Avengers Endgame Was Actually Pretty Bad

the vengers endgame was pretty bad now that might be an unpopular position but if you cast aside all the hype and emotion tied to the MCU this movie just has huge problems that I think a lot of people are overlooking simply because but while you were getting that sweet sweet fanservice he probably didn't notice that almost nothing in this movie made sense now I'm a big fan of the MCU and superhero films in general but just because I'm a fan doesn't mean I can't point out flaws and just because this film has moments that you like doesn't mean that it's good so get ready to have those rose-tinted glasses shoved right up your ass [Music] so picking up where we left off in the last film half of all life in the universe has been eliminated by Thanos and after the Avengers learn he's destroyed the Infinity stones they drop them like a sack of potatoes right off the bat I have two huge issues firstly wouldn't destroying the Infinity stones have horrible ramifications on the universe the ancient one specifically says the Infinity stones create what you experience is the flow of time remove one of the stones please notice she says Infinity stones so all of these things are super important and removing just one of them would be catastrophic but I guess all of them being essentially delete it doesn't have any effect on anything so let me get this straight this film tells us that these stones are absolutely critical to the universe but at the same time shows us that the universe continues all the same without them that's confusing the scene would make more sense if she was just talking about the time stone that seems like the only one that needs to be returned so it can be used to beat Dormammu the rest just seemed to sit in labs and tombs and create more problems than they solve this is really dumb but unfortunately it's not explained well at all anyway my second major issue is that killing Thanos so early is a horrible idea as it deflates all the tension surrounding the antagonist for the rest of the film this nigh unstoppable villain is subdued and killed within seconds while making his goddamn lunch wouldn't it have been more compelling if the hero spent most of the film trying to find a clever way to defeat this guy seems like they sacrificed the ultimate underdog story for shock value to make matters worse they end up having a big fight with a younger version of Thanos at the end of the film anyway so if you're just gonna have that same conflict in the end why strip away all that character development the younger Thanos doesn't even truly understand who he's fighting sure you can say that he we learned some of those memories but it's just not the same as having the actual experiences and overall he ends up feeling like a different character coming off of infinity war there were so many opportunities for reprisals and dialogue and they don't go anywhere this interaction goes nowhere this goes nowhere in these moments go nowhere it's like if in Return of the Jedi they killed Vader at the beginning of the film and brought back a younger version of them from the prequels to fight Luke it just doesn't make any sense and it loses all emotional impact but enough about inconsistent rules and how they completely ruined their villain five years have passed and now our heroes need to travel back in time to get the Infinity stones so they can undo what Thanos did in case you were wondering the only reason we jumped ahead five years in the story is because that's precisely how long it took this rat to save the day I wish I were joking that this is actually the key event that sets this whole plot in motion anyway what's got back in the picture he suggests to Tony that time travel might be possible via the quantum realm and thus the time high stakes shape but when you think about their plan for more than 10 seconds and how the story gets pushed along by random unpredictable events the whole movie feels contrived and unnecessary the times and places they decide to get most of these Infinity stones or the most inopportune making things harder than they need to be and if they do pick a decent time in place something ridiculously inconvenient happens because well movie just so I'm not being an [ __ ] though let's examine the plan for each snow and shall we so rocket suggests going back to Morag at the beginning of the first guardians film to get the Power Stone not a completely bad idea except the script conveniently forces nebula to spill the beans to a younger Thanos about what the Avengers are doing and the history that led to it not only is this such a lazy forced way to get Thanos back into the story but again it makes me question why the writers kill them off in the first place oh that's right [ __ ] if not for this random issue this part of the mission would have been like taking candy from a baby while we're here though I just want to stress that nebula doesn't attempt to use her time suit again while being beamed up by Thanos his ship seems like it would be worth at least one more try and he'll I mean if she was really devoted to not letting Thanos win she also could have just killed herself I know that's a little dark but Gamora was ready to kill herself to stop Thanos so why not so because our heroes are fools and we need to pack this movie with tons of fanservice they decide to try for the space mind and time stones when they're all in one place New York City in 2012 this might seem like a good idea at first except for the fact that it increases the chances of failure by 100% not only is the entire world watching because of the jet re attack but younger versions of our heroes and villains are everywhere wouldn't have been safer to acquire these stones at neutral times I mean most of these things just sit around in labs for decades I'm sure Tony would be able to find out precisely where and when the space stone could have been retrieved at any time between the 1940s in the first Avengers film which is what they end up having to do anyway so it just further proves my point the mine stone could have been retrieved between Avengers 1 and age of Ultron you know when it was just sitting on a table however when it comes to the time stone it would only make sense to get it from the events of infinity war because that's the only time that they knew where it was but kind of taken a huge risk thinking they can get it in 2012 none of them even knew about Doctor Strange until infinity war and they couldn't possibly be sure he lived at that same address during that time in 2012 there are still three of these sanctum buildings across the world and these people are often drifting in between dimensions I mean strange had to go to Nepal just to meet the ancient one so isn't it extremely lucky that the time stone is in New York during this time and the hard-boiled egg is there to give it up with seemingly little persuasion in a drunken speech Thor suggests going back to Asgard in 2013 to get the reality stone and then while on the bright side the squeezed in some character work it doesn't make a ton of sense logically why go to yet another location full of powerful heroes and villains when you could have picked someplace safer again isn't it ridiculously can to Thor's mom is just cool with the whole time-travel thing she called Odin or Jung Thor for help they'd be [ __ ] poor rocket would have been turned into a Coonskin hat really the reality stone could have been retrieved from the collector at any point between Thor 2 and infinity war Thor knows that it would be there too because his goddamn friends gave it to the guy why would he go to nowhere because for years the reality stones been safely stored there with a man called the collector I know I'd be taking my chances with David Bowie over arguably the most powerful race in the universe nebula suggests going to war Mir in 2014 to get the soul stone really this is the only stone where the location and even the time leave no better option but unfortunately that doesn't stop the conveniences in the writing of course the two people that care deeply for one another happen to be the ones picked to go to war Mir so they could make the sacrifice I mean if they had sent nebula and war machine instead the mission would be a complete flop no one except Thanos could possibly have known that it required a sacrifice so this is just dumb luck beyond the plan for each stone though it's established that they need Pym particles to time-travel and there's a big deal made about them only having enough Pym particles to pull off the time heist once Pym particles right and ever since Hank Pym got snapped out of existence this is it this is what we have we're not making any more come down sorry we've got enough for one round-trip each that's it however later in the film our heroes need more anyway because surprise surprise their initial plan fails so you're telling me that no one thought that they should a figure out how to make more Pym particles or B go back and get more before starting the time heist I mean we just saw Tony build a time machine and what seemed like a week and he conveniently guessed what time and place had more Pym particles - this is just a shitty way of making things seem more dire than they really are it only gets worse when later the evil Nebula is able to send Thanos as massive ship and army to the present when we were told repeatedly that they had a finite amount of these Pym particles how does one little jar of the [ __ ] allow you to shrink all of this but can't transport a few people multiple times I guess we just have to write the movie for them and say that fan OHS backwards engineer and more Pym particles but we all know that wasn't communicated in the film also if it was so easy to backwards engineer these things you couldn't have done that earlier basically the only reason our heroes succeed in their plans is because they get ridiculously lucky at every turn conversely the only reason we have any conflict in this story is because one of our heroes randomly spazzes out and attracts the attention of a younger Thanos from an alternate timeline if they attacked it with just a little common sense and if random issues weren't created for the plot this movie would be over in ten minutes however because this story is designed from the ground up to have as many crowd-pleasing moments as possible we have to watch three hours of events that in all honesty really didn't need to happen at all so you see the very structure of endgame is flawed and you know what they say the house built on sand will rake in billions of dollars and no one will give a [ __ ] in a universe with so many magical or otherworldly solutions to problems I can definitely see why it might have been difficult from a writing standpoint to come up with a satisfying ending that felt final however I feel like the writers went out of their way to make the audience not care let's start with the time travel an endgame time travel is a little different than what we usually see in these types of movies traditionally the goal of time traveling is to cause or prevent something that will affect the future however this movie insists that that's a bunch of baloney changing the past does it change the future we go back we get the stones before Thanos gets them danos doesn't have the stones problem solved and go how it works instead the idea is that when you go back in time and change something you simply create an alternate timeline that has no relation to your own so for example if you were to go back in time and kill your younger self there would now be two timelines the original one where you're still alive and a new one where you're dead this makes logical sense I guess but it kind of just sucks the life right out of time-traveling doesn't it the writers of endgame said that they talked to real physicists about the time-travel so that it would make as much sense as possible and while they continually bust the balls of other films like Terminator or back to the future for not making sense the futures a bunch of [ __ ] at least the time-travel rules in those movies were limited and presented real danger if Marty didn't get his parents back together he'd fade out of existence Sarah Connor got her [ __ ] head blown off Manatee would lose the war against the machines actions had consequences sure if you think about time travel too much you'll go cross-eyed but obviously adhering to the most current scientific theories isn't as important as making sure there are stakes in your story at the end of the day you cared about those characters and what happened to them I can't say the same about these guys ironically in an attempt to outsmart those other time travel films and make something more based in reality they seem to forget that when you give your characters too many ways out of a situation there's no longer any reason to care for example with this multiple time line business if a character dies it's now possible to just travel to another timeline and get a version of them back and when you add a god-like MacGuffin on top of that it becomes really difficult to give a [ __ ] about anything that's happening to show you what I mean let's talk about the big character moments an endgame and why they're all trash I am lying man so the big crescendo of this film and pretty much the whole MCU up until this point is the death of Tony Stark well I'm sure that this was intended to play as a big emotional moment to me it played like this all the characters were crying and some people in my audience for sniffling in my [ __ ] ear but I felt nothing the reason I felt nothing was because this event did not need to happen the way it did in the end battle when they're trying to get the gauntlet away from Thanos and Tony ends up sacrificing himself there's absolutely no reason why they couldn't have done the following a have a strong character like Thor or Captain Marvel snapped Thanos and his forces away be have ant-man shrink the gauntlet so it can't be used by Thanos see have Captain Marvel fly the gauntlet as far away from the battle as possible at light speed I mean she destroys the an OSHA ship when she arrives so they can't follow her or die' because she's so powerful just have Captain Marvel fly right through Santos's chest if it absolutely had to be the way the film says it does though then the characters could easily have gone to another timeline and gotten the Tony from a few hours earlier once Thanos and his forces were gone sure I guess that timeline would be changed but they don't seem to care about the damage they do to these other timelines so why not and he'll if for some reason they didn't want to use the time machine again dr. strange could have just used the time stone to bring Tony back I mean from previous films we know that you can use the time stone to reverse time on specific things even dead characters so why was this the only way this could have played out again I tell you what happens won't happen why there was no other way how many we win what yeah I just have nothing and then I got this using that same logic why can't they bring back Black Widow with the time machine it can't be undone or that's at least what the red floating guy had to say maybe you want to go talk to him okay oh so according to this movie being the sacrifice for the soul stone is the most permanent way a person could die in the MCU why did anyone else really take this scene seriously when they realized that gomorrah was also sacrificed for the soul stone and they brought her back from the past just fine stop saying that things won't work when we know they will people have always complained that these movies had no consequences but there's an actual in universe way to reverse death now it might seem like caps ending was fine because you know he doesn't die but just like everything else in the film it's ruined early on while experimenting with time travel our heroes also seemed to have stumbled upon a way to reverse aging so again while everyone was crying into their popcorn that was plainly obvious that if our heroes really wanted to they could make cap young again or just go get another younger version you can argue all day long about how he got on that park bench but in reality the resulting scene has no emotional impact either way when you think about the multiple ways he could return it seems like the goal here was to phase out these three characters and provide as much fanservice as humanly possible but when you take into account everything I've mentioned so far between the plot the time-travel and the big character moments being so empty we're kind of just left with fanservice and don't get me wrong there are definitely some neat and funny moments in here but I ask you at what cost are these moments really enough to float a three-hour movie and pay off ten years of films I'll give you the short answer when you let all this sink in you start to see endgame for the shallow experience it really is aside from a moment here are they're taken out of context the most important elements are completely broken these scenes of sacrifice and passing the torch don't work because we've already established that things like old age and even death don't matter anymore these tear-jerking moments would have been fine you know if they weren't completely contradicted and cheapened by everything else we've been shown that's just bad writing the problem is even worse though because this movie is gonna leave a stain multiple stains in fact and they'll never wash out so when all the dusted characters returned the MCU is now 5 years older but to all those people it's only been a few seconds this applies to the entire Marvel Universe what this means is that essentially every film or TV show going forward is gonna be faced with two choices you make light of this event and always have a giant elephant in the room or Center the entire plot around the consequences of the time-skip while a movie like spider-man far from home got away with playing the time-skip mostly for comedy it ended up feeling weird that literally nobody in Peter Parker's life seemed to be affected by this cataclysmic event on the flip side are we gonna have to watch to chala fight another king for the throne and black panther 2 is Doctor Strange gonna have to reclaim his title as sorcerer supreme so many of these projects are gonna have to spend time explaining the ramifications of endgame and it just seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot it's a weird status quo especially if new characters like the x-men or Fantastic Four will be introduced I want to forget endgame in the dumb events that happen going forward but it seems like they'll never go away and you know damn well that they're gonna milk these character endings for a while too overall it's just pretty disappointing to think that the future of this franchise is gonna rely so heavily on horrible decisions speaking of which I'm also pretty pissed about what they did to Gamora the guardians films are probably my favorite out of the whole MCU and I've grown attached to these characters as a result you can imagine my disappointment then when I saw that they took Gamora and essentially made her a clean slate the version they got from 2014 never met the Guardians or had any of the character development we saw in previous films making utterly pointless I just kept thinking to myself why she do now poor James gone has to explain away this decision or make a large part of guardians three about trying to bring her back up to speed it also really doesn't even make sense that she survived Tony snap either he barely knew who she was or what she looked like and for all he know she was just another soldier in tannaz's army but enough is enough the more I think about this movie the worse it gets I don't know what else I can really say about end game it was a cultural event sure but it just didn't deliver in the same way that Infinity Ward did one area that that film really excelled in was getting you invested and making you scared for the characters maybe for the first time ever in the MCU from the opening scene of infinity war a massive threat was established and that's the film progressed things only got more intense the heroes worked together combining their powers and clever ways in order to get the upper hand and if they made bad decisions it was usually in line with their character or the result of emotions blinding them it was tragic because everyone seemed to be trying as hard as they could to stop Thanos but in the end they all failed in other words you really cared about what was happening in infinity war because for the limited options that the characters had they made decent choices however an end game the same characters have seemingly boundless choices between time travel and the Infinity stones yet they act like complete fools were there moments in infinity war that didn't make much sense or weren't explained sure but they were nowhere near as egregious as they are an end game although the biggest disappointment of all is that people can't seem to tell the difference this film is almost universally regarded as amazing but after analyzing it it's a pretty sloppy fanservice movie with not much to get invested in my revealed that script last night was not satisfying yeah well I was not satisfied [Music]

Channel: Cinema Sleuth

Views: 360,930

Keywords: Captain America, Comic Books, Infinity War, Thanos, Iron Man, Marvel, Avengers Endgame, MCU, Movie Review, Iron-Man, Review, Cinema Sleuth, Hulk, Black Widow, Black Panther, Thor, Loki, Guardians of The Galaxy, Rocket Racoon, Star Lord, Drax, Groot, Spider-Man, Spiderman, Ant-man, Antman, Agents of Shield, Mad Titan, Space Stone, Mind Stone, Soul Stone, Time Stone, Reality Stone, Power Stone, Wakanda, Dr Strange, Doctor Strange

Id: tPVSV3_p-gs

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019