directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Eleven years and twenty-one films after a fledgling studio took out a half a billion dollar loan and a chance on some of its lesser known characters, audiences all around the world will be treated to the astonishing, utterly satisfying conclusion of what has quite arguably been the most sprawling, extraordinary ongoing cinematic saga of all time. Yes, that sounds like a lot of hyperbole to start off a film review, and were it any other movie but Avengers: Endgame I would almost certainly balk at such language, but this movie just hit all the right buttons for me, every single one.
After the events of Avengers: Infinity War, specifically the snap of the fingers by the Infinity-Stone wielding madman Thanos (Josh Brolin) which has decimated exactly half the population of the universe, the Earth has been left reeling. Although a handful of the original Avengers, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor/uhm...Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) joined by James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) almost immediately try to put things right, it's not all that simple, and for a while, people have to simply come to terms with what has happened.
Then, five years later, something happens, and for the first time in a long time, the Avengers may just have the chance to save the world. All the Avengers have to do now is bring back Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and go someplace they've never gone before.
It's hard to go into detail about why this film rings true to me without flirting with spoilers of one kind or another. This movie is just packed to the gills with treats and surprises for fans that need to be experienced cold, without any expectations. Before I attempt to navigate the challenging territory of the completely spoiler-free review, I can put down to exactly one word the reason why this movie works as well as it does for nearly the entirety of its mammoth three-hour runtime: love. Love is the bedrock on which this film is built, love for this universe and the characters that inhabit it, love for the stories (for better or worse) that have led to this point, and love for the audiences all over the world that have made the Marvel Cinematic Universe the single most lucrative film franchise in history. This movie is not, as one arrogant, anonymous Oscar voter crassly described Infinity War when asked about its chances for winning the Best Visual Effects Oscar earlier this year, a "cash grab," but a loving ode to over a decade of meticulously interwoven narrative and the people who have diligently followed it.
Underlying it all is a solid story full of real affection for these characters, specifically Captain America, Black Widow and of course Iron Man. It was gratifying to see Cap and Widow get much more screen time here than they did in Infinity War, and to see the follow-up on Thor's story that the last film kicked off quite well. This movie belongs very much to the six OG Avengers. Strikingly enough, the big action set pieces work because there's an astonishing amount of character work going on here; the story involves revisiting various points of the MCU's decade-long history, and it's not spoiling anything to say that one MCU actor in particular gets more meaningful dialogue than she's ever had in any prior MCU movie. In short, it's the quieter moments, the moments of conversation between the lead characters and people they care deeply about, that give the final, slambang action sequence real weight and consequence. Of course, none of it would work if the actors playing the scenes didn't bring their "A" game but they did.
It helps, of course, that everyone else who worked on this film, from composer Alan Silvestri, cinematographer Trent Opaloch, editors Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt, as well as the rest of the cast and crew, especially the army of visual effects artists from no less than four different outfits brought their absolute best to this momentous closing chapter as well.
So forceful is the narrative that the Russos, their writers, their cast and their crew have crafted that even when the inevitable questions about the implications of time travel arise (which the writers try to preemptively dismiss by explaining "time travel doesn't work that way") it's the easiest thing to dismiss them, as it was with classics like the first two Terminator movies or the Back to the Future trilogy (both of which, incidentally, are explicitly mentioned). This movie is just too good a ride to allow us to get bogged down in the details.
Given the scale of the story to be told, it was inevitable that a number of characters would get short shrift, and so as to avoid spoilers, suffice it to say that there was one such character in particular whose reduced participation would have disappointed me had the movie not been the masterpiece that it is.
After being disappointed somewhat by Captain Marvel I was really overjoyed to have my socks blown off by Endgame. I think it's fair to say that, my love for this film notwithstanding, it is NOT for the uninitiated; there are FAR too many references and callbacks to films in the MCU's 21-film catalog for this film to make anything vaguely resembling sense to anyone who has not seen at least the three Avengers movies. For those of us who walked in fully invested, the payoff was everything we could ever have hoped for...and then some.
11/10
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