Endgame discussion thread: Spoilers!

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Just got back from Endgame, and some thoughts.

The Good:

1) Natasha and Tony's sacrifices were both heartfelt and great send-offs for the characters. Two best moments in the movie.

2) Strange's plan coming to fruition: Endgame really setup all the pieces coming together and why Strange needed to surrender the time stone exactly when he did. The knowing nod between him and Tony before Tony does his thing is one of the best moments in the film.

3) Thor's arc: I actually really liked Thor having a crisis during this movie despite having killed Thanos at the beginning. His conversation with Freya was touching. Hope he sticks with the guardians.

4) Decent time travel rules. Time travel is always hard, and with Tony, Bruce and the ancient one explaining it, they established a decent set of rules that makes the "why don't they just go back in time again" argument moot.

5) Tony Stark family man. Great scenes with him and his daughter.

6) Dark Clint.

7) Wanda vengeful. I wish they would make a scarlet witch movie, but it doesn't sound like that's in the works. Hopefully, they continue the character. Nice touching moment with her and Clint mourning Nat and Vision respecively at the end.

The Bad:

1) The present scenes were really good, but much of the past felt boring and silly.

2) A little too much fan service for me, especially in the past scenes. Seemed like they were trying to get every marvel actor into this movie.

3) Captain Marvel's portrayal. I feel like she just didn't work in this movie. Granted her part was small. Could really use a character makeover a la what Cap got in the Winter Soldier.

4) Professor Hulk. Uncanny valley much?

The Indifferent:

1) Cap's resolution. Knew they had to get rid of the character, but it feels odd, that he just didn't come back.

2) Thanos' motivations. Suitable but thin compared to the amazing portrayal we got in infinity war.

Overall I liked the movie and found it a satisfying conclusion to the series. I think Infinity War is a significantly better movie though.

I like how Captain Marvel had other planets to help, but apparently the entire universe being under attack didn't take priority.

[spoiler]: Natasha, Steve, Tony, and Vision are gone. Any one of these could have kept the Avengers cohesive. The Avengers' HQ is a smouldering, water-filled crater. All of their fancy gadgets are twisted and shattered. [/spoiler]

IMHO, the Avengers' story-arc is truly ended ...

... barring remakes, retcons, prequels, spinoffs, and other tools of the movie-makers' trade.

I thought it was great that a deeply flawed superhero, Iron man, truly made a difference. More than anyone else. By far.

Golden boy, Captain America, came to the realization that he never really made a difference in all his years. Which explains why his story ends the way it did.

The whole point of having spoilers in the title of the thread was so that people could freely discuss the movie in the thread.

I never much cared for Vision anyways, although Nat, Tony, Steve were the heart and soul of avengers 1.0. They'll move on and make movies with the newer characters, but it will be difficult to reproduce the magic of this first run.
Not clear who is "in charge" of the Avengers right now. Seems Marvel wants to make Carol Denvers head of the avengers, but that doesn't work with her extra-planar job. I'd love to see Wanda take over, she's grown a lot in the last few movies and isn't tied down with her own franchise.



Actually he made a pretty big difference in The Winter Soldier, I do think it was fitting that it was Tony not Steve (or anyone else) who took down Thanos.

Tony has a great character arc over the entire series, and was the MVP of this movie. Steve's is great in places, but the ending just didn't feel right.

They wanted everyone to leave the theater happy for Steve. Not many ways to do this and tie this up.

Time travel is not a legitimate tool for storytelling. You can fix anything via time travel.
Other options to make a story meaningless: waking up from a dream, jumping into a dimension where things got fixed by accident etc.

The latter is how one episode if rick and morty ends - and the fact that this renders all struggle utterly meaningless becomes the point of the story.
Unless you're acknowledging that you just frustrated any emotional and intellectual investment your audience has made, you're just a poor writer and or assuming your audience is too stupid to notice.

Time travel is the Deus-Ex-Machina of science-fiction.

Warp-core breech? Send a message that only the android can understand back to the past to warn his past self.

Whale extinction? Travel back to the past in a stolen starship to kidnap a pair of mated whales to repopulate the ocean.

Stalin conquers the world? Travel back to 1888 and impregnate Klara Pölzl with semen from a narcissistic sociopath.


Why go to a lot of time, effort, and expense to solve a problem when you can just step into yesterday and prevent the problem from happening in the first place?

There is a plot hole that you could pilot the Death Star through.

The Ancient One told Dr. Hulk that the removal of any one stone would disrupt the timeline and cause more damage than Thanos' snap.

It had earlier been revealed that Thanos had destroyed the stones and almost died in the process.

Why hadn't the destruction of the stones caused the universe to self-destruct, as well? I mean, five years had passed between the destruction of the stones and the Avengers' attempt to retrieve them from the past, right? Ample time for some kind of ominous threat to life, the universe, and everything to present itself, right?

Right?

But just one stone wasn't removed. They were all removed simultaneously.

If you remove just one, there may be a delicate balance that is disrupted. Removing all of them may not require a balance to be maintained.

There's a plothole but not the one you say. Removal of the time stone makes it so they can't combat threats like Dormammu who would otherwise destroy reality.

The real plothole is that returning the time stone merely creates a 3rd reality since the film establishes changing the timeline doesn't affect your timeline but merely creates a divergent one.

There is still a reality where the time stone is missing and they are doomed.