Sorry if these topics have been discussed in the various ENDGAME threads. I didn’t see these covered. I’ll admit to being lazy but I could also be blind or stupid.
Endgame just came out on disk so I’ve watched it a few times over the last week and a few thoughts come to mind. I would welcome your input on these issues.
During the big reveal of the “Cap, on your left.” scene where all the portals open up and end everyone shows up to make Thanos’ day a whole lot more complicated, why no S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier? I’ve not really watched most of the ancillary show like AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. but I know from the previous films that S.H.I.E.L.D. more or less collapsed after being completely infiltrated by Hyrda. There was still enough of S.H.I.E.L.D. around for Fury to marshal the forces and save the day in Avengers: Ulton. There may be some perfectly logical, in-universe reason why the heli-carrier couldn’t be there that I just don’t now about. If so, please tell me where to find it. You could also argue that it would be fairly pointless on that battlefield. Thanos’ ship probably could have fired a single volley and blasted it into oblivion. That being said, clearly that scene was pure dramatic fan-service and if the heli-carrier had shown up with Fury looking down all pensively, would we really have cared about logic? I wouldn’t but then I’m all in favor of ludicrous overkill.
Next, at the end where the elderly Steve Rogers talks with Sam, a friend of mine commented on how good Chris Evans’ digital aging was accomplished. We’ve had very good, practical makeup effects for aging actors for many years and digital de-aging is getting both fairly good and fairly common. Does it make any sense though to digitally age an actor? I was getting ready to argue this point with my friend when I though that he might be right. I simply agreed that digital or practical, the effect was done well. Was this effect done digitally?
And finally, also during the scene with Steve and Sam, was any explanation offered for the different look on Cap’s shield. Is there and in-universe or behind the scene reason for this? Is this just an artistic choice by the Russo brothers where my question is correctly answered by “shut up!”?
Cap’s shield was destroyed by Thanos. They never explained where he got a new one (maybe it will be in Falcon’s show), but I assumed he had a new one made in Wakanda.
Were any of the portals big enough to fit the Helicarrier through?
As for the aging makeup, real physical makeup can only add, not subtract. But people’s faces tend to get thinner in some spots as they age. You can maybe produce the illusion of that with pigments and so on (such as by creating fake “shadows”, for instance), but you can’t actually take away flesh. Computerized “makeup” can.
So you’re saying that while Steve was traveling through the past and returning the stones, somehow he got a new, never before seen shield from someone at some time with possible answers to these mysteries at some potential future date? The alternative is that Steve grabbed his old shield from the past, temporal integrity be damned, repainted it and gave it to Sam.
Yeah, I’m gonna stick with “shut up!” pending evidence to the contrary.
No, not while returning the stones. During the entire lifetime he spent after that though? I can easily see that. And the force facing Thanos was put together in under five minutes, even with wizards teleporting everyone around you can’t get a helicarrier ready that fast. It would have just gone down easily and crushed the good guys anyways.
The helicarrier itself probably doesn’t make sense, but it might be cool to have it visible through one of the portals, sending air support through or something like that.
It also makes me think that it would be fun for them to do a short film of everybody getting unsnapped and then brought into the battle. Fury could pop back into existence saying “UCKER!” and we could have the scene Peter describes to Tony about Dr. Strange.
The film explicitly tells us that going back in time to change the past won’t affect the present, so temporal integrity isn’t an issue - the point of returning the stones was to prevent a bunch of dystopian alternate realities from getting created, not to prevent their current timeline from getting damaged. So, Cap can go back in time, spend a lifetime with Peggy while still doing super hero stuff in the '50s and '60s, avoid getting his shield wrecked by Thanos, and then when he retires, take it back to the “regular” MCU universe and give it to Sam.
On looking at those pictures, it doesn’t look like a different shield to me. It looks like a shield with a textured surface, that sometimes shows up in some lighting but not in others.
That’s odd, they looked obviously different to me. The old shield was always smooth across the entire surface, while the new one has a seam in the middle of the white ring.
Ugh. Sorry, I tried to find a pic from the movie that didn’t have the entire text of Anna Karenina as the URL, but couldn’t find one. I swapped it for a pic of the unpainted shield prop, instead of a still from the movie.
SHIELD’s had its up and downs in the show. That “collapse” has been to varying degrees, and at the most recent, they are sort of back in business, though not to the level they once were. Spoilers for Agents of SHIELD season 2-6…
The last time they had a helicarrier on the show was in the lead-up to Age of Ultron, (season 2) and basically they just repaired it and passed it on to Fury and his team to use in that film. As far as I know, that helicarrier hasn’t been seen since. At the time of Infinity War, (season 5), SHIELD was busy with their own issues, trying to stop the world from cracking apart, and left Thanos to the Avengers. After that, it’s unclear how the show matches up with Endgame. The show jumped a year ahead in Season 6, but never referenced the Snap/Blip, and hasn’t caught up to Endgame’s 5 year jump yet. There was some time-travel/alternate universe shenanigans in the show thought, which might mean they are in an alt-U where Thanos didn’t win in IW. We probably won’t know for sure until the upcoming final Season 7, if then.
