Avengers: Endgame was the culmination of 10 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 22 movies, most of them bad. Sure, some of them have been fun. There are great characters in this series. Good jokes. Cool moments. A handful of filmmakers who snuck in excellence when Kevin Feige’s back was turned. I’m not made of stone.
But maybe one reason the MCU is the most successful movie series ever is that it exhibits some of the worst trends of modern Hollywood filmmaking—indeed, embodies them for this generation. Big stars and expensive effects paper over unthinking direction, bland craft, and scripts that commit the chief sin of modern Hollywood movies over and over and over again. They tell when they should show. They symbolize when they should dramatize. They present illusions only… Characters who seem to change but don’t really, or do but not in a way that’s earned. Plots that are at once overly simplistic and under-explained. Worlds that aren’t built with detail and solidity, some of which are even poorly imagined. Stories that don’t function, that don’t mean anything. Movies that can’t confront real conflicts except in the broadest and basest terms. Franchises perpetually cheating their way out of consequences, pushing us forward to the next movie and the next and the next, giving us tidbits and soundbites and reunions between characters who never built a relationship in the first place.
None of it is real, none of it can be grasped with your hand and your heart. Or not enough of it. Scraps and dust.
Do anything long enough and you may miss it when it’s gone. I’ve been watching Robert Downey Jr quip his way through one movie after the next for ten years, so there’s a certain satisfaction in a film that calls back across that span of time.
But a callback isn’t a story.
Endgame does a lot that’s fun. It’s a light-hearted crowd pleaser. It makes jokes and references. It plays, really, like a high school reunion. Look who had kids, who changed jobs, who got fat and who lost their way. Hey, remember when? And so on. We like these actors and these characters, and that familiarity and affection carry us along through a movie of bombastic, nonsensical events that tries to end the story so hard it kills Thanos twice.
It was fun. I’m not angry, the way I have been at so many Marvel movies—angry for so long, because I knew they could be better than they were. I guess this is as good as they are. The MCU gets a C+ from me as a whole, I think. Two or three very good ones, a handful of decent ones, some flawed, some very flawed, some… well, some I wouldn’t watch again if you paid me.
Endgame has all of their flaws, even as it tries to sew up a few old holes (like trying to redeem part of the worst entry in the series, Thor: The Dark World). For better or for worse (mostly worse), it is very, very MCU.
– Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, operates on science whose rules are ill understood, so that characters have to keep explaining it anyway at the point of drama (like asserting that Black Widow can’t be saved). This one adds time travel nonsense to the mix. Can time travel save people who died before the snap? You can’t change the timeline, but you can bring people from the alternate timeline to this one, like Gamora, which surely changes that timeline’s future, but if they’re going to an alternate timeline, how does old Cap end up back in ours? Don’t try and explain it to me, we’ll be here all day making diagrams with straws. The rules aren’t clear or intuitive, so it ends up a mishmash of contrivance. (The Russos had to explain some of it in an interview, and even then admit they don’t know the answers to some of these questions. Not that director interviews are a substitute for a movie being clear on its own.) See also the Infinity Stones themselves (weren’t they supposed to be impossible to even hold for most people? Why not use them individually as soon as you have them?), Banner’s gamma radiation, etc.
– Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, has bad villains, by which I mean villains who are boring, bland, unsympathetic, arbitrary, unthreatening, or some combination thereof. Thanos is a special boy because his problem is, his ideology is insufficiently countered by either of his two Avengers movies. At least Endgame makes it clearer that he’s just an asshole (“Nobody has enough food, so I will kill half of the humans, but also half of the plants and animals that humans eat! Brilliant!”). The films’ attempts to make him sympathetic and humanized are obnoxious. Thanos’ armies are boring mooks meant to be so gross and alien that they can be killed with impunity. (In Endgame, Spider-Man activates his suit’s auto-kill mode, something he significantly avoided in his own movie for fear of doing harm. And for all that Stark’s story has been about the dangers of making and using killing tools, he wins the conflict by building a replica of the villain’s tool and turning horrific mass murder back on his opponent and Thanos’ conveniently inhuman forces.)
– Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, has shoddy world-building. There are exceptions in the Marvel Universe (Wakanda is particularly well thought out), but everything from the visual design of the spaces (shut your eyes: what does the inside of the Avengers compound look like? Now how about Batman’s HQ in The Dark Knight?) to the way characters and plot points are lost in the shuffle (Thanos snaps a whole galaxy in half, but nobody from any of the other planets or the other five realms wants to help do anything about it? How about explaining how one vial of Pym particles is only enough for a single human’s round trip through time, but also enough for Thanos to bring an entire planet-conquering army and its giant ships to the future?) to the basic failure to meaningfully confront how the world would be impacted by any of these events (something they failed to do with the first New York attack, where the largest impact of the MCU version of having 9/11 happen on the same day humanity learns they’re not alone in the universe is on the local real estate market, and still don’t seriously confront with the post-Snap reality—The Leftovers, this ain’t).
– Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, articulates, but fails to dramatize, change. This is the MCU’s biggest problem, manifesting in most of their films, and it stems in part from a fear of change. Comics, and now comic book movies, must take place in an eternal now, where characters cannot meaningful grow or change because that would risk altering their ability to headline a sequel. The exception are origin stories, where characters often exhibit change they haven’t earned (Spider-Man: Homecoming) or in some cases fail to even do that much (Captain Marvel), and now this finale of sorts. What could Marvel do to avoid change, now that it must wrap up the arc of every original Avenger, including making most of them choose to step away from the fight? Endgame’s sneaky bastard trick is to put all the transformations off-screen, during that “Five years later” title card. The series has done this before (what exactly is the fallout from Civil War? What are Cap & co. doing between that and Infinity War? Who the hell knows?) but this is ridiculous. Off-screen, Banner reconciled the two halves of his nature; off-screen, Hawkeye became The Punisher; off-screen, Natasha learned how to be a leader; off-screen, Thor gave up on himself; off-screen, Tony found peace. Then the film cleverly does a victory lap to celebrate how much its characters have changed “over the course of their stories” by sending them back in time to observe or interact with themselves from the time of the original Avengers. But they haven’t changed much over the course of their stories, unless you count those five off-screen years. It’s a parlor trick, and it’s meant to distract you from the failures of the series as a whole to tell a meaningful serialized story about nearly anyone. Has Tony changed since he sacrificed himself in The Avengers? He repeats that here. Has Cap lost his idealism? He walks away from the fight now because Chris Evans’ contract is up, that’s all. Did Bruce and Natasha’s relationship end tragically, or did it never even really occur in the first place? These people have been in stasis for years and years now, with future developments always promised but never arriving (rogue Cap, Hulk/Widow romance) or happening but not sticking (Star-Lord’s growth in his own series followed by his regression in Infinity War, Tony’s seeming conclusion in Iron Man 3 immediately discarded). Many other characters are simply plot devices with a few quips or battle cries (Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man, Strange) in terms of the story outside of their movies. Maybe oddest of all, Nick Fury doesn’t even get a line in Endgame, despite starting the Avengers and getting what I assumed was a preparatory spotlight in Captain Marvel. As he silently watches Tony Stark’s funeral, does he regret setting Tony on the path that would lead to his death, or is he proud of the hero Stark became and the world he saved? Shrug, says Endgame. No time for things like that.
– Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, fails to express character and theme through action. Is there a more pointless scene in this entire movie than Captain America fighting himself? That’s not what Cap’s story is about! Madness. (Much better is the scene where he avoids reprising his elevator fight scene from Winter Soldier by quoting a famous recent comic book moment.) And this is basically true all the way through the movie. The number of action scenes that even express a meaningful conflict in the MCU are rare. Endgame doesn’t add to their number. Simply put, that’s a shame.
– Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, nods toward diversity of characters, but not in a way that’s either meaningful from a story perspective or sufficient from an industry perspective. When Cap hands his shield off to a black man, there’s no meaning invested in the gesture—Falcon isn’t much of a character, just a receptacle for a mantle that, within the world of the story, didn’t need passing on. (Likewise for Thor handing his royal title to Valkyrie.) It’s nice that one of Cap’s group therapy patients is a man describing a date with a man, but is that all the queer rep we get in 22 movies? One guy talking about a date where they both cried? Then there’s the moment of all the female MCU heroes gathering to help Captain Marvel get across the battlefield, which is like a monument to pointlessness; not only does Carol demonstrably not need the help, but this celebratory moment of gender diversity feels absurdly self-congratulatory when it also serves to remind that absolutely none of these women have led Marvel movies of their own. 10 years in and Marvel is still taking its first hesitant steps toward letting people who aren’t snarky, bearded white men be heroes. If the most successful studio on the planet can’t risk full-throated acceptance of diversity, who can?
– Last but not least, Endgame, and the MCU as a whole, are not about anything. At least, not anything more complex, subtle, or relevant beyond the basics of “when you suffer a loss, you should keep fighting”, or, “true heroes are willing to sacrifice themselves for other people.” It’s a Chumbawamba song, really. In Endgame, did Cap learn that sometimes you should trade lives? Did Tony learn how to put down his weapons and accept his fears? Did Thor learn how to shoulder his responsibilities with maturity? Do any of our heroes see their flaws reflected in the villain, the better to combat them physically and morally? (Actually, Thanos follows their lead, in deciding that traveling through time for a second chance at victory is the right way to go.) If anything, for all its contrived finality, Endgame is a monument to the negation of all consequence, to the idea that loss need not be lived with so long as there’s some bullshit magic that can show up to reverse the day.
In its muddled way, the MCU to date has been about a post-9/11 America, rising to defend itself from outside foes and then from the consequences of its own moral compromises, and on a more personal level, about the costs and methods and values of that fight. But Endgame doesn’t so much add to or clarify that thematic landscape as it does double down on the unintentional themes that exist in the MCU by nature of both its format and the overall decisions of the studio. The series’ confused attitude toward American militarism—born from early MCU films receiving financial support and script approval from the Pentagon and continued through Captain Marvel’s otherwise inexplicable decision to repudiate her false identity as an elite soldier of an alien military in order to claim her true identity as an elite soldier of the American military—finds no extension here, as governments are completely sidelined in Endgame (I guess Civil War ultimately had literally no impact on anything, even Rhodey’s ability to walk) and figures of corruption or troubled legacy (Pierce, Howard Stark) go unconfronted here. The series’ troubling, narcissistic tendency toward the power of identity in the face of change finds its most absurd nadir in Stark’s final response to Thanos/death, “I am Iron Man.” The series’ uncertain viewpoint on power and its uses continues to boil down to who can punch who more, a form of conflict resolution that often contradicts the apparent themes of the moment. The series’ viewpoint on death and change is here presented as both being utterly arbitrary, being without reason or logic. Which I guess makes sense: in the capstone of a series defined by events that have neither cause nor effect, how could that viewpoint be anything but arbitrary?
I’ve seen all 22 MCU movies, some reluctantly, some excitedly. Hated some, cried or rejoiced at others. As most of them did, Endgame lands somewhere in the middle—a fun story, some smiles, emotional affect ladled over misshapen plots and illusory character arcs, in a world that doesn’t make much sense, in a cinematic universe that doesn’t much care about being good. And why should Marvel care about being good? As characters keep repeating in this movie, “We won. We did it.” Marvel has indeed won. It changed the business. It cemented its place in the industry. It made a lot of money. Well, it’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money. They’ve had their fair share of mine, and then some.
But I think I’m done. I’m done being disappointed in these movies. I’m done watching them out of obligation or foolish expectation. Done catching up, done keeping up, done joining the “cultural conversation” that’s not a real conversation at all, just shibboleths and memes. If I watch another Marvel movie, it’ll be because I’m a Ryan Coogler fan, or because it’s a James Gunn story. Not just because it’s part of the Marvel brand. I’m not watching The Eternals. I’m not seeing the next Spider-Man. If they make an Ant-Man 3, don’t call me. I won’t pick up the phone.
When it comes to the MCU, to quote John Cusack in High Fidelity, I’m tired of it. I want to think about something else.
-Kyu