Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/29/avengers-endgame-smashes-reco.html
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This is the perfect opportunity to go out on a high note and stop making all these super hero movies.
But no, this is the commercial zenith that will be referenced post-mortem following the 2029 nadir of Spiderman’s unlucky 13th reboot.
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No surprise really;
Stan Lee passed away (RIP), RDJ and Chris Evans’ contracts are up and it was the final film of a 11-year run of 22 movies.
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I wonder what the previous record was? Because I wonder if it’s a 2012 (Hulk) smash, or a 2019 (Hulk) smash? 
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My review: very enjoyable, utterly forgettable.
Or as as Vice points out, it’s the pinnacle of mediocre movie making:
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Well worth it, an excellent film that did a great job of wrapping up 11 years of story arcs spread amongst 22 movies, rewarded viewers of all of those films while still being accessible for folks who’ve only seen the ‘highlights’ – that’s a filmmaking feat all by itself. Not at all “forgettable” or “mediocre”. I disagree highly with Vice.
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"It should be said that not every superhero film is completely worthless."
Yeah… that guy totally sounds like the type of person whose opinion a comic book fan should listen to and take seriously.
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I agree that this was a nice bow on the 22 movies that led to this moment. But it has some serious issues. This isn’t even in my top 5 MCU films, and is only marginally better than Age of Ultron for me (I give it a slight edge for some great fan service moments, and for the difficulty of being the end cap of the last 10 years).
Its a very flawed flick, even by comic book standards. And simply put the BEST of the MCU films are the ones that stick to the comic story lines and the foundation of these characters. The bad MCU films are the ones that pull a DC and go off the rails and ignore the source material. This one throw the Infinity Gauntlet story line in the garbage.
Just my 2 cents on the subject. My oldest son and I spent 2 hours discussing the issues of this 3 hr spectacle…but we both admit, it was a fun and entertaining movie overall, just falls way short of what it could have been.
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As someone who didn’t read the original comic book story, it honestly doesn’t matter to me at all that it differed hugely from what was originally printed, any more than it matters whether Game of Thrones (the show) differs from what George RR Martin wrote. I think of these movies and the comics as fundamentally different things and certainly don’t think of the comics as some sort of gospel that can’t be deviated from to tell a good story that involves a ton of characters across the whole Marvel universe.
I think any film will have flaws, sure, but this one did an admirable job of telling very human stories with fundamentally wacky characters. I’m sure that people with a perspective coming from the comic will have a different viewpoint on what they wished it could have been.
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We saw it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enjoyable.
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Fan service. Fun. Satisfying.
As a standalone movie, it’s pretty inaccessible and bad. As a conclusion for a 22 film arc (plus several TV shows and other spin offs) it’s very satisfying. I guess you need to calibrate your expectations accordingly.
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I’d guess Avatar or Star Wars. SciFi rules our world.
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I read them - didn’t care either. Very few movie adaptations of books hold completely to the story line either. In comics - Watchman did mostly - and wasn’t as good as it could have been for it.
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I am baffled by the thought of anyone looking at Endgame, thinking “maybe I’ll finally go see what all this superhero nonsense is all about”, and then having the audacity to be annoyed that they had no idea what was going on. Even ignoring the entire 11-year saga, it’s still a sequel to Infinity War, so Endgame is absolutely not going to bother with even the barest attempts to help onboard newcomers by gently introducing characters before kicking into high gear. I mean… duh? (Not accusing you of doing/thinking this, but really, any critic who tries to take the movie in isolation is Missing The Point.)
I thought their approach to the Timey Wimey was novel, especially since it lets them kill Thanos twice without wrecking the timeline, while still providing a justification for having to put everything else back at the end, thus giving Steve his happy ending. The people who are getting left behind going forward all got great send-offs, and I think the conclusion came with enough catharsis and finality that it’ll be possible to “reset” back to smaller stories and new characters without the pressure to somehow escalate even further than universe-ending disaster. At least for now.
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unfortunately the items you put in spoiler mode…are the biggest issues in the film. Both of those things literally break everything else.
Are the fan service and make you smile and give closure…sure. But in both cases they break the very rules the writers put forth in the actual movies.
As I said above…I still enjoyed it, its a fun film and given the size and scale of the wall they tried to climb…I can live with it. But anyone trying to tell me this is a masterpiece or the best of the MCU or anything like that…nope. A for effort C+ for execution.
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And an A plus for America’s butt.
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Agreed, I’ve seen a few extremely negative reviews that centered on the idea that it worked poorly as a stand-alone film, and that seems like a really weird metric to measure the second part of a two-movie set that’s explicitly the conclusion of a 22-film arc.
I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what stories can be told that aren’t a bit hamstrung by having to tie into the bigger Thanos storyline. Besides smaller stories, I feel like Captain Marvel made it clear that there’s a lot more going on in the universe than Earth stuff; I think we’ll see a lot more cosmic space adventures. And hey, maybe they’ll introduce characters like Kamala Khan and make dudebros’ heads explode.
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Moments like that were absolutely my favorites in the film. Those are the things that the MCU writers have done so well over these last 10 years. Beer belly Thor was dumb as shit IMO…but any moment with Ant-man was great…or Quill being called an idiot…again! was awesome. Even some of the name calling “mean blue girl” was fantastic.
@nungesser I think the point of what they did in this movie was actually to end the Avengers. Which ties directly to your comment about moving past a big bad like Thanos. This next phase IMO is clearly about individual heroes doing smaller scale stuff. Will it lead to another group team up like Avengers 1? Who knows…maybe its Avengers 2.0 or A-Force, or a true Defenders team, one of those things. But for the short term it is clear they want to focus on singular heroes and pre-formed teams (Guardians of the Galaxy, and the newly acquired Fantastic Four and X-men).
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And more Thor, Korg and Rocket please!
They can all move in with Darryl.
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Eh, the last Avengers movie was the first marvel movie I’ve seen since the original Iron Man (it was on Netflix). I understood everything fine. Everyone knows what Hulk and Captain America are all about, for example. No intro needed. They’re all racing the bad guy to get the Macguffin. Context fills in the rest. I imagine the new movie is the same, with the added detail that “half the universe just died (lol)” which everyone knows through pop culture osmosis.
As the kids say, “it ain’t that deep”.
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