Avengers: Endgame-So Long, and Goodnight My Heroes

This is it. We’re in the Endgame now.

What else can you really say besides that? Avengers: Endgame is just that. The end of a decades worth of characters, the closing chapter to a saga that started so very long ago. Endgame feels final. Complete. Supremely satisfying, especially in the third act. It’s everything a superhero fanatic could ask for. It’s also sobering in a way. Sometimes it’s hard. But in the end it leaves you feeling whole.

Endgame picks up where Infinity War leaves off. Thanos won. Everyone else lost. Our heroes try to adjust, to move on. But they can’t. The weight of their failure ways heavy on them, so when a second chance is offered to them they take it. They’re all in, now or never. One shot to make things right.

Endgame moves a lot better than its predecessor. I was hesitant when I saw the run time clocked in over three hours, but once it shifts into gear Endgame is firing on all cylinders. Once the mission is set it’s done. There’s no going back. The action is brisk throughout and the choice to split the team allows the movie to give each hero smaller moments that help expand their character instead of just bouncing from one set piece to another. It never feels like a slog, save for a few moments at the beginning, where we’re reestablishing everyone after the events of Infinity War, and at the end during the epilogue. It has a bit of a Return of the King vibe to it, but just like with Tolkein’s concluding chapter it’s necessary. It is, after all, the end.

Endgame wraps most of our main heroes stories, none more so than Captain America and Iron Man. I don’t know that there was a better way to end either of these stories. It pays off the promises set by the first Avengers. I won’t say anything else. It’s just damn good storytelling.

Cap and Stark aren’t the only two to get a time in the limelight. The conclusion to Widow’s arc is magnificent, really drawing on her relationship with Hawkeye. You get a feel of the real sense of powerlessness the two feel, as well as what they mean to each other.

I said in a previous post that I don’t think comic movies will feel as impactful going forward. I postulated that there’s only so much hype, so much anticipation that one can build and once it’s spent, it’s spent. Endgame solidified that for me. This is it. The final chapter in this, what I think we can call, the Golden Age of heroes.

The movie isn’t flawless. There are plot moments and character choices that upon reflection I didn’t agree with. I thought Thor in particular really suffered in this movie, and that it undid his arc in Ragnarok which was a shame. I won’t go into specifics here, lest the spoiler averse hunt me down and drag me through the streets, but these issues did not detract from the overall narrative, at least for me. In the end, this movie did what it needed to do. It brought about the end to one of the most important franchises in pop culture history. The wait was long, but in the end I believe it was earned. There was no better way to send off these characters. It was a mix of spectacle cheesecake and somber reflection, a blending of what made the MCU great, and ultimately what a beautiful note to end on.

 

The End of the Golden Age Of Heroes: How Endgame Will Change a Genre.

I don’t think that anyone can really argue that we aren’t in the Golden Age of Superhero movies. We can debate about when it started; conventional wisdom would say 2008 when The Dark Knight and Iron Man came out. Some would consider its start to be earlier, at the turn of millennium when the first X-men movie dropped, with Spider-Man coming right after. The start of a “Golden Age” is often hard to pin down. What’s usually easier is pinning down where they end, and I have a feeling that the end of this golden age of heroes is going to be Avengers: Endgame. After Endgame I don’t think Superhero movies will be as big as there peak. Not that they’ll stop making them, far from it. Superhero movies are insanely profitable; even bad ones rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. What I’m saying is the charm will be finally spent, and the movies that follow will never be as good as the batch we got from 2008 to now.

I preface all this by saying I love hero movies. I think Marvel has been consistently putting out high quality blockbusters for the better part of a decade now, each one with their own vibrant worlds. There are so many unique ideas in comics that have been brought to life on the big screen; it’ll inspire new writers for generations to come and that’s a net positive. In addition these movies are branching out, expanding the mold in regards to representation and now typically under served minorities have their own champions. You only have to google Black Panther and you can find waves of pictures of small children staring at the posters in awe, and that matters. So trust me, I don’t want this era to end. I just thing the bubble is going to burst sooner rather than later, and I think Endgame is going to be that bubble.

Endgame is going to be huge. Colossal. Probably one of the biggest events in movie history alongside Harry Potter and Star Wars coming back. And that kind of hype is hard to match, let a lone top. We’re seeing it with Harry Potter, with the new Fantastic Beast spinoffs giving us diminishing returns with every sequel, and while the numbered Star Wars movies make comically hilarious amounts of money the spinoffs only make mildly amusingly amounts of money, and Disney has already announced that post the release of Episode IX they’re going to scale back on the movie front and focus on smaller scale projects, like tv and video games. They seem to realize that there’s only so much juice you can squeeze out of an orange and they’d be better served to not try to milk the golden space cow.

That was a lot of food based metaphors. It’s almost lunch time and I’m hangry. Apologizes.

The larger point I’m trying to make is that Endgame is that it’s the last chapter in a decade long saga. I was a sophomore in high school when Iron Man came out. I was young and optimistic, like baby Steve Rogers in First Avenger. Now I’m jaded and disillusioned, like Steve Rogers in Infinity War. Sun rise, sunset. Endgame really does feel like the end of an era, and I don’t know that comic book movies will ever feel as big or as grand as this, nor do I feel like they’ll ever rake in the kind of cash that they used to in a post Endgame world. Nothing’s going to feel as big after this, though I’m sure Marvel’s going to keep making movies. Some are probably still going to be on par with their best work, in terms of narrative quality.

I just don’t think they’ll ever feel as big, and that’s okay. This was a once in a generational event. To repeat it, or to try to replicate it is folly. It’s not something that you can just reproduce.  Endgame is the last hurrah. The final showdown. It’s time to sit back and enjoy it. Raise a glass to Marvel folks. They’ve earned it.

Of course I could be wrong. Marvel’s basically untouchable right now, and now they’ve got the X-men and Fantastic Four back who knows that kind of spectacles they can unleash.