Avengers: Endgame Is Exactly the Movie You Want It to Be
...And maybe that's the problem.

I won't spoil anything about Avengers: Endgame, except to say: It delivers.
There are superheroes—so many superheroes—acting both super and heroic. There are villains acting villainous. There are jokes and sacrifices, witty banter and inspiring speeches, moments that will give you chills and even, perhaps, a few that will bring tears to your eyes. At the end of the movie's roughly three-hour running time, everyone in need of punching has been punched in exactly the amount they deserve to be punched. Cinematic justice is thus meted out with acute precision, as if calculated by some complex algorithm. Which, come to think of it, it probably was.
The point is: If you are fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)—and, based on the box office returns, you probably are—you will almost certainly leave satisfied. Avengers: Endgame is, if nothing else, a masterpiece of Hollywood franchise administration. It is not a great movie, but it is often a rather good one, and its true genius lies in the deft and seamless way it manages and eventually fulfills more than a decade of superhero movie expectations.
And there are so very, very many expectations—more than 20 films' worth, at this point. If you have watched every movie in the MCU just once, you have spent a little more than a full-time work week following the adventures of this gang of lovable super friends, which has sprawled and expanded to the point where it may sometimes feel like a spreadsheet would be handy.
That sprawl, and the need to at least acknowledge all those characters and stories and subplots, may explain the plot's schematic, episodic nature. The story is self-referential in the extreme, less an end to a decade's worth of movies than a summary and highlight reel of all that has come before. Narratively speaking, it sometimes plays more like a feature-length recap—a PowerPoint presentation intended to catch you up on the Avengers so far—than a conventionally structured story.
Like so much of today's mass culture, Endgame is a movie that indulges in a fond nostalgia for its past. Yet unlike, say, Disney's recent Star Wars sequels, it manages to be referential without being repetitive; this is a movie determined to end a chapter of a beloved story, not simply rehash and repeat it.
The individual scenes themselves, meanwhile, are executed with such verve and wit that I hardly cared whether or not they made much sense together. Endgame, like so many Marvel movies before it, works on the strength of strong characters and discrete moments, which have been honed and polished and workshopped into remarkably efficient delivery systems for pop pleasure.
That goes for the inevitable climactic showdowns as well as the smaller bits. Indeed, for a superhero epic with a zillion-dollar budget, Endgame spends a surprising amount of its running time dwelling on the ordinary minutiae of extraordinary lives. Children and families play a significant role; Thor drinks beer and helps a friend play Fortnite (really); Captain America attends a low-key support group session; Hulk signs autographs for kids; and there's a delightful mid-film disquisition on time travel movies and Back to the Future II. Even Thanos, the movie's over-muscled purple villain, gets a brief moment to relax and pick giant berries from a sun-dappled countryside. No doubt he makes a delicious fruit smoothie.
Much of Marvel's success over the last decade can be credited to its emphasis on crafting clearly defined, broadly appealing characters. These characters may not be complex in a deep, literary sense, but they are endlessly charming. You want to spend time with them, you want them to fight, and, in the end, you want them to win.
So when the fighting eventually begins in earnest, as it inevitably does, you find yourself thoroughly primed to root for victory. Endgame culminates in perhaps the grandest superhero battle ever put on screen, a spectacle that somehow manages to make effective and coherent use of nearly all of the main and supporting characters that have passed through the MCU over the past decade. It is the payoff to 11 years and 22 movies worth of build up—and somehow, it's worth it.
I have sometimes been critical of Marvel's formulaic approach to filmmaking, of the studio's too-standardized action scenes and overreliance on weightless computer-generated effects; most of those criticisms still apply here.
Yet I have also found more than a small amount of genuine enjoyment in the MCU over the years, in the franchise's blend of jocular wit, lavish action bombast, and serialized twists and turns. The pleasures of a top-tier Marvel movie are the much the same as the pleasures of the Marvel comic books they are based on; the best ones have the capacity to inspire an innocent, childlike glee, or at least an exceptionally well-rendered, corporate-funded simulacra of the same. A good Marvel movie reminds my cynical adult self of the un-cynical excitement I once had coming home from school and finding a new issue of a comic book in the mail. Marvel offers escapism not only into its own imaginary world, but into the even more addictive nostalgia of one's personal past.
Endgame did more than remind me of those pleasures. It amplified them, focused them, gave them an almost talismanic power, as if MCU mastermind Kevin Feige had somehow made the movie with the help of the Soul Stone. It was everything I wanted a Marvel movie to be.
And if there's a problem with the movie, that's it. Marvel, in combination with its owner, Disney, and its recent streaming partner, Netflix, has helped usher in a world in which the vast resources of our pop culture overlords—and especially those in Hollywood—are largely devoted to the precise and methodical setting and meeting of expectations. One of the principal objectives, in other words, is to never challenge or upset viewers, who are now understood as fan-stakeholders. The goal instead is to survey and train the desires of those viewers, and then find a way to consistently deliver. These properties may be owned by billion dollar corporations, but their use has been, at least partially, given over to the will and taste of the collective, with predictably bland results.
There is nothing wrong with this sort of cinematic comfort food, per se, and there are real benefits to a cinema that is more responsive to fandom—among them that it is often far more respectful to the original properties, because it understands their essential appeal. But a decade into Marvel's reign, it's clear there are downsides, too, most notably in the lack of novelty or surprise. A movie like Endgame is merely as good as I hoped it would be; truly great movies offer something viewers could never imagine on their own.
A year ago, when Endgame's perfectly tolerable but notably inferior predecessor, Infinity War, hit theaters, I wondered if Hollywood would settle for devoting the largest share of its resources to merely competent, pretty good, superhero blockbusters that aimed only to please crowds in familiar ways.
Endgame, sure to be one of the year's most successful box-office draws, seems to answer that question with an enthusiastic yes: It might be the very best pretty good movie I have ever seen. The fan service in Endgame is exquisite and masterful, almost an art unto itself—but it's still fan service. And even though I am personally a fan, and enjoy being served as such, some small part of me was still hoping for something more.
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Sometimes a movie is just a movie.
"And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." --Bill Clinton
"But my movie had the wrong ending!" -- Hillary Clinton
The Meuller movie is exactly the movie you want, Mrs. Clinton...
"What would you do to be in a movie?" -Harvey Weinstein, probably
THAT PICTURE IS A MAJOR SPOILER.
It's all been in the trailers for months.
Also full of spoilers. And don't get me started on the spoilers in the movie itself.
Your parody sounds like EscherEnigma's reality.
Some of us actively avoid trailers for that reason.
Some of us don't care.
If the creators put it in a trailer, released months ago, it's not a spoiler anymore, and bitching about it is fucking retarded.
Spoiler: You're Tulpa!
I think you captured the point perfectly.
Here is the problem with that Escher. What was once a reasonable request to avoid actively giving away valuable information has transmogrified into a demand to avoid even the tiniest tidbits of knowledge about any aspect of a movie.
And that is irrational to the point of absurdity. I won't go so far as to say it is "f*cking ***arded" but there is a limit to what I consider a reasonable request to avoid spoiling a movie entails.
Spoiler: it is “f*cking ***arded.”
"truly great movies offer something viewers could never imagine on their own."
Seems like you're trying to convince people that your definition of greatness is the only acceptable definition.
Maybe that's why it's an opinion piece.
Ah ok, you're one of those people that thinks having an opinion means demanding everyone accept that you are right.
A liberal then.
If you want an opinion piece without an opinion, you've come to the wrong place.
Ah ok, you’re one of those people that thinks having an opinion means demanding everyone accept that you are right.
A liberal then
Where is he demanding anything? Seriously, if you read that review of a movie and thought that Suderman was demanding that the reader do something or believe something, I just don't....I can't...lunacy.
“truly great movies offer something viewers could never imagine on their own.”
Right there.
It seem like you have trouble reading my posts.
Where's the demand? He's explaining what he thinks "truly great movies" are? It seems like you have your own reading comprehension issues.
“truly great movies offer something viewers could never imagine on their own.”
Right there.
It seem like you have trouble reading my posts.
Keep trolling my friend.
A liberal then
I'm sorry you see him qualifying that as an opinion, your English teachers are more to blame than you are.
" I just don’t….I can’t…"
Read? Understand basic English?
You are demanding that I interpret his sentence in the same way you do.
A liberal then.
Well, I am demanding you attempt to understand English properly.
And you are bristling and pretending you can't.
So yes, you do seem to be a liberal.
I can tell by how upset this has made you that you realize you're wrong but can't accept that gracefully.
It's a Crusty/Sparky sockpuppet. And boring.
I'm told that
Social Justice WarriorCaptain Marvel only gets 5-6 minutes of screen time, thankfully.Actually, I heard it's more like 15 minutes. I might reconsider my plan to boycott the movie because of her.
I am so sad if this isn't a joke and that people from the group that boycotting Captain Marvel (for woman reasons) found themselves here.
Cry more.
You're stealing chipper morning eunuch's schtick
"I am so sad"
I wanted to agree with him there, but I really didn't want to hear him whine like he did upthread when he didn't realize he was wrong about Suderman making demands.
No joke. Just can't see myself spending good money to see Brie Larsen's ugly, smug, punchable face projected on the big screen. However, I might just wait and download a copy for free.
Sunday morning buy a ticket for Unplanned to get you in the building, then mistakenly wander into the Marvel auditorium. Win win.
She’s a minor character in this movie, mostly MIA, and so doesn’t ruin it, though when she is on screen it’s doing predictably stupid things.
"It is not a great movie, but it is often a rather good one."
That's really the best an MCU movie can aspire to.
No. Thor Ragnarok was great. It was a modern remake of Flash Gordon, and campy as hell and straight up great. Be a douchebag elitist somewhere else.
He has nowhere else.
Never saw that one but I hear good things.
Review the space noir film High Life next, Sudermensch.
Is that the one with Method Man and Redman?
Endgame isn't one of those "original" or "surprising" movies, to be sure. But why spend half the article wringing one's hands about that fact?
We live in a world where we don't have to find the one, stained-seat clove-cigaret-smelling art filmhouse in our town to see "original" and "surprising" movies. We just stream them to our 80" 4k (fuck yeah!) tv and enjoy them at home. There are thousands of art-house titles, documentaries and original series at your beck and call right now. I hear about them daily from the latte-sipping snobs I call work colleagues.
It is not clear to me why Suderman is so obsessed with pop culture given the variety available to us today. To the extent that Hollywood is putting out ever more big budget pulp fiction, it is because they no longer have to choose between risky cinema and sure-to-sell fan favorites. They can has both. And we can too!
Enjoy Endgame for what it is, and rest assured that it doesn't come at the cost of your intellectually satisfying and emotionally upsetting fix.
Avengers: Endgame Is Exactly the Movie You Want It to Be
X-rated Scarlett J.?
Mark Ruffalo is orally raped?
So why are you trolling that guy as jcw?
word.
Eh, did you see Under the Skin?
Most disappointing movie ever.
Watching 2 hours to get 2 seconds of Katie Holmes in The Gift is a better use of your time.
Suderman is whining.
Endgame isn't woke!!!!
The original Avengers was the British espionage TV show from the 1960's that had Diana Rigg in it.
[…] Avengers: Endgame Is Exactly the Movie You Want It to Be Reason […]
I seriously doubt I'm going to walk out of the theater satisfied, as I'm an Adam Warlock fan, and they've apparently written him completely out of the plot, despite his being precisely as central to the comic book plot as Thanos was.
Might as well have written Captain America out of Winter Soldier.
It will probably be entertaining, though.
The point is: If you are fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe...
...you're probably
a) a guy
b) lacking in basic social skills
c) a gun owner
d) a video-game aficionado
e) all of the above
McSuderman may be an authoritarian progressive cuck but I'll take him at his word this movie truly does suck.