Avengers Endgame: A Not-Review of a Not-Movie

At some point in my viewing of ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ I had an epiphany and realized that it would be downright impossible to give the film a proper review. After all, I formulate my reviews around a breakdown of plot, acting, production, cinematography, atmosphere, and direction and typically consists of an analysis of the quality thereof. But ‘Endgame’ is the square peg for a circle hole. It’s not a film that can be broken down or analyzed in any quantifiable terms. It exists as a macrocosm, a tidy bow wrapping up a cultural phenomenon over ten years in the making that had no real right to exist in the first place.

I’d run down the plot, but not only would that spoil many of the film’s endearing surprises, but it’s irrelevant. People never saw these movies for the plot, they saw them because they fell in love with intrinsically likable characters and wanted to see those characters interact, fight, and banter with one another while the stakes steadily rise and priorities change on a dime. I’d discuss the acting, but most of these actors have been playing these roles for the better part of ten years and at this point saying it’s a perfect cast is like remarking that rain makes things slippery. I’d mention the production values, but Disney was more than happy to pour pretty much every dollar they had into making this film look as good as possible, safe in the knowledge that they were going to make back their investment tenfold. I’d bring up the cinematography but the Russo brothers have inherited the great George Miller’s eye for directing action scenes and have proven it time and time again in this franchise. I’d talk about the film’s atmosphere, but everyone in the world who has even an inkling of an idea of what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is knows the meteoric impact and weight it’s had on fans of the series.

So yeah, it’s good. Really good. Stupid good, even. And it was always going to be really, really good. After the devastating cliffhanger ending to last year’s ‘Avengers: Infinity War,’ the only way ‘Endgame’ could have dropped the ball would be if Karen Gillan wiped off her makeup halfway through the movie, looked dead to camera, and started reading the redacted Muller Report with a racist accent. And even then, it would at least be fascinating in how horrible it would be.

This was a movie destined to make its entire budget back opening weekend and have probably one of the must successful box-office runs in cinematic history based not only on the power of its franchise but its guarantee of five-star film quality, a promise it more than fulfills.

But here’s the thing. After all that hype, all my posturing and flowery language describing a generation-defining action film that nobody should miss, there exists a fallacy in my logic. Because for all the positive qualities of the movie I’ve been espousing, there’s one tiny piece of information that Disney, Marvel Studios, and the franchise backers in general don’t want me to tell you.

‘Avengers: Endgame’ has a huge weakness that should have made it a horrible film.

Let me explain.

Without getting into spoilers, the entire premise of the film revolves around the heroes Marvel has spent years cultivating and defining on the silver screen breaking the internal logic of the MCU. Multiple times. In flagrant disregard of both the audience’s intelligence regarding this film and long-time fans of the franchise, it insists on a version of events that laughs in the face of reasoning. Now this might not seem like a big deal, this is a franchise where a magic alien god is drinking buddies with a hundred-year old WWII vet after all, but in any context, there’s only going to be so much disbelief an audience can suspend and, at a certain point, it breaks the illusion that the entire medium of film is based on.

Keep in mind, this isn’t just complaining that there are overly fantastic elements in the film. None of the cinematic conventions ‘Endgame’ plays with or uses are unfamiliar to the science-fiction, fantasy, or superhero genres. But it intentionally destroys all known and accepted details about these tropes only to insist upon traditional logic halfway through and then reject it once more in the third act. They even go so far as to hang a lampshade on the issue by pointing out how the clichés the film uses don’t apply in their universe. Until thirty minutes later when they do. Until an hour after that when they don’t again.

It’s not a nitpick, it’s a fundamental flaw with the movie’s plot and themes that should cripple a film. And because of it, the movie suffers a huge pacing problem that constantly has the narrative wobbling back and forth like a broken merry-go-round. It doesn’t help that new concepts that contradict previous existing Marvel lore are introduced and explained away in seconds, as if the film knows it’s trying harder than usual to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes. And it does so with the lazy attitude of someone who knows their success is a given. Poor Mark Ruffalo spends ninety percent of the film in a mo-cap suit for reasons that are never explained in full and the weak explanation that is given doesn’t make sense in the context that the MCU has provided. They brought back Tilda Swinton to reprise her role of the Ancient One but didn’t give the makeup department enough time to finish her bald cap, leaving it semi-visible onscreen. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is built up as the most powerful, most badass character in the entire continuity, but is given maybe five minutes of screen time.

These are only a few small examples, there are many that are much more prominent or nonsensical. Because of this, there’s an overarching sense from about the thirty-minute point onward that something is wrong with the movie. It’s an eerie, subconscious, uncomfortable atmosphere that threatens to derail the film at many key moments.

And yet…

It’s amazing. The callbacks, the fan service, the action beats, the character moments, the in-jokes, the haunting first act, thrilling second act, and explosive and deeply satisfying third act, all of it comes together to make ‘Endgame’ a real masterpiece, one that could only ever exist if it had an entire library of filmography to reference and support it. It’s impossible for any other franchise to even come close to matching it. And by all logic, even Marvel shouldn’t have been able to pull it off.

But Marvel and Disney have created an environment where not only is failure not an option, but it is not even a possibility. This is a movie, perhaps the first in the MCU canon, where fanservice has absolutely taken priority. And instead of feeling like a gimmicky cash-grab like it should, it feels deserved and warranted. In a strange way, it feels natural that an entire decades’ worth of film was building up to this, just as it felt natural that four years’ worth of movies was building up to the first ‘Avengers’ movie.

And in a weird way, that’s kind of scary. I love it, but I’m frightened by the concept of a company that we have been hardwired to give the benefit of the doubt. Especially a studio like Disney who has all but co-opted the sheer concept of childhood and could use their powerful influence for less than admirable means with ease.

All in all, it’s a five-star film, maybe a four-star if you’ve never seen a Marvel film before (which is kind of a dumb argument, by the way. ‘Godfather Part II’ is only a three-star film if you haven’t seen ‘Godfather’). But it does lend itself to a few major questions that have stayed with me. Not just what comes next for the franchise now that its major storylines have all wrapped and it has set up the already-announced subsequent films with the smug confidence of a teenager who just found out his parents are the richest in town, but, in looking back at a decade of movies with a kind of fascinated and delighted horror, just what have we allowed to happen? How did we get to the point where we just assume a movie is going to be a spectacle based not only on how the previous installments in the franchise were, but on a shared cultural acceptance of quality based on a certain brand’s ability to integrate itself into the zeitgeist through social osmosis?

This is far from a new phenomenon, but I do have to wonder why it’s never been all too noticeable before. Most clothing and technology brands are able to do the same thing and mask that they abuse Chinese sweatshop labor. Fast food outlets are able to pull off the same trick to a lesser degree to disguise their low-grade food quality and employee abuse, but we are at least aware on a certain level that the things we are able to enjoy more often then not come at the expense of someone else in the world.

So I have to ask, by indulging in Marvel’s biggest contribution to cinema yet, a veritable celebration of its own existence that blows up in grand fashion with a fifty-minute finale battle, as is MCU tradition at this point, what are we ignoring? What are we costing someone by enjoying these films in a way that we don’t and are unable to enjoy others? Or, perhaps more frighteningly, are we grabbing cultural debt by the fistful that Disney will later cash in on in the future in some manner we can’t even anticipate?

Basically, without trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist, what is Disney planning to do now that it has our money, our love, and about seventy percent of all intellectual property in the known universe?

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