the “Time Heist”, begins.

Scott Lang is also The Avengers' Vice President of Branding and Marketing.

It’s there that Endgame becomes, at least for long stretches, an enjoyable romp, locking in on the more diverting mode that most Marvel movies adopt sooner or later. The chance to have our heroes dip back into key moments of MCU history, playing around with old friends and enemies, and using knowledge of the past and the future to bring humor and clever twists to the fore is an utter delight. Whether it’s Captain America having to go toe-to-toe with his past self like it’s a live action Capcom game, or War Machine and Nebula adding sarcastic commentary in the intro original Guardians movie, or Cap sidestepping another elevator fight with a well-placed “Hail Hydra”, this stretch lets the Avengers be lovable, mischief-making scamps once more. These sequences remind viewers why we’ve enjoyed watching these heroes so much, even apart from their world-shaking adventures and poignant personal struggles.

And yet, the film also uses those hops across time to underscore those same internal struggles, as much as it revels in the fun, cameo-coated heist flick setting. Iron Man and Captain America both go back to the 1970s, where Tony resolves the daddy issues that have been at the fore since Iron Man 2, and Steve is haunted by being both unimaginably close and unimaginably far away from his greatest love. Thor has an unexpectedly touching reunion with his mother circa Thor 2, that helps him recover from the debilitating sense of having failed. And last, but anything but least, Black Widow and Hawkeye realize what it takes to obtain the soul stone, and fight one another to for the chance to pay its price.

It’s one of the more affecting sequences in the film, as two heroes essentially compete to save the other and sacrifice themselves. Their skirmish is unquestionably tense, given the stakes, and shows the pair of “badass normal” from The Avengers at their best, in ways both personal and pugilistic. Natasha wins, and firmly and finally erases the red from her ledger, giving her life to save the world and doing so for a feeling and a family she never thought she’d have. It is a noble, satisfying, hard-but-heartening death, that gives Black Widow the emotional high point of the film before the massive, final rumble begins.

That too is one of Endgame’s canniest choices. The Russo Brothers and their team show our heroes succeeding in their wildly improbable (if somewhat inevitable) mission, only for that to be the beginning, rather than the end, of their biggest challenge. After the time-skipping reassembly of the Infinity Stones, and a painful-but-fruitful snap from The Hulk that brings all of the old dust mites back, the final bout of trouble truly begins.

Thanos's helmet is mainly a concession to the National Commission for Bicycle Safety.

The trouble comes, in a clever twist, as 2014 Thanos uses 2014 Nebula’s connection to her 2019 predecessor against her and, with knowledge of the Avengers’ plan, travels to the future to stop them. Surveying the aftermath of his original mission, The Mad Titan decides that his past-and-future self did not go far enough. He resolves to gather the stones once more to remake the universe in his own image from the ground up, one without a memory of what was taken from them. And he calls in his army to see that it happens.

It’s there that the rousing fan service of the movie erupts in earnest. Every battle-ready MCU character of note (save those poor unloved heroes from the television-only wing) bounds onto the screen at once to tear through Thanos’s goons together and stop the Mad Titan from bringing his plan to fruition. The outcome of this war is never in doubt, but its beats are as fistpump-worthy as anything in cinema.

Captain America summons Thor’s hammer as he, Iron Man, and the God of Thunder take on Thanos in three-on-one close-quarters combat. Black Panther saunters in triumphantly with his usual infectious resolve while Spider-Man swings back into action to ease Tony’s conscience. Captain Marvel gets the “Big Damn Hero” moment, and is the cherry on top of the utter thrill it is to see every warrior, compatriot, and ally The Avengers have ever crossed paths with assembled in one place. The mass of rootable, recognizable heroes, all there to take on Thanos’s equal and opposite force, is the sort of high water mark no other film can claim.

It is, in a word, uproarious, in the best possible sense. That final rumble is pure crowd-pleasing splendor, with moments that verge on the pandering, but which never stop flooding the audience’s pleasure receptors with superheroic dopamine. While the results are inevitable, the chills and spills to get there are too enjoyable to care, as Endgame makes good on its ultimate crossover promises to give anyone and everyone a moment to shine.

This year's hottest archetectural design trend is "charred rubble."

That finale to end all finales feeds into three themes that have been with the Marvel Cinematic Universe almost since the very beginning. Time and again, the Avengers flicks have focused on the idea that these heroes are vulnerable when divided by discord, but nigh-unstoppable when working together. For Tony Stark in particular, Endgame works as the final confirmation of the idea that, however much he may want to place the world on his shoulders and go it alone, it takes trusting his teammates, and seeing the fruits of so much affection and connection from so many people, to save the world from its greatest threat.

That effort, however, sees Tony sacrificing himself for that greater good. When all other options are exhausted, Tony himself nabs the Infinity Stones from Thanos’s gauntlet and, at the cost of his own life, snaps his enemy’s forces out of existence. It is a mirror image of the end of Infinity War, with all of the alien aggressors fading to flakes of ash, and Thanos himself crumbling under the weight of his crestfallen disappointment, rather than looking with satisfaction upon a grateful world.

But those events mirror Infinity War in another, more spiritual way. Time and again in that film, Thanos was able to win because The Avengers were not willing to sacrifice one another to stop him. They were unwilling to let others die, let alone put others in harm’s way, even to secure arguable the most important victory they’ve ever needed to claim. Here, on the other hand, we see the opposite side of that nobility. All of these heroes put their lives on the line to stop Thanos, but only Natasha and Tony know and accept the full costs of their actions. Thanos loses not only because of the friendships and alliances forged in the name of defending what’s right, but because he underestimated the magnitude of the sacrifices that Earth’s Mightiest Heroes would make in order to protect the people they love.

That’s been Tony’s goal since the prospect of an unstoppable alien threat first emerged in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2012’s The Avengers. From his endless array of alternate suits, meant to account for any possible threat in Iron Man 3, to his efforts to put an iron shield around the world in Age of Ultron, to his desire to save his compatriots from themselves with the Sokovia Accords, Tony has arguably been obsessed with defending this world from the worst it has to offer. In his final moments, Pepper brings that notion full circle, telling him that he’s succeeded, that they’re safe now, that his long labor is finally over, and he can rest.

Tony accidentally taped over some of the original episodes of Dr. Who.

The predictability of that finish weakens the moment a little, but it’s buoyed by the reactions of those closest to Tony, and the ballast that comes from paying off eleven years of personal struggles, trials, and travails from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s signature character.

It’s only in Endgame’s closing segments, where the film tries to grieve too quickly and pass too many torches in sequence, that it fumbles the ball a bit. Whereas most of the incidents in Endgame come with a surprising amount of focus given the scope of the film, it’s that last little stretch where the movie’s supports start to buckle and the scenes start to feel more scattershot.

And yet it all ends on a high note, with Steve Rogers finally getting the happy ending – the long, joyful life with the woman he loves – that the universe had denied him for so long. It’s an ending that requires a little movie magic, and some timeline-shredding consequences, but rides on the total joy of him finally getting that long-awaited dance with Peggy Carter, and the beautiful future it implies.

That scene epitomizes Avengers: Endgame, a film that by all accounts, shouldn’t work, and given the odds against a cinematic experiment this big, should never even have happened. If you think about the details of Steve and Peggy’s reunion for too long, the whole thing almost falls apart. And yet, it’s the end product of so many great emotional moments, so many clever twists, so many pieces of plot and character and feeling that have been sewn together over the past decade of storytelling, that it cannot help but feel earned.

"Now that's what I call Captain America: Civil War!"

In the same way, Endgame is an unprecedented achievement, one that inexplicably manages to marry the lighter thrills of funny moments and superpowered fisticuffs, with committed, long term character work and genuine emotional depth. The Marvel Cinematic Universe will continue, but we will never have a cinematic event as big, as momentous, and as multilayered as this sparkling capstone to the original Avengers films ever again. Thank goodness for all of the assembly required and undertaken, all of the memorable characters realized from their four-color roots onto the silver screen, and all of the rousing, interconnected spectacle that it took a real life super team-up of so many talented people to bring us.

There’s no mold for a film like this to follow, no model for it to imitate. For all the accusations of sameyness against the Marvel movies, Avengers: Endgame is a sui generis film, giving audience something they’ve never seen before, and may never see again.