I am glad I saw it last night. On Yahoo’s front page, there are two news stories:
and
I mean, come on. Any hinting is spoiler suggesting at least. The Hulk one is a full spoiler.
OK. I loved this movie. I loved, loved, loved this movie. It was like they basically made a movie specifically for me. There’s just one thing bugging me, but it’s bugging me a lot and it’s making me enjoy the movie in retrospect less than I want to. Posting it here in the hopes that someone can offer an explanation that makes me feel better about it 
Let’s talk about Captain America’s ending. Midway through the movie, when Banner is talking to the Ancient One, she outlines the rules of time travel in this fiction pretty neatly. You make a change to the past - like taking an infinity stone out of the timeline - and it causes a split in the timeline, with unpredictable results. This is why it was important to return each of the stones to its point of origin when the heist was done. OK, fine. Straightforward, simple, unfussy, and mostly the movie adhered to this.
So let’s designate the MCU timeline we’ve all been watching for fifteen years and call it Timeline Prime. The Avengers return to various points in Timeline Prime and do things that might result in a split to the timeline: take out infinity stones, have interactions with key characters, even drag Thanos five some odd years into the future. But by returning the infinity stones to their points of origins, presumably we are to understand that the Avengers obviated these splits. Thus Timeline Prime remains intact, if a bit twisty, and there are no splits.
But.
At the end of the movie, Cap decides to travel back to 1970 (or whatever year), where I guess he reunites with and marries Peggy Carter and gets his Happily Ever After. Now, according to the rules as I understood them to this point, this should have split the timeline. And if Cap had simply disappeared and never reappeared, Sam Beckett-style, it all would have made sense. Presumably he had his adventures with Peggy or whatever, but that’s a different timeline and this is not that story. I would have loved that ending, and you could still have him leave a note and the shield for Sam and gotten the same torch pass with a nice voice over.
But that’s not what happened! Instead, Cap appears right here in Timeline Prime as an old man, presumably having lived through all of the events of Timeline Prime as a second Steve Rogers. In order for this to be possible, this would have to mean that Transported Cap took no action that would cause the timeline to split. So he arrived in 1970 (or whenever) knowing that of his three best friends in the world, one will die alone on a planet light years from her home, one will die a young man leaving a wife and daughter behind and bereft, and one is being slowly brainwashed in a foreign land. You’re expecting me to believe that the Steve Rogers we have come to know over all of these movies wouldn’t have been on the first plane to Russia to try to rescue Bucky? That he’d just have done nothing about all the Hydra agents hanging around his wife’s workplace? That he’d not have intervened in a thousand ways, any one of which would have ensured that he’d never again be a part of Timeline Prime? That idea is such a betrayal of the character of Captain America as it’s been shown that I can’t accept it - and yet I can’t find any other explanation for him showing up in Timeline Prime at the end (with Nat and Tony still dead).
Somebody talk me down.
Maybe he is smart enough to realize he wouldn’t be helping them, just splitting the timeline and his friends would still go through all that. It would be a selfish act just to make himself feel better.
It was the most “comic-book-y” of any movie I’ve ever seen. The MCU has always been good at this, but this took it to another level. Not just the visuals of battles between huge groups of heroes and villains, but the truly wacky story that wasn’t outright comedy (like Thor: Ragnarok and GotG) but was still way wackier than any other MCU movie. I loved it!
Selfish? Wouldn’t the most altruistic thing be to split off a new timeline whenever possible, doing your best to set the inhabitants on a path to thrive?
Too much timey-wimey stuff. I choose to see it as Cap made all these decisions in various timelines, and we just happened to see the one in which he kept everything secret and lived a quiet life with Peggy.
Isn’t an inverted Moebius strip the same as a Moebius strip? Anyway, everybody knows that this is not how time travel works. It is more of a Klein bottle thing! Apart from that (and too much Hawkey, not enough Captain Marvel), it was very enjoyable.
That’s what I usually do… but this time I didn’t, because, come on, MARVEL. Ah well.
I think there’s a middle ground. As it is, this absolutely key, pivotal moment, is still left unclear to us. Did he just manually unfasten them all, one by one? Did he program a backdoor into the glove that Hulk used, just because he’s paranoid and clever? Did he very quickly nano-reprogram his own suit for stone-stealing? Seems like that would have been a perfect time for Strange to have given him some foreknowledge, allowing him to perfectly set up all the tech for that precise moment… which would have been the culmination of the 1-in-14-million. As it is, it just felt a bit… weird. For all of his great moments and amazing skills, none that I can recall involved having super-quick pickpocketing fingers.
(Not that I think it ruined the movie, or the moment… but I do think it felt a bit out of left field.)
As for the women-team-up scene, after a few hours of pondering, I’ve realized how I would do it, which would also solve another minor problem, which is that Thanos’s chief minions, who were quite serious mini-bosses in their own right last movie, barely registered.
So one of the (male) minions is fighting one of the female good guys. They trade blows, then he gets the upper hand, and makes a derisive sexist comment, calling her a little girl, or something. Then we do a series of camera cuts all around the battlefield as triumphant music plays, showing all the female heroes kicking ass, ending back at the initial fight, and she responds with a one liner like “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman” (but more funny) and dodges his death blow and chops his ass in half.
Same general celebratory effect, makes way more sense.
I can’t accept this, though, because Steve could not have made various decisions in various timelines - there’s only one of him, it’s just that his own personal timeline has some weird loops in it. If he went back in time and lived a quiet life with Peggy, that’s what he did, but he doesn’t get to make a bunch of different decisions.
I also don’t accept this. So, OK, Steve goes back in time and does a bunch of stuff such that Thanos never gets hold of the Infinity Stones at all. Timeline Prime remains unchanged; Steve Rogers isn’t in it after 2024, and Nat and Tony are dead and so on. But now there’s also Timeline Beta, in which Nat and Tony are alive and Bucky got some semblance of a normal life and whatever else.
Above all, it just doesn’t seem in character for Steve to not try to help. I mean, on the most basic level, his now-wife works for S.H.I.E.L.D. Is he just going to… not tell her that HYDRA is/has infiltrated her workplace? If he tells her, boom, timeline changed, because a Peggy who knows that stuff makes very different, probably pretty significant choices than the Peggy in Timeline Prime. So Steve Rogers doesn’t appear at the end of the story in Timeline Prime. But a Steve Rogers who doesn’t tell the woman he loves something that important is essentially unrecognizable to me.
The thing is, there’s no timeline in which Steve gets sent back in time and doesn’t turn up on the bench. Because in every timeline in which he chooses to intervene, the events leading to him being sent back simply don’t happen. Since we are in a timeline in which they did, we know he can’t have intervened.
I loved it. I have not seen all of the movies, but this was a great story arc for the Avengers movies.
The only thing I guessed was just after the tease with Tony leaving a message for Avengers/Pepper in the broken helmet. I said, “Ah, shit. He’s dead.” I was only worried that he’d die before the big battle for some stupid reason. But it was a bitter-sweet end. And I like how Doc Strange KNEW this, but couldn’t reveal it and didn’t need to.
Only one small downside for me was I was hoping that-- Okay, so you’ve got this time theft thingy. Some get the stones, some don’t. And a few more disintegrated heroes emerge from the zone. Maybe Spidey, War Machine, and Panther. I thought maybe some would return depending on which stone they got. So we would get more screen time with the missing. Then LATER, the rest appear from the portals for the battle.
But I realized that IF they did that, it’d be way too confusing time wise. And it actually was great the way they did it. Apparently, the one plan that worked was getting everyone to that moment when the battle would start. It tricked Thanos & Company, it tricked the Avengers that were setting it up (they had to go through all their loss in order to get everyone there), and it tricked the audience.
It was a very good comic-book style story. And the endings that have some kind of loss seem much more real than, “Hey, we all did it! Let’s all return to the Justice League” type endings. It was also a big “thank you” to Robert Downey Jr. His Iron Man/Tony Stark performance is unforgettable.
Can’t wait to watch again!
Practically speaking, we’re not going to see the same character again, becuase Chris Evans (and Robert Downey Jr and Chris Hemsworth) are done with these movies. The studio will start over with newer, cheaper, actors and characters as Captain America and Iron Man. (Much as the comic books do, although I’m not a comics reader.)
I was wondering about that.
As for my opinion, I liked it. Very funny and fun. I went to a showing at 11:15am today (Saturday, April 27) and at about 10:30am, of the twenty screens in the multiplex, nine were showing this movie.
I assume he did help and do all those things, but it only affected his timeline and not the prime timeline. Presumably he tried to help them as well but was unable to due to his not being a time travel master. As for how he appeared in the prime timeline as an old man, presumably he had just one dose of the Pym particles left and used it after Peggy died from natural causes / old age.
I just want Thor to join the Guardians of the Galaxy in the next movie.
Well, that scene at the end clearly set the stage for it, so maybe they’ll get one last film out of Hemsworth as the Dude of Thunder. 
I just got back from a second showing. This time I was much more alert and I was actually able to follow the plot – mostly. I enjoyed all the preamble movies, but I never really put too much study toward what all those stones meant and did and were called and all that shit, so this second, alert, viewing really helped me put some puzzle pieces together. Also on first showing, I had totally missed the Early Bad Nebula disguised as Later Good Nebula thing, so that cleared up some plot points as well.
My only disappointment was that this crowd was so subdued. The humor got the laughs but the hero moments got barely anything. It was kind of weird. I mean I knew it was coming but when Cap is revealed with Mjolnir I actually got a little emotional but no one seemed to want to woo-hoo with me. I guess Saturday matinees are not the time for raucous viewings.
I’ll bet Chris Hemsworth was happy that he didn’t have to do the whole six months in a gym for five hours a day routine to get into prime shape to play a shirtless musclebound superhero.
My impression was that Cap didn’t use the Pym particles and just aged naturally, but I could be wrong. Maybe the Super-soldier serum gave him a slower aging process. He just knew where and when to show up. When did Peggy Carter pass away in the original timeline? I vaguely remember a scene where she’s old and in bed and talking to the unaged Cap.
I realized, as I was driving home after seeing the film, that the secret SHIELD underground bunker at Camp Lehigh, which Steve and Tony infiltrate in 1970, is the same bunker from Winter Soldier, where Steve and Nat encounter the disembodied intelligence of Arnim Zola.
Do you remember the scene at her funeral, in CIVIL WAR?