Avengers: Endgame smashes records with $1.2bn box office

boing
21

Heh. Me too. But that’s exactly what the dental hygienist who was cleaning my wife’s teeth essentially said. She was planning to see End Game, and had never seen any of the others. Not even Infinity War. My wife was aghast.

I need to see it again to see if I can piece together the time entanglements, but yeah. I was surprised they took that route for the resolution and the fact that the first trip they made after perfecting the machine wasn’t to go and get more Pym particles from the man himself.

That said, I’m not sure when I’ll want to spend another 3 hours watching it again (although my brother and his wife saw it twice already, and my wife said she would go see it again the next day, so I’m alone there).

5 Likes
22

I’ve only seen a few of the MCU movies and after each one I come out entertained, but feeling a little empty inside (Black Panther was the notable exception). I keep wondering if I should start catching up and watch them because everyone is watching them and talking about them. But, then again, I’d rather spend my time watching Game of Thrones.

2 Likes
23

It’s all apples and oranges comparisons. The current dynamics of movie releases are different from those of previous years. (E.g. more foreign box office, theaters taking different cuts, changes in ticket prices, etc.)

I find it strange that box office is described in dollar terms - this says nothing about the actual money that Disney are raking in. Box office monetary sales is pretty meaningless; those tickets are being sold at a variety of different prices, theaters and distributors are taking various cuts depending in what country the ticket sales are taking place, etc. It’d be more relevant, to a film’s success anyways, to see ticket sales, but I can rarely find that information on films these days.

2 Likes
24

There’s a LOT of movies and not all are really worth bothering with, though Endgame manages the feat of touching on every single one without it feeling bogged down.

In my opinion, if you wanted to see Infinity War/Endgame with the bulk of the emotional impact and background needed, you’d see:
Iron Man (the first one only)
Captain America
Captain America: Civil War
Avengers (maybe skim “Ultron” for the good bits of the team hanging out)
Guardians of the Galaxy (the first one)

I loved Black Panther, Guardians #2, Thor Ragnarok, and others, but if you wanted a crash course in the bare essentials, the movies above cover the most necessary ground.

3 Likes
25

I disagree, I don’t think it broke anything, but as with any case where time travel makes an appearance, it can get convoluted really quickly. I kinda want to work it out in writing if only for my own sake, but I’ll put it in a cut since it’ll be rambling and loaded with spoilers…

SPOILERS and timey wimey nonsense rambling, you've been warned...

First off, the movie actively poo-poos time travel as conceptualized in modern culture (“Man, Back to the Future was bullshit!”), which is probably the biggest ask in the entire film. The more I think about it, the wilder it is that the Russo brothers built the film’s entire narrative around a completely different model of time travel and expected the audience to latch onto it in less than 3 hours.

Essentially, it’s impossible to create a time paradox in the MCU, because any changes you make simply branch the timeline into a new reality. Where you are in time is always “your” present, and regardless of when in time something happened, it always happened in “your” past. (I believe Hulk’s line was something along the lines of “If you go back in time, your past is now your present and your future is now your past.”) Anything you’ve already experienced remains your reality, so the snap remains, in the parlance of Doctor Who, a fixed point in time for our heroes (emphasis to become important later). It can’t be undone, but it can be worked around. The other difference, from what I can see, is that unlike Back to the Future, if you change something in the past, you don’t travel forward to that reality’s future, you just go back to your own. People are inexorably tied to their own reality, because quantum mechanics can basically do whatever you really need it to do.

Removing the infinity stones from the existing timeline therefore doesn’t create any risks to the timeline as we’ve experienced it in the films, it simply creates new branches we don’t get to see, where the stones vanish. At the insistence of the Sorcerer Supreme, the stones have to be returned to close off those realities and prevent them from occurring once the Avengers are done un-breaking their own universe, because apparently Bad Things happen in them—the Time Stone-less reality in particular. As far as I can tell, that puts us in a universe where, at the end of Endgame, the stones are still destroyed in our timeline. I’m sure they could find a way to bring them back, but it would involve a considerable amount of effort and a lifetime supply of handwavium.

The biggest hitch in the timeline is that Thanos comes to 2023 and gets himself snapped, thus preventing his re-insertion back into the timeline of 2012 onward. However, that doesn’t really break the film continuity, because as previously explained, it simply creates a new branch of reality where Thanos vanishes before he ever gets his hands on any of the stones. What we experienced in the MCU is the timeline where that didn’t happen, so that it could happen in Endgame. :exploding_head: Presumably, the Sorcerer Supreme is fine with leaving that reality un-aborted because now that reality doesn’t have to deal with a megagenocidal superlunatic anymore. I was actually expecting the movie to put Thanos back, so he’d return to the past with the knowledge of where the stones were and thus be able to acquire them for his gauntlet in the first place, but then I realized that wouldn’t really make sense because he’d also know he had to nuke-and-pave the whole cosmos from the get-go to prevent the Avengers from messing up his whole… thing.

The only unresolved time travel goof is when Loki takes the Space Stone after Stark gets knocked out by the Hulk coming down the stairs. And again, that doesn’t break the continuity of The Avengers, because The Avengers as we saw it occurred in the past from our heroes’ perspective, so Loki fucking off to wherever is simply a branch that doesn’t get closed off again the way the other 6 do. Presumably, this is the setup for the Loki spin-off TV show being made for Disney+, because Loki died in the first 15 minutes of Infinity War and is otherwise accounted for in the rest of the MCU’s timeline.

Rogers can still go back to be with Carter and show up again at the end because he arrives to be with her before any of the other timeline shenanigans occur, so he’s not in one of those alternate branches of reality, and there’s plenty of time after Carter’s TV show for him to pop back up without doing anything but recast Carter’s presumed pining in various flashbacks (it would also explain why they stopped looking for the gigantic black plane that crashed in a freaking snow field). I’d also have to re-watch Winter Soldier to see how this slots in with Steve’s reunion with Carter right before she dies. It might screw that one up, but I kind of don’t care because America’s ass deserves to be happy god dammit!

All of that said, I do agree it’s not the best Marvel film… it’s big and bulky and has a lot to do, and even in 3 hours it has to race through a lot to do it. It takes something of a Thor-wielding-Mjolnir approach to getting the job done, and some of the character beats fall really flat (like everyone constantly ribbing on Thor, who quite clearly has PTSD in the wake of Infinity War and the whole photograph bit in the diner with Hulk and Ant-Man). I still think it’s impressive that they managed to build something this crazy-complicated and interwoven with any amount of competency whatsoever. It’s just so many moving parts and juggling balls to keep track of at the studio level.

4 Likes
26

Yeah, it felt much more like a TV series finale than a movie. In so many ways.

I’ve only seen about half the preceding 22 movies, so I guess I guess that’s why I left the movie theatre feeling only half-fulfilled.

1 Like
27

Or Riri Williams to pick up the RDJ torch.

3 Likes
28

this item right here is what broke it…you don’t need a pen and paper to trace this out: the Thanos (and his army) that die in 2023 at Iron Man’s gauntlet inspired snap is actually from a point in time BEFORE 2018 and the 1st snappening. Which means, Thanos & Co left the timeline in 2014 (we don’t know the exact moment but it was within that year) and then went forward to 2023 and never returned…meaning he never stole all the stones, and never snapped his fingers.

There are other issues that also break all sorts of rules they established themselves in the dialogue and story lines…but that one is the biggest and most egregious. You can disagree all you like…but it will take some serious mental gymnastics to find any solution out of that right there (albeit comic book logic/problems).

29

Not sure if I agree or disagree but they lampshaded many of these things pretty early on in the film with the “everything you think you know about time travel is wrong” conversations. And on any event these are comic book films with FTL travel, magical space gods, magical space stones, and so on. Serious science has no meaning here.

2 Likes
30

I was wondering if the clanging over the logo at the very end of the credits wasn’t just an Iron Man homage but also a hint at someone else forging a suit. It was curious that while Cap had his big torch-passing moment, Thor passed his mantle to Valkrie, and Hawkeye is getting his own torch-passing series on Disney+, there wasn’t any suggestion of a nod to War Machine or Rescue as to who might take up the mantle.

2 Likes
31

Indeed. It’ll be interesting to see what this actually ends up meaning.

32

I’m not really expecting you to be convinced by it, but… did you not read the timey wimey ramble I put in the collapsed part of my post where I specifically explain why that actually works?

33

but note what I said…based on the parameters THEY put forth in their own movie. I am not applying any theories any where else.

And to that point…they essentially go with string theory and the whole “your past becomes your future” and you “can’t move before or after your own existence in the string” which isn’t really whacky or hard to understand…they made it simple enough. But to that point, the simpler the solution is, the easier it is to have it go off the rails. Less moving parts means even a minute thing off can be catastrophic.

In this case I think it is very clear they wanted to give closure and a nice farewell to this part of the MCU phase of characters. They didn’t want to just kill everyone, nor could it be everyone just goes along as if nothing ever happened. They had to find a middle ground. It’s fine…just not great. And not what it could have been.

34

I did read it. And you should read what I put response. Your simplifying it down and ignoring the issue created. again…the rules that were set forth by The Ancient One, and then echoed by Banner were very clear. And the over arching story broke them.

35

No, no, that part is quite alright, because as Bruce explains while they’re designing the time heist, it just creates a parallel world in which that didn’t happen. The real problem is that Thanos is using a different model of time travel than the Avengers. When the Avengers travel forward in time, they cannot go (back) to the world as it was when they left it, they can only go to the new future they’ve created by their actions in the past. But when Thanos travels forward in time, he does end up in the future of the world in which he never left. To be consistent, if he leaves his timeline and travels forward, he should only be able to arrive in a world where the events of Infinity War never happened.

36

Ye canna break the laws of physics…but you can bend them.

scotty%20and%20scotch

2 Likes
37

Again…you have to look at what is stated in the film as the model for the time line and navigating it and the conditions in which we are shown. So in other words…face value. No “well but maybe this happens” mental shenanigans.

When they arrive back at Avengers HQ with the stones…they are in 2023 POST snappening. Hulk dons the gauntlet and brings everyone back. They move back along the single string of time, take the stones and move forward to undo what Thanos did in 2018. The entire key to bringing the stones back to the exact moments they took them from is precisely to ensure 2018 and the snappening still happen…because if they don’t do that, then they have created a new quantum string off the main one. As the Ancient One warned them about. Nebula 2014 bringing Thanos & Co 2014 forward and them vanishing breaks that. Entirely.
The events from 2014-2018 could never have happened now.

38

From the Vice review:

Between them, the Marvel and DC films have employed 21 directors: how many can you name?

I was already “ho hum” about this review – in its pointing out that the field has gotten more restrictive, and the offerings are less interesting/diverse – before I even got to the question of naming the directors as some kind of indication of the worth of the movies.

I love movies, but I’ve learned over the years that I love them for the stories more than the directors, actors, best grips, caterers, etc. I don’t expect any of those things to tell me that a movie is going to be good. Ishtar, Spies Like Us, Cleopatra, Star Wars Episode I… the list goes on.

The directors that I can name are usually because they aren’t good, have seriously stumbled, or are just so well known that it’s difficult to not know them. The ones that come immediately to my mind are Ed Wood, M. Night Shyamalan, Uwe Boll, Michael Bay, Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, Kevin Smith, John Carpenter, etc.

Hence the worlds created by Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Marvel, where language is always wholesome, blood is never spilled and everyone is born with an in-built chastity belt.

Wait… what? Did this person even watch the film?

That it has generated such fawning from critics is testament to the bludgeoning these people’s brains have taken from the genre.

This is not even a review. It’s someone complaining that the film even exists, and anyone who likes it is brain damaged.

7 Likes
39

Given the amount of “shits” and other swears, the ridiculous amounts of blood being visibly spilled, and scenes like Star-Lord cheerfully talking about the semen stains all over his ship, I’m assuming they’ve never watched a single Marvel movie but had to fill space.

5 Likes
40
Cut works better than spoiler tagging multiple paragraphs, apparently...

The Sorcerer Supreme isn’t so much worried about creating quantum splits as she is with the outcomes that will result from them. In particular, if she doesn’t have the Time Stone, Earth will be overrun by Dormamu, and she can’t let that happen, so Banner has to swear to bring the stones back. Not for his own sake, but for the sake of that alternate Earth that would be created by his actions. That is specifically what she was discussing when they talked about removing the stones from that point in time, not Thanos. Pulling Thanos out of time to destroy him in 2023 doesn’t undo the events of the MCU, it creates a split where Thanos doesn’t get to perform the snap that we are not privy to, because the MCU’s approach to time travel means no paradoxes, just alternate realities. It’s sort of the flip side to how Star Trek got rebooted; in Trek 2009 we got to follow the split, but in the MCU we’re still on the Prime timeline (and following the MCU’s rules of time travel, if Spock were to go back through the black hole, he’d end up back in the Prime timeline as well).

Essentially, nothing in Endgame breaks the rules of time travel as established by Endgame. There are merely certain outcomes that, for the sake of people in those alternate realities, the team needs to try to avoid. Mechanically, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with them keeping the stones in the Prime timeline and giving Tilda Swinton the finger, because the Prime timeline would keep on ticking away, blissfully unaware of the alternate reality of darkness that Banner created by going back on his word. Like I said, a universe where Thanos doesn’t get to do his snap because he got pulled forward through time and killed is not likely to be a reality that the Sorcerer Supreme is terribly worried about re-collapsing out of existence.