Well, the other avengers clearly expected him to return to the portal, not to mention that every other instance where people returned to the main timeline (all…one other instance), they returned to the portal. It would seem extremely reasonable to conclude that the portal was the anchor to make sure they were returning to the timeline rather than forking off another, present-day one.
But the time travel in the movie was indeed pretty dodgy - it never seemed to me that the logic given in the movie would even make it possible to return to a timeline once you’d jumped out of it - new jump = new timeline. So returning the stones shouldn’t even be possible under the initially stated model. Now of course it could be that they developed new tech off-screen to locate and return to the timelines they had previously extracted the stones from, but that still doesn’t explain why everyone was standing around at the portal if it wasn’t part of the return process.
This is far from the only movie where the time travel movie is inconsistent, but still. Annoying.
(Also annoying was their claim that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure used a time travel model where you can change the past, when it very explicitly does not. However that can be written off by an error by the ignorant characters.)
Saw it yesterday. Absolutely loved. I’m a sucker for epic fight scenes which the Avengers have provided in all their movies. This one topped them all.
Have only skimmed the long thread, so here are a few things. Apologies if they have already been touched on.
The time travel makes no sense. That’s OK, it never does, and at least Endgame engaged in some clever hand-waving to make it as plausible as possible. For example, if Cap goes back to the past and stays with Peggy, how is he in “our” timeline at the end. The timeline should have branched off. Timelines seem to branch or not at the movie’s convenience. Again, this did not bother me, and it did deal with the “Why not kill baby Thanos” strategy, which would have bugged me later.
I would have preferred seeing Widow and Hawkeye cut the Gordian knot and figure out a way to get the soul stone without one dying. These are fictional characters and the writers could have figured out a way to make it work. I like Black Widow and I’m sorry we won’t be seeing more of her other than an origin story set in 2006.
I wasn’t bothered by the nod to A-Force. Having all the female heroes get together to help Captain Marvel was great. I could hear reactions throughout the theater. Sure, it was hokey and tropey, but all the MCU movies are hokey and tropey. It’s a feature, not a bug. I mean when Thanos orders his ship to rain fire, weren’t you counting the seconds till Captain Marvel arrived? Didn’t you figure that would happen the moment Thanos ship showed up above Avengers HQ?
Also what were the silver insect winged ships that showed up to fight with the good guys? Wakandan? And was Howard the Duck really at the final battle?
Well, sure, they expected him to return but he chose not too. He chose, instead, to use one of the Pim vials to make another jump back to some time after the events of the first Captain America but still early on (maybe sometime right after the war) so he could join up with the love of his life and basically live a full life with her. There was no need for him to use the portal to get back, though I suppose he could have if he wanted to come back at the exact moment in the exact universe he was coming from, but he’d spent decades in this other timeline so it makes sense he jumped back to the core timeline he came from the just drove over to the park on the date he knew this was all going to happen on and sit on the bench, waiting for his earlier self to make the jump before talking to his old friends.
Honestly, this was probably the best done piece of the time travel bit wrt this or most other movies, as it makes the most sense and is actually what a lot of physicists think would happen if you could actually figure out how to do time travel (which seems to be mainly thought of as impossible). My own questions would be, how does Stark’s magic bracelet know which reality it’s going to? You can set the date and time, but if he had already spun off a new timeline, why wouldn’t it take you to some point in that timeline instead of in the one you originally came from? I can suspend my disbelief enough, however, in this sort of movie as to not really worry about the small stuff though.
Ugh, no. The movies have enough complicated stuff going on as is. The time travel in this one was pretty well done, and fit in with the entire concept, but they should never, ever, ever, try it again.
And I pray Feige is savvy enough to keep the mutant universe separate from the MCU. Damn dirty mutants.
OK, on further review I guess the Cap thing at the end does make sense in the movie’s time travel model. I didn’t get that he jumped back into our world. But I still have some problems with the thing. Another issue: How is Gamora alive in this timeline? Is this a new timeline? If so, is there a timeline where the Avengers never undo the snap? But if that’s the case, that’s the timeline of Infinity War, and we’re left with a half dusted universe and a triumphant Thanos. And why wouldn’t the Avengers of that timeline do exactly what the Avengers of the main timeline did?
Well, Gamora is alive because an earlier version of her jumped ahead to the core timeline (I’m just going to call it ‘our’ timeline if that’s ok). So, that’s why she has no memories of Quill or the events in any of the Guardian movies…literally, they didn’t happen to her. This, of course, also means that her timeline has diverged from ours, because now she, her sister, Thanos and all of their armies are gone…they all jumped forward into our timeline and either died or are now stuck in what, for them, is a different timeline. So, to answer your next set of questions, absolutely…there is now a timeline that never had a snap because Thanos left it and so didn’t exist TOO gather the stones and snap half of life out of existence. So, Infinity War never happened in that one.
To really bake your noodle, what happened in the timeline Cap jumped to and changed by being there? He would have had a ripple effect in it, and I doubt he would have done nothing more than woo his future wife. It’s possible in that timeline things would be vastly different by the time of Infinity War or even the first Avenger movie in his new time line.
Cap’s not a guy who settles for “mostly okay.” I just don’t see any possible way he can sit around, knowing that there’s suffering he can prevent, and just letting it happen. He knows exactly who Bucky is going to kill when he becomes Winter Soldier, for example. You really think this is a guy who, say, knows the exact date his friend Howard Stark is going to die (at the hands of his other friend, no less) and just sit idly by and let that happen? Even if that was his intent when he went back to be with Peggy, there’s no way he can stick to that when he starts seeing the emotional fallout of letting all these bad things happen when he knows he could have prevented it.
The explanation about elderly Steve Rogers, that he lived in an alternate timeline, makes more sense than the alternative. But they sure seemed to be implying otherwise by having him show up on the park bench rather than, as Begbert noted, on the time machine platform.
I agree with your broad logic here, but I’d take it even further. As a musical philosopher once said: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
Do they, though? I was a Marvel completist when I was a kid, and I was always annoyed by the presence of non-supers on the same battlefield as heroes as powerful as the Vision, Wonder Man (remember him?), and Thor. (At the time, this included Cap, as he was just “peak human” strength–which is only sometimes what he is in the MCU.) It’s like taking a golf cart and BB gun into a massive tank battle.
Hasn’t he already said the X-Men et al will now be incorporated in the MCU? That’s as it should be, IMO, since that’s how it was in the comic book Marvel Universe.
Okay, sure: you might wonder why we haven’t seen them in the past, or especially in “Endgame”. But I’m okay with them handwaving this away and just acting like they didn’t happen to interact in previous movies. But YMMV obv.
There’s at least three alternate timelines that are created as a result of the events of this movie:
One that diverges around 1950, when Steve goes back to marry Peggy.
One that diverges in 2011, where Loki escapes with the tesseract after the Battle of New York, instead of being returned to Asgard as a prisoner.
One that diverges in 2014, when evil Nebula replaces future Nebula, and infiltrates Avengers’ HQ and brings Thanos to the future.
The Gamora we see in this movie comes from the third timeline. In that timeline, the Snap never happens at all, because Thanos vanished into a time warp and never came back.
I think they were trying to present him as non threatening. He went from the most powerful creature in the universe to an injured cripple with no magic powers in a few days.
Also as was said, it made his death much less satisfying because there was no battle leading up to it. His death solved nothing.
Is he? I thought his dad was some sort of space god, and that he has some of those powers already (though he didn’t really show much in this movie wrt powers). He could touch one of the stones with his bare hand, which I thought was something most mortals can’t do.
When Starlord’s dad died at the end of Guardians 2, someone says something about how Peter’s Celestial heritage is going to fade away until he’s just a normal human.
Ah, I didn’t remember that bit. I didn’t watch Guardians 2 in the run up to this movie…I focused on the ones I thought were core movies and Guardians 2, while I loved it, wasn’t on my list.
But there are certainly quite a few of the Avengers and others in these movies that fight above their weight class, so to speak, being basically humans (perhaps peak human, but still human). I’m unsure how Falcon can really be Cap. I know in the comics he actually does become Cap at one point, but I don’t know if he has any powers in the comic or just has the shield and is really fit.
Saw it last night. From just scanning the thread, I see that I’m in the minority. I liked it. I didn’t love it. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I’d rank it in the lower half of MCU movies. The first 2 hours could have been condensed into an hour and I don’t think it would have lost much, if anything. The battle scene was about what I expected it would be. It was impressive but nothing more than we’ve come to expect.
I don’t understand Captain Marvel’s disappearance. I get that the Earth is just one tiny planet in the whole galaxy/universe, but don’t you have to fight Thanos wherever he is? What was she doing on all the other planets?
In the comics, he just has the shield and is really fit. Oh, and I think he can talk to birds or something. But he doesn’t have super strength or invulnerability, or anything like that. He’s basically just an elite soldier with a jet pack.
As she said early in Endgame (paraphrasing): “There are a lot of planets out there that need help, and they don’t all have the Avengers.” So, presumably, dealing with the aftermath of the Snap on other worlds.
And, in the five years between Thor killing Thanos, and Thanos getting time-jumped to the “present” by Nebula, there wasn’t any “fighting Thanos.” He was a non-issue.
