Avengers: Endgame may not be the best movie of 2019, but it certainly is the biggest. Clocking in at 3 hours and 1 minute, it’s the longest studio release since the epics of the 1960s. And grossing an astounding $1.2 billion dollars worldwide in its first weekend, it is the biggest financial success in Hollywood history, breaking six box office records so far. At the cineplex where I saw the film with my grandson, it was being shown every half hour, 35 screenings in a single day, beginning at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. We felt lucky to snag three seats together in the neck-craning third row — and we bought them in advance. My grandson was already seeing it for the second time. I might see it again too.
So what’s the attraction of Endgame? It’s just another superhero movie in a long line of superhero movies, right? Is it really that special?
For many, "Infinity War" and "Endgame" marked the movie event of the decade. Super fans rewatched a dozen films or more in preparation for the release of both films.
Well, yes and no. Several factors make this film quite special, while others caused me to cringe in disbelief. I lost interest long ago in the superhero genre, yet I felt duty bound as a movie reviewer to see this one, and found elements that gave it a spiritual and literary gravitas I wasn’t expecting. Since there are hundreds of traditional movie reviews praising this film, I want to step away from the traditional and focus on my experience and reaction watching it, and I can’t do that without talking about significant elements of the plot. So if you want to see the film without the spoilers, you’d better stop reading and save this review for after you’ve seen the movie.
First, the basic plot. Endgame is the culmination of 22 separate superhero films based on Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics, featuring Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Spider-Man (played by numerous actors over the series, and in this one by Tom Holland), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Antman (Paul Rudd), Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), the Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), and the entire Guardians of the Galaxy contingent, along with numerous side characters from each domain.
The characters have been crossing into one another’s universes over the past several installments, finally culminating in the ultimate Showdown with Evil in the two-part finale that includes Infinity War (2018) and Endgame, the current film. For many, these two films marked the movie event of the decade. Super fans rewatched a dozen films or more in preparation for the release of both films. While listening to a call-in radio show last week I heard a woman ask whether she could honorably get out of going to a hospice retreat with a friend who is dying of cancer, because she already had tickets to see this movie with her family. (The radio host wisely advised the woman to skip the movie and assist the friend.) Some theaters scheduled marathon showings for fans who wanted to watch the earlier films in the series together. I didn’t bother to “prepare,” yet I still enjoyed the two films just fine by accepting the fact that I didn’t know every backstory or reference, and that was OK.
What I like about this movie is how it taps into deep mythological archetypes and also introduces a new concept about time travel.
In Episode One of the finale (Infinity War), super villain Thanos (Josh Brolin) wants to gain possession of six powerful stones that will allow him to vaporize half the population of the universe with the snap of his gauntleted fingers. He thinks this will make the universe a better place by reducing overpopulation. (Here is the first of many conundrums; what kind of evil superpower is motivated by the desire to make the world a better place? But that’s the way it is.) His plan shares nothing with the parlor game of imagining a lifeboat with too many people onboard and arguing about who deserves to stay in the lifeboat and who needs to be thrown overboard so the others will have enough food and water to survive; his plan is a seemingly fair, unbiased, randomly selected annihilation. And he succeeds, in a particularly moving ending to Episode One, as half our favorite characters are vaporized into tiny particles of flame.
Episode Two (Endgame) begins with the vaporization of a family on a picnic, reminding us that it isn’t just the Avengers who have lost half their numbers; nearly everyone in the universe has suffered the loss of a loved one. Now the remaining Avengers must wage another battle to regain the stones so they can reverse the process and bring back the people who have been annihilated. This is pretty iconic good-versus-evil, science-versus-nature stuff, with mechanized robot-warriors on the evil side, and flesh-and-blood (or wood-and-sap) superheroes on the other.
What I like about this movie is how it taps into deep mythological archetypes and also introduces a new concept about time travel. One of the accepted rules of the time-travel genre is that anything you do while traveling in the past will change the future. Thus Marty McFly in Back to the Future returns to his original present and discovers that his family has changed. His father is successful, his mother is slender, his siblings are happy, and his old nemesis is washing Marty’s car. Only Marty remembers the former timeline, because only he has lived the “new past.” This occurs in most time-travel movies; only the person who went into the past remembers the old present. It always makes me a little sad that those who remained behind don’t realize the dreariness or danger they’ve escaped. In Endgame it’s explained that they can’t change the past because what they are doing actually occurs in the present. What they’re changing is the future, which is true of all our choices. Thanos will still have vaporized everyone, but now everyone will be able to come back. I like that concept because all of them realize the fate they’ve escaped and appreciate the sacrifice of those who fought for them.
Then Thanos returns and another epic battle ensues — just as Satan will, according to the book of Revelation.
What I like even more are the biblical and mythological allusions in this story. At the end of Infinity War, two biblical allusions appear in the sudden and random vaporizing of half the population. The first is a reference to the rapture at the end of the world, when, according to Matthew 24:40, “Two men will be working together in the field; one will be taken, the other left.” That’s exactly how the vaporizing feels. The other is a reference to the destroying angel taking the firstborn of every household in Egypt that marked the beginning of the Israelite Exodus into the wilderness. And another reference to the Exodus is seen when Thanos observes, “As long as there are those who remember what was, there will be those who resist,” echoing God’s decision to make all the Israelites who remembered Egypt wander in the wilderness until they died before the others were allowed into the Promised Land. In yet another scene, Dr. Strange holds back a towering flood of water, just as Moses held back the water in The Ten Commandments. (Okay, that was Charlton Heston. But he was portraying Moses.)
Thanos succeeds initially in Infinity War, but he is killed in an early battle of Endgame. For five years, the remaining residents of the earth enjoy a fairly idyllic life. They marry, start families, work the fields, study, produce, and live in peace. Then Thanos returns and another epic battle ensues — just as Satan will, according to the book of Revelation, be bound for 1,000 years of peace and then unleashed to gather his armies for a final epic battle. And when the final battle occurs in Endgame, the Avengers are joined by the resurrected beings who had been vaporized, just as in the battle of Armageddon — according to some interpretations — Christ will be joined by the resurrected dead. It’s a powerful scene in the movie, met with thunderous cheers from the audience, and made more powerful by the archetypal allusion.
Other references to redemption occur as well. Bruce Banner learns to embrace his inner Hulk, who now lives peacefully on the outside. We see a virtual resurrection of the late Stan Lee, who created the Marvel universe and died in 2018, de-aged and in his prime for his final cameo appearance in a Marvel movie. “Hey, man! Make love, not war!” he calls, as he drives out of sight. Robert Downey, Jr., who plays Iron Man (my favorite of the Avengers because he is an inventor, a businessman, and a reluctant superhero) has also experienced a kind of redemption in his life, having overcome his nearly debilitating addictions 20 years ago to become one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. His career was dead, and it has roared back to life.
This is an astonishing affront after the brilliant success of "Black Panther" in 2018, and serves to highlight the self-righteous hypocrisy of Hollywood liberals.
Perhaps it was the serendipity of Endgame’s opening just a few days after Easter that caused me to see Christian archetypes in the film. The ultimate hero in the story willingly sacrifices his own life to reverse the deaths of those who were vaporized, saying, “If we don’t take that stone, billions of people stay dead.” He willingly trades his life for the lives of his friends — and everyone else. Like Jesus, he dies when his heart literally breaks. His last words are “I am . . . [his name],” I AM being a name of God, applied by Christ to himself. By contrast, the character’s father tells him, “The greater good has seldom outweighed my self-interest,” but I like to think that self-interest and concern for others are not mutually exclusive. In fact, each of us acting in our own self-interest while respecting the rights and property of others is probably the fastest way to the greater good. So I like this too.
My biggest beef with Avengers: Endgame is that the Black Panther universe is shoved to the back of the bus. Its citizens don’t show up until the third hour of the film; they literally stand at the back of the Avengers group in a significant funeral scene; and the token non-BP black Avengers, War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie), play secondary roles throughout the battles. Even Okoye [Danai Gurira], who survives the Thanos vaporization in Infinity War and thus ought to be fighting alongside the Avengers throughout the movie, makes only a token appearance in the first two-thirds of Endgame (to report on an earthquake under the sea). This is an astonishing affront after the brilliant success of Black Panther in 2018, and serves to highlight the self-righteous hypocrisy of Hollywood liberals. What were they thinking?
My second beef is actually a chortle at Hollywood do-gooders who couldn’t quite figure out what was evil in Thanos’s plan, whose goal is actually to remove one of their pet peeves — the overpopulation that is supposedly destroying the planet. One would almost expect them to see this save-the-planet-by-eliminating-the-humans tactic as a good thing. (Indeed, many historians argue that the plague produced an economic boon in the Middle Ages by reducing unemployment.) And in fact, Captain America comments to Black Widow at one point, “I saw a pod of whales when I was coming in, over the bridge . . . Fewer ships, cleaner weather.” What a good guy that Thanos is!
I wanted to see more of how the loss of half the population of earth affected trade, manufacturing and production, but everything was presented in a very hodge-podge way.
Nevertheless, the film gives us only a glimpse of life after near-annihilation, and it is glaringly inconsistent with the “liberals’” worldview. The reduction in population seems to have resulted in a dystopian future; five years later, cars are still abandoned where they were left by their drivers when they were vaporized, and our heroes are living an agrarian life in the woods. Okay, that makes sense. If we lose the people who run the factories, drive the trucks, service the power grid, and pump the oil, life is going to become pretty bleak, I think. At least back-to-basics. I wanted to see more of how the loss of half the population of earth affected trade, manufacturing and production, but everything was presented in a very hodge-podge way.
An example: despite their agrarian existence, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is making Tony Stark and their daughter peanut butter sandwiches on something that looks suspiciously like factory-produced Wonder Bread. Who’s manufacturing that soft, squishy, sliced bread with its pure white center and thin tan crust? For that matter, who’s manufacturing the peanut butter? Who’s making their daughter’s machine-knit sweater, her jersey-knit leggings, and her cute little pink tennis shoes? Evidently the Gen-Xers and Millennials who run Hollywood these days don’t understand where products come from, besides the store (or Amazon). Meanwhile, the Internet works, the computer and communications systems work, kids are taking selfies on their cell phones, and somehow food supplies are getting to the diner everyone patronizes. I wanted to give everyone in Hollywood a copy of “I, Pencil.”
Despite such inconsistencies in the setting and plot, not to mention the ideas, and despite my not having watched at least half of the films leading up to this denouement, I have to admit I was moved by the story. I think it was largely because I watched it with my own set of tropes and understandings about good and evil, sacrifice and redemption, resurrection and restoration. The relationships are well portrayed, and I bought into the battle, although I would have liked a clearer philosophical conflict than “Please don’t kill everyone.” I appreciated the fact that some characters changed and chose their own paths. Like my grandson, I will probably see Endgame again.
