Finally saw and loved this. I was spoiled on both deaths, but I don’t much care about spoilers in general and am not overly invested in the MCU, so it was all good.
I do love big giant CGI battles, and this didn’t disappoint. I practically had a tear in my eye when Cap wielded the hammer. So great. I also loved that the low-power agile guys (Hawkeye, Black Panther, Spiderman) had an actual job to do in playing keep-away with the gauntlet. That was clever. And Scarlett Witch owning Thanos was awesome.
While watching, the thing that confused me the most was the Clint and Nat suicide decision. Why would Nat be the one who Clint loves? His family is actually alive during that scene, albeit very far away on earth. Surely the sacrifice isn’t limited to only people physically present; what happens if you show up alone, or with someone you don’t know that well? My assumption during that whole scene was that someone in Clint’s family on earth would drop dead as his sacrifice.
The second moment that took me out of it was the girl power “she has help” scene, but not because it was all women. I didn’t even realize it was all women in that scene until I read this thread. What bugged me about it was that she was infinitely more powerful than anyone who showed up to help her. Not only did she not need their help at all, they then proceeded to not help her. I mean, they cleared away some mooks and a couple big flying things, but Marvel then just blasted through the other 90% of the battlefield between them and the van all by herself. It could be argued that Thanos was teeing up to smack her and the support crew knocked him over, but based on the fact that his headbutt didn’t even make her hair move, I’m pretty sure she would have plowed right over him. Either way, no bad guy, including Thanos, slowed her down even the tiniest bit on her way to the van. Thanos blew up the van just before she got there by chucking his weapon at it.
The time travel logic (or lack thereof) didn’t bother me, probably because they lampshaded it so well when discussing it: “You mean movie time travel is bullshit?” Yes, that is exactly correct, thanks for pointing it out!
Four possible answers (in order from least fan-wanky to most fan-wanky):
To possess the soul stone, one must sacrifice something he (or she) loves, not necessarily loves MOST. He has love for Nat, albeit not as much as for his wife and children.
In HIS present, his family was dead. Yes, they’re alive in 2014 where he traveled to, but that’s who the 2014 Hawkeye loves most, not post-snap Hawkeye.
Nat was always his first love, but for various reasons (her infertility, the dangerous/deceitful nature of her life of a spy) he couldn’t/wouldn’t marry her (or she him), so in his wife, he settled for someone he loves less, albeit still loves.
When Nat attempted to sacrifice her life for him, that caused him, in that moment, to love her more than anything else.
Just rewatched it, and once again the 3 hours flew by. A couple more quick thoughts:
One correction on my complaint about Marvel’s “help” being the equivalent of attack dogs escorting the hulk (ie: pointless): Scarlett Witch is a legit player. The rest, not so much.
I love that Stark’s last four words were “I am Iron Man.”
I think I get what the writers were going for with the split timelines. In our (the movies’) timeline, the snap happened and then is undone five years later. In the newly created timeline, Thanos and his forces disappear without a trace before the snap happened. So they created a second universe, but the snap is avoided or corrected in both so it’s worth it. But now they have a second timeline where all our characters – including Black Widow and Iron Man – are alive and well and potentially reachable with Pym particles. None of our heroes in that timeline ever had to fight Thanos. So that’s a nice way to leave the door open. (The Loki and Captain America timelines are undefined as of yet.)
I realize I’m way late to watch these movies, but I’m not a huge fan of them in general so the mood has to be right. None of this plot line made any sense to me. Who was the crappy superhero with the yellow stone in his head? Is he the worst superhero ever? Why did Hulk refuse to do his fucking job? And was that Supergirl at the end?
Anyway, it didn’t all suck. I just found it didn’t keep my attention well enough to follow the plot lines. Thanos was kind of a cool villain but the bejeweled glove was a bit much. It looked like a prop inspired by Pier 1.
Going to watch this later this week. Just for the CGI, smartass lines by RD Jr., and a sense of closure, if nothing else.
You really had to be following all of the Marvel movies to be able to keep track of all of the various characters, because there are a ton of them in this movie (and in all of the other movies with “Avengers” in the name).
But the guy with the stone in his head is Vision, who’s actually one of the major powerhouses on the team, and is currently co-starring in the TV show “WandaVision”. And I think that the character you’re mistaking for Supergirl is probably Captain Marvel, another one of the more powerful ones.
No more weird than suggesting there is a “Best Watched By” date on films.
I think I’ve watched most of them now except perhaps the one where Ironman and Captain America have a falling out. Anyway, they seem to have patched things up so I’m not going to worry about it.
I thought it answered the one question that was bothering me from the previous movie about why Hulk refused to do his job. I really didn’t pay any attention to any of the other plot lines closely enough to care whether they were resolved sensibly; Kinda just gave up on trying to follow and enjoyed the silly banter and CGI… No idea why Capt. America was able to lift Thor’s hammer or why that made sense to Thor. He didn’t seem to mind though. Still no idea who the Lady In Red was. Or why Gweneth Paltrow was flying around in a suit. In the end(game), mostly it seemed like a movie meant to cram in as many super heroes as possible. The final battle was redonkulus but then, of course, that was “Inevitable”.
Thor’s Hammer has a kind of Excalibur thing going for it, except instead of “Holding this proves you’re the King of Britain,” it’s more, “Holding this proves you are the most righteous of bad-asses.” There’d been a scene in an earlier movie where all the Avengers get drunk and try to lift Thor’s hammer - nobody can, but Steve makes it move, just a little bit. That’s where Thor’s “I knew it!” came from - he’d suspected Cap was a sufficiently righteous bad-ass to wield the hammer.
Scarlet Witch. She was a big part of Age of Ultron and had a fairly important role in Civil War, which established that she was in a relationship with the guy with the yellow gem in his forehead.
Marvel had been getting a lot of criticism that they’d done a bajillion hero movies, and like 95% of them starred different blonde men named Chris. Endgame tried to make up for this by cramming basically every female character they had onto the battlefield, even when it made zero sense for them to be there, like Pepper or Mantis. (You probably don’t remember who Mantis is. This is entirely expected.)
It occurs to me that this would be fulfilling to Thor in a unique way. As long as he’s the only one who can wield the hammer, it could just be a hammer only Thor can wield. Seeing everyone else fail to wield it except for this one other guy who Thor deeply respects means that Thor himself is a person worthy of deep respect. We already saw this when Thor is excited to have the hammer come to him in the previous timeline but I can see Thor being happy to be compared to Captain America in this way after everything else he’s been through.
(I’m sure this is in no way a new or unique perspective, just that it didn’t occur to me personally until now)