Unclear and, honestly, slightly confusing.
Rudd seemed surprised to see birds. But even had half of all birds been snapped, five years is well long enough for short-lived finch-types to have replenished themselves. Especially with half as many lower-breeding predatory birds out there. So Ant-Man’s reaction is unwarranted by events. It’s a bit of clumsy work there by the Russos really intended to set up the ‘blow Paul Rudd backwards through glass shot to announce Thanos’ arrival.
But you’d still have Today’s Population+50% of 5yrs Ago Population which I’m guessing equals a noticeable amount of birds versus five minutes ago.
Word of God is that it was 50% of all life, period. Although the question posed only asked about animals so I suppose you could try and loophole a “but not non-sapient plants” into there if you want to hand-wave the lack of dusted trees.
But if no plants then what about Groot?
Honestly, it doesn’t bear too much examination, really.
Non-sapient plants. Though I suppose non-sentient would be more fitting since I don’t think gerbils and horned toads count as sapient. Looking forward to someone demanding an answer about Venus fly traps and sundews.
Like the time travel stuff, it’s best to just enjoy the ride.
The Tesseract was the second stone Thanos got a hold of. And that’s the Space Stone. So it’s easy to assume that his control over teleportation was much more powerful than Strange’s and Wong’s. If anyone had tried to go head to head with Thanos in a portal duel, he’d have won.
I’m guessing that, once the battle was joined, the magic dudes were pretty busy and anyone who stopped mid-fight to try to catch ship artillery in a portal would have been mauled by a space lizard or decapitated by a space axe.
OK, head to head maybe not. But at the point where he commanded the ships to rain fire down and all the sorcerors (?) put up the yellow circles over the Avengers’ army, I genuinely thought that the next thing we’d see would be a second set of circles opening over the ships and the spectacle of them shooting themselves. It seems like an obvious thing for people who portalise things to do on a battlefield, and Thanos can’t undo that with teleportation of his own.
And even if Thanos does end up engaged in a portal duel, and even if he wins it in the end, at the least it’s a big distraction from his main goal of getting the gauntlet. If he’s constantly fetching himself and his Leviathans back from Titan then sending Strange to the moon, that’s relatively harmless.
Maybe, although having the Wakanda infantry between your sorcerors and the space lizards/axes would help with this. Or a front line of sorcerors dealing with frontal assualt and a rear echelon wreaking havoc from a distance.
I suppose the point is that this is a superhero film, and not even a Dr Strange film at that, so we’re not going to see a victory due to collective action of the poor bloody infantry. A series of individual heroic actions/sacrifices is what the genre calls for and that’s fine. But there’s probably a little bit of room for a couple of moments of awesomeness from the rank and file, and portals seem like such a versatile and powerful mechanism for that.
Maybe it was already addressed in this thread, but has anyone addressed the fact that the Endgame trailer scene showing the arrival of Captain Marvel in Avengers HQ after Fury’s pager died was omitted? If I’d not seen that trailer, I’d have been confused about her just showing up to rescue Tony and then hobnobbing with the other folks without a proper intro. Or is this a new trend? you have to have seen the trailers to really get the whole movie?
I just saw it today, liked it fine, especially the non-battle emo stuff about dealing with losing half the planet. Time travel solved the problem, but not by magically pressing a reset button, and otherwise I’m just ignoring a hundred other apparent contradictions.
But if I wanted to get nitpicky, I’d go beyond the question of half your colonic bacteria suddenly dying off and ask what about all those mitochondria in the cells; did we lose half of them? They’re more like intracellular bacteria than not! 
This is true. They seem to just have assumed people watching Endgame would have watched Captain Marvel.
Granted, that’s a pretty safe assumption. They even made a point of saying that Captain Marvel was being introduced in her own movie so she could be used in Endgame. And the movie was released recently enough that it’s still playing in many of the same theaters that are showing Endgame.
I think there are probably more people who decided Ant-Man was just a side character and decided to pass on last summer’s Ant-Man and the Wasp. That movie turned out to be very important to Endgame and people who didn’t see it are going to be confused when Scott Lang starts talking about the quantum realm.
Okay, another unrelated question.
In Endgame, Bruce Banner wears glasses. Enormous Hulk-sized glasses. Now from a real-world point of view we know why this is: wearing glasses is a time-honored way to signal that a character is intelligent, so we get a nice visual cue that this isn’t the same old Hulk anymore.
But in the world of the movie, do those glasses do anything, or they just an affectation so Bruce feels more comfortable? Because if they’re functional, then that means that for large parts of the movie, including the trip back in time and the end battle, Hulk’s walking around nearsighted. They’re not just for reading; he’s wearing them at the diner, and he doesn’t take them off for selfies. It’s pretty clear they’re full-time wear.
Was Hulk always nearsighted, but just never smart enough to wear glasses with a strap to keep them on his face while he’s gladiatoring around? Or is this a side effect of the Hulk/Banner merge, like the only physical quality that the merge inherited from Banner is myopia?
Also, he’s had a couple of years. Couldn’t he go get super powered LASIK? Or is the Hulk’s healing factor so strong that when you fix his retinas they just go back to the way they were after an hour or two?
I have thought too much about Hulk’s glasses.
I would go with their just being clear lenses, no Rx, as a fashion choice. I have known people (well, a person) who did this IRL.
Stanislaus, excellent point about Dr. Strange. I guess this is why in his comic book (at least when I was a kid in the early Eighties), he didn’t interact much with others in the Marvel Universe. Unless he’s going against another sorcerer, Dormammu, etc., he’s too powerful.
I assumed they were an affectation - a prop to make him look less threatening.
Theaters have now added the most recent Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer after the end credits of Endgame. It’s after the iron clanking sounds, then some silence and black screen. Needless to say, it does not have Tom Holland’s spoiler warning. I had read about it, then yesterday after I’d seen something else I saw people leaving an Endgame showing, so I ducked in to watch the end credits to see if this theater added the trailer, and yep.
Wouldn’t it have been awesome if someone screwed up and they showed that trailer *before *the movie?
It’s been five years, man. Dude’s probably got bifocals or progressives at this point. Middle age is merciless to normal people and superheroes alike.
Hell, wait until he has to take a daily dose of fiber.
I try to time getting to the cinema to the point where I miss all the adverts and the majority of the trailers, which is generally 30 minutes after the published start time. This time, when I got there the film was already running. Probably because it’s such a long film so many want to watch, they abridged the lead time. At the the point I got there the Avengers and Carol Danvers were in Avengers HQ discussing their plan to go out and beat Thanos. Could someone tell me if I missed anything?
Stark and Nebula are playing paper football on the ship (you know, where you flick a paper triangle through the opponent’s fingers) while they float adrift and wait to die. Stark records his message to Potts from the trailer and lies back, asleep/unconscious from lack of food and diminishing oxygen. Nebula lifts him and sets him in the captain seat in the cockpit; the two obviously have established some rapport while drifting.
A bright light floods through the cockpit and Stark awakens to see Captain Marvel flying in front of the ship. She ‘lifts’ the ship and hauls it to Earth. A bedraggled and notably thinner Stark is back with the Avengers.
He sees more birds then before and wonders if they have succeeded. And states he thinks they did.
We see Mrs Barton calling Mr Barton, or at least her callerID.
The audience is not sure it worked until the “Avengers, Assemble!” Line.
That was the second scene. The first one was Hawkeye with his family having a picnic, he is showing his daughter how to shoot a bow when the snap happens and they all puff to dust while he is not looking at them.