My Review of Avengers: Endgame and Funny GoT Battle of Winterfell Parallels
[Massive, MASSIVE SPOILERS For Avengers: Endgame below! Be Warned!!]
So I finally got to see Avengers: Endgame and it's immediately apparent why, in addition to the hype brought about by 11 years worth of buildup, the movie has surpassed all box office predictions and numbers, which is saying something as those were already quite high.
(check out @readingdanvers post on the topic HERE)
The writing was superb and it was a more than adequate end ot the long going Thanos arc. However, I do have a lot of big questions concerning the implications of the events of Endgame to the timeline of the MCU, but seeing as this article is quite long enough, will address those in another post, along with the GoT parallels.
First, the Movie.
As promised, Endgame was really a movie about the Original Avengers, which was a great way to close their chapter. Yes, every other character had a role to play--some big, some small, some negligible--but the main plot was driven by the first Avengers, along with Nebula and Rocket. They were the ones who really experienced the brokeness such a disastrous failure brings. We got to see every other direct supporting character from the MCU movies, and I mean every. From Ned, who only made a cameo at the end, to Pepper, who finally took on the mantle of Rescue, to Okoye, one of the Wakandan survivors who had kept on working with the Avengers. And for the first time ever, we even get a nod to a TV series in the person of James D'Arcy, who played the original Jarvis on ABC's Agent Carter and returned to reprise the role. The only characters whose absence I noticed were Sharon Carter (whose non-apearance poses a big question to me) and Agent Ross.
The plot was great.The way the writers brought in conflict and solutions were nothing short of amazing. I guess we all owe a certain rat our sincere thanks though--without it, Scott would never have returned to give our heroes hope. But Scott wasn't enough. We needed Steve's undying optimism, natasha's relentless determination, Professor Hulk's 'big brain', and Tony's effortless genius to piece it all together. Oh, and let's not forget Rocket's wit--telling Thor there was beer on the ship was a great way to bring our broken king back on board. The answer to what happened to the rest of the Asgardians was also given: they settled on Earth, ruled by Thor in name but Valkyrie in essence. Once the time travel shenanigans were figured out, the plan to get the stones was hatched. It seemed simple enough, but of course, things went sideways fast. Some of these were easily solvable--go back further in time and get the Tesseract, for instance--others, not so much, especially Thanos' discovery of the plan through Nebula, whose cybernetwork begins interferring with that of her past self, giving the Thanos of 2014 access to all her memories and allowing his Nebula to impersonate the one from the future and return in her place. And Natasha sacrifices herself on Vormir so Clint can get the soul stone, ending the Black Widow forever.
All-in-all, their plan succeeds. They get all the stones and the Hulk wears the gauntlet and snaps his fingers, the only one who can do so without suffering instant death. Howevr, before they can ascertain if it worked or not, Past Nebula hatches her betrayal and brings her Thanos into their present. He immediately destroys the Avengers' compound and sends in his troops after the gauntlet. Battle ensues, with some truly spectacular moments such as Steve picking up and using Thor's hammer (which had been brought back from the past), and the arrival of Wakandans, Asgardians, Ravagers and sorcerers, assembled by Dr. Strange, who also arrives with the rest of the dusted Avengers, proving the Hulk's snap did work.
With the battle raging, getting the gauntlet and the stones away from Thanos proves extremely difficult, forcing Tony--with whose tech the new gauntlet was made--to do the only thing he could, creating another, seizing the stones, snapping his fingers, and turning Thanos and all his troops to dust... an act which results in his own death.
One of my favorite aspects of the end of the movie is the abundance of gangsters. There is Cassie, Scott's daughter who is now a teenager; Lila, Cooper and the toodler Nathaniel, Clint's children; Morgan, who Tony and Pepper bore after the snap, and even Harley Keener, Tony's kid helper from Iron Man 3 who returned for his funeral. With Peter and Suri also in the mix, this is such a ripe ground to grow more stories, especially now that Tony and Natasha are dead, and Steve is an old man, having gone back to the past and living a full life with Peggy.
Which leads me to my big timeline questions... which I'll expound on in my next post.
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