FIVE REGRETS I HAVE ABOUT THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE THANKS TO AVENGERS: ENDGAME (I’D SAY SPOILER WARNING, BUT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN AVENGERS: ENDGAME AT THIS POINT IT’S NO LONGER MY PROBLEM)

Given that pretty much anyone who would really care to watch Avengers: Endgame has already done so at this point, there’s been a lot of weighing in. Some loved it, some didn’t, and almost everyone is in agreement that whatever else this movie may be, it provides a definitive ENDING to the grand story arc that Marvel Studios has been building up over the last eleven years, since Jon Favreau’s Iron Man first hit theaters way back in 2008. I’ve already spent two blog posts and innumerable social media posts and comments gushing over this movie, so there’s no doubt as to where I stand, but as strange as this may sound, having seen the film three times now, there are a few things about it that make me feel a little differently about a number of films in the 21-film category that led up to the momentous conclusion in Endgame. Some people have argued, and I’d say correctly, that Endgame has retroactively improved a couple of not-so-well-liked Marvel Cinematic Universe movies like Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron by either revisiting them in a new light or paying off the things they teased. For my part, though, and I’ll understand if this opinion isn’t necessarily popular, the sheer craftsmanship on display in Endgame has actually exposed a number of creative missteps in the MCU that might not necessarily have been noticeable up until this point. So, in ascending order, here they are…

5. CAPTAIN MARVEL’S SEQUENCES SHOW HOW UNDERDEVELOPED SHE IS AS A CHARACTER - Even fans of the latest MCU hero Captain Marvel (and $1.1 billion at the global box office tells us there are quite a few of them) will readily concede that Carol Danvers served little purpose in Avengers: Endgame other than as a deus ex machina, both at the beginning of the film when she saves a stranded Tony Stark and Nebula from dying in space and at the end when she destroys Thanos’ ship in the big battle and trades a few blows with him. To my mind, these were genuinely cool moments, and the film packages them as such, but unfortunately, beyond being glad that Tony was saved and that Thanos’ ship, which at the time was raining gunfire on everyone, was destroyed these moments really did not resonate with me because despite having been introduced to Carol Danvers a month before Endgame, I was not really given a glimpse into what makes her tick as a character. In my review of the film Captain Marvel I said this was down more to bad writing than any flaw in Brie Larson’s acting, but the net result is really still the same. Endgame smartly avoided using Captain Marvel or anyone other than the original six Avengers (apart from Ant-man) too much in the film, because at the end of the day this was their story, but even Captain Marvel’s extremely brief appearances could have had much more weight if only her character had been better realized in her solo film.

4. TONY STARK NEVER GOT TO INTERACT WITH BLACK PANTHER ONSCREEN, LIKE, EVER – This one, for me, is a real head-scratcher for a number of reasons. T’Challa, aka the Black Panther fought at Tony’s side in Captain America: Civil War. Tony and T’Challa have quite a bit in common, being rich, highly-intelligent men in high-tech suits of armor. And yet, for all of that, in the three movies in which their characters appear together, whatever pleasantries Robert Downey, Jr. and Chadwick Boseman may have exchanged in real life, their onscreen characters have never interacted in any scene that made it to the theatrical cut of these movies. T’Challa has had plenty of interaction with other Avengers like War Machine, Black Widow, Bucky (whom he wanted to kill for most of Civil War), Hawkeye, Captain America and even Bruce Banner, but for some reason, neither writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, nor anyone else from Marvel’s brain trust, ever had Tony exchange so much as a word with T’Challa. Bruce Banner’s oh-so-brief exchange with Shuri, which was basically just a put-down, gave viewers a tantalizing glimpse of the sort of back-and-forth that Tony could have had with the Wakandans had he spoken to them onscreen at any point. In the final analysis it doesn’t make Endgame any less of a movie, but given that we’ll never see Tony Stark in a Marvel movie again, or at least, not as played by Robert Downey, Jr., this feels like a heck of a wasted opportunity. It also would have been a great way of passing the torch, considering that Black Panther is arguably going to be the MCU’s flagship character with Cap and Iron Man out of the picture.

3. STEVE REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE KISSED SHARON CARTER – When Captain America shared a brief, somewhat chaste kiss with Peggy Carter near the climax of Captain America: The First Avenger, it made perfect sense because the entire movie had basically been building up to it. When Captain America kissed Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier in order to get a HYDRA agent who was looking for them at the time to avert his eyes, the moment seemed the tiniest bit gratuitous, but it also worked within the context of the narrative and we got the MCU’s one and only Cap boner joke in the process. By the time Cap kissed Agent 13 in Captain America: Civil War, she had already outed herself as Peggy Carter’s niece and, if I’m honest, the kiss served no greater purpose in the narrative; they hadn’t really established that Steve had strong feelings for Sharon, and I say this as someone who knows they end up together in the comics. It was almost as if Marvel had put it there to make sure that all three Cap movies showed him kissing a woman (or two, which happened in the first one), if only to assert to all the Reddit users who were shipping Cap and Bucky that Cap was straight. Every time my kids see that moment while watching Civil War on DVD or Cable TV they wince, and now that we know, courtesy of Endgame, that Cap ends up with Peggy, which was really the natural trajectory of his character, the Sharon kiss is all the more cringe-inducing. It’s a pity, really because Captain America’s character arc that runs through all three of his solo movies and the Avengers films is, to my mind, probably the best-realized of all the individual Avengers’ stories, even more than Tony’s story arc which has arguably had more creative missteps along the way (e.g. Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3). As a result, this one kiss, which feels totally superfluous, is a narrative hiccup that really could and should have been avoided.

2. LOKI’S DEATH IN INFINITY WAR SUCKED – As early as last year, when it actually happened, I thought little of the decision to kill Loki off extremely early in the story of Avengers: Infinity War, but I held out hope that he’d get some kind of big moment in Endgame. It was, alas, not to be, and even though Loki appears in not just one but TWO of the past timelines that the Avengers revisit he literally only has one new line of dialogue, in which he mimics Captain America. It’s as if Tom Hiddleston basically just did a walk-on for both Infinity War and Endgame, the latter of which served no other purpose than to tease his upcoming show on Disney’s streaming service. There is something all kinds of absurd about this as Loki is one the most beloved characters in all of the MCU, and while I was not opposed to having him die, I absolutely detested how they did it. When I think of how much screen time an irritating character like Ebony Maw got in not only Infinity War but in Endgame as well it honestly annoys me that the Russos, Markus and McFeely, who did an otherwise astonishing job mapping out this sprawling narrative, couldn’t even find one stinking moment for Loki to really shine.

1. IRON MAN HAS LIVED AND DIED WITHOUT A MEMORABLE THEME (AND NO, I DO NOT CONSIDER EITHER THE BLACK SABBATH SONG OR THE AC/DC NOISE THAT TONY LIKES TO BLARE ON HIS SPEAKERS AS HIS THEME) – Avengers: Endgame is a movie about the MCU’s history, first and foremost, and one of the reasons that Captain America’s story arc is the most resonant of the entire movie is that the Russo brothers cannily plumb the character’s history by having composer Alan Silvestri (who quite frankly deserves an Oscar for his work here) revisit key pieces of music he wrote for Captain America: the First Avenger nearly a decade ago. When Cap spots Peggy in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters during his 1970 time-jump, the music swells and plays the mournful notes that played in the First Avenger the moment Cap plunged into the ice back in 1945, separating himself from Peggy forever. When Cap lifts Mjolnir and uses it to fight Thanos, his theme plays rapidly and deftly complements the glorious fight that unfolds onscreen. When old Steve hands his shield to Falcon, the Cap theme plays in all its glory and the emotional weight of the moment is captured perfectly. Now, contrast that with Iron Man, who has a lot of quiet, emotional moments in the film that would have precluded blaring some generic, annoying rock song. Silvestri does not neglect Tony Stark; he composes a theme for him that plays in the very beginning of the film, while he is stranded in space, and later again during his funeral. It’s beautiful, emotionally-charged music, but doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of the musical callbacks to Cap’s wartime sacrifice, because there is simply no history to it. All three Iron Man movies had different composers each of whose themes was more generic than the last. In the last few years, Marvel has clearly paid more attention to the importance of having good music underscoring their movies, as evidenced by the hiring of the likes of Oscar-winner Michael Giacchino to do Doctor Strange and Spider-Man: Homecoming and the re-hiring of Alan Silvestri to do Endgame and Infinity War, after the embarrassing hodgepodge of music that Brian Tyler and Danny Elfman composed for Avengers: Age of Ultron. In fact, thanks to Black Panther, Marvel now has the distinction of having the first superhero music score to actually win an Oscar, something not even the fabled John Williams’ Superman theme can claim. All that said, however, they most definitely dropped the ball in terms of giving their flagship character a distinctive musical identity.

To be perfectly clear, none of this changes how I feel about Endgame, both as a standalone film and the culmination of a decade-long narrative journey. It remains, for me, sublime, all of its flaws notwithstanding. Conversely, I do not suggest that the MCU, apart from what I've enumerated here, is otherwise perfect as a piece of narrative. There are many, many other flaws speckled throughout the 11-year, 22 film cinematic juggernaut that would be too numerous to name, but for me, these are the ones that Endgame made somewhat prominent.

As Marvel prepares for their next big push, I do hope they take stock of what they could have done better, so that when the eventual culminating event of this new generation comes along in a decade or so, we can look back on everything that’s come before and just completely enjoy the ride.