A year since Avengers: Infinity War dared with a level of bravery uncommon for the Disney-Marvel franchise to leave audiences hanging on a note of despair and defeat, Avengers: Endgame arrives riding a wave of hot anticipation and epic ambition. Sibling directing duo Anthony and Joe Russo conclude their diptych, which initially picks up where the original left off, with half the universe’s population annihilated by the victory of Thanos (Josh Brolin). The first act sees Carol ‘Captain Marvel’ Danvers (Brie Larson) rescue Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and cyborg Nebula (Karen Gillan) from slow death in deep space and take them back to Earth to be reunited with the denuded ranks of Avengers, including Natasha ‘Black Widow’ Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Steve ‘Captain America’ Rogers (Chris Evans), James ‘War Machine’ Rhodes (Don Cheadle), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). Tracking down and slaying Thanos proves surprisingly easy for the team once they get the Guardians of the Galaxy’s spaceship repaired, but with a grim caveat: they learn from the mad titan that he destroyed the Infinity Stones with their own power, leaving his act irreversible. Danvers dashes off back into space to help the many crumbling worlds dealing with the devastation whilst the other Avengers are left to do the best they can holding Earth together.
Cut to five years later, where everyone’s still groping their way through the emotional and physical devastation. Steve plays grief counsellor. Natasha tries to run the Avengers’ operations with her remaining operatives. Thor’s become a tubby alcoholic stewing in guilt over his many failures as his fellow Asgardian survivors like Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) build a new home in a seaside village. Bruce ‘Hulk’ Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has evolved into a happy medium of his two personas. Clint ‘Hawkeye’ Barton (Jeremy Renner), after losing his entire family, has become a ruthless vigilante wiping out gangsters. Ironically Tony, after blaming Steve for failing to back him up at the time of Captain America: Civil War (2016), fares best, settling into domestic bliss with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and daughter Morgan (Lexi Rabe). Suddenly Scott ‘Ant-Man’ Lang (Paul Rudd) manages to escape the Quantum Realm he’s been trapped in since the demi-apocalypse, and after reuniting with his now-teenage daughter Cassie (Emma Fuhrmann), brings to the remaining Avengers words of hope: he thinks they might be able to use the Quantum Realm to travel back in time. Talking the initially reluctant Tony into helping map out the rules of such a quest, the Avengers gather to take their last, best shot, circling back to points in the past where they can retrieve the Stones and bring them to the present. Well-laid plans go awry, however, particularly when Nebula travels back to a point where her cyborg parts synch up with those on her past self, alerting Thanos to what’s going on, so he substitutes the old, loyal Nebula in the reformed one’s stead to foul up the deal.
Endgame spares a great deal of its nearly three-hour running time for dealing with its characters and their attempts to transcend themselves in the face of failure. Much has been made about how blockbusters today can settle for stakes no lower than the fate of the Earth, but fair play: Endgame takes the idea of what failure on such a level can cost fairly seriously, even if with only a narrow focus that mostly excises contemplating what the worst results of that must look like. If the current superhero trend was most potently framed and propelled by a desire for fantastical saviours and clear moral paradigms after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Endgame, nearly twenty years later, is intriguing as the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to really suggest a substantial consideration of the idea of grief and devastation rather than merely offer escapist panaceas. This note sounds most loudly during Steve’s early scene coaching fellow survivors. The opening, depicting Hawkeye’s bewilderment as his family idyll vanishes, is particularly effective in offering truly terrible loss as a keynote for the drama that follows. That the demi-apocalypse left us with the old core of the Avengers team still intact signals other priorities, at once getting back to basics in terms of franchise star power whilst also laying the groundwork for moving on from them. In the most cynical terms, several actors whose contracts are finally running out at last get to slip their fetters whilst those with a few more left to run are brought back from digital dust.
Even once the story proper gets going and the characters embark on their various quests, Endgame proves utterly defined by the past, in both narrative and franchise terms. After a glibly amusing run-through of time travel movie titles to explain the rules of the mission, Scott comments ruefully, “So Back to the Future was bullshit?” But then the true model proves to rather be Back to the Future II (1989), as the Avengers must dodge their previous selves and negotiate fastidious recreations and augmentations of moments from previous instalments, as when Steve, Bruce, and Tony try to extract the Tesseract and Sceptre from their own hands in the wake of the climactic battle of the first The Avengers (2012). This goes sideways as Loki (Tom Hiddleston) manages to use the Tesseract to escape, forcing Tony and Steve to take an even bigger risk in travelling back to 1970 to grab the Tesseract from an army base, cueing scenes where Tony encounters his father Howard (John Slattery) and Steve catches sight of eternal flame Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). Meanwhile Thor has a salutary encounter with his mother Frigga (Rene Russo), as he and Rocket try to extract the Aether amidst the chaos of Thor: The Dark World (2015). And Natasha and Clint are soon faced with the same agonised sacrificial proposition Thanos and Gamora passed through as they move to obtain the Soul Stone.
With its general purpose of providing a “satisfying” conclusion to several major facets of the franchise, and given how frothy and disposable many previous MCU instalments have been, Endgame seems particularly like a delivery at last on a long-withheld promise to present a truly meaty epic of life and death. And, once more to be fair, it delivers this to a certain extent: this is a story where miracles can be accomplished but also some hard losses must be countenanced. In this regard Endgame partly reveals the previous film as a fake-out, to get us to accept the latter in exchange for the former. So much of Endgame is devoted to heart-to-hearts and teary encounters, like the A.E.W. Mason-like encounter between Tony and his father who looks rather younger and less life-battered than he does as he admits to anxiety over his imminent fatherhood, or Thor’s reunion with his preternaturally informed and accepting mother. But too much of this is a daisy-chain of recapitulations of aspects already thoroughly worked through, posing as emotional epiphanies and resolutions, rather than genuinely engaging with the chemistry of the heroes, which is fragmented and diffused by a storyline that feels too often like the Marvel creative team bragging. Look how great we were at putting all this infrastructure in motion; see how much we thought about all this? Meanwhile the things that actually matter to these characters in their immediate contexts, like the lovers and pals who die throughout or prove permanently changed, skid by as momentary events.
Yes, Endgame does offer a triumph for the contemporary nerd culture fetish for seeing parts in relationship to a whole on the level of story mechanics and trope disposition. But it also epitomises how much the series has tended to tread water in regards to its more basic themes and players, to the extent where it’s still doing it even as it sends some beloved characters off to the undiscovered country. I was reminded of the bitterest failure of Logan (2017), where that film’s hero was forced again to retrace the arc of reluctant hero after doing that two or three times before, in a way that suggested less a tragic sense of personal devolution than of the stultifying beats of current Hollywood screenwriting styles. So here again we get Tony dealing with daddy issues and Thor again struggling with his identity. The most interesting new dramatic element here is seeing Nebula battling her literalised past self as tyrant’s slavish, sadomasochistic weapon, but this subplot resolves in a truly inept and paradox-provoking manner, as indeed does the plot as a whole. It’s understandable that the filmmakers would want to exploit Hemsworth’s evolving talents for self-satirising humour, and there is a vein of tragicomic gold in the sight of a paunchy, shaggy Thor who’s an emotional wreck. But the version we get of the character here is stupid, a betrayal of just about everything we’ve been told he stands for, and what his experiences have so far added up to.
And that’s the problem with this series in a nutshell: things happen, transformations occur, but they don’t seem to actually matter that much. The ultimate death of some of the core characters betrays less a sense of reaching the end of their evolutions as people than admission of the fact they can’t evolve at all. And when they do develop, like Bruce-Hulk, well, they tend to get pretty silly and extraneous. The most surprising and compelling aspects of Infinity War, like making the villain its protagonist, and its manner of piling up its cast in unfamiliar situations with giddy and reckless abandon that felt genuinely childlike, here give way to a movie that runs in circles a little too long before delivering the requisite colossal finale as a chaotic and poorly thought-through grab-bag of random brawls and characters. There's a strong feeling of deja vu, like you’re watching the act of a magician who does their best trick at the start and the rest is just variations. The Russos’ touch proved effective on Infinity War with their sense of texture in the small-scale stuff and stolid practicality in the face of the grander business. But here they prove total duds at contouring grace notes into overall story thrust; the truly epic is far, far beyond their purview. That’s partly because the story, whilst very busy, is actually rather self-defeating. The plot affects cleverness and intricacy as the answer to pulverising might, but fails to actually present those qualities.
We’ve got heroes of the present battling villains of the past with the consequence of sucking the story dry of true urgency. Endgame’s great length proves less to be an earned product of its true complexity and due weightiness than because it’s totally in thrall to a televisual approach to character interaction. It can’t summarise emotional experience visually and so must deliver everything on the level of dialogue. Indeed, despite the heft of production and special effects spectacle, Endgame might finally represent the total conquest of blockbuster cinema by the televisual. It has no design, no authentic aesthetic to communicate its messages and present an artwork that exists as more than the sum of its gestures and elements. Only stuff, stuff, and more stuff, to be watched but not seen. Which is not to say there aren’t plenty of fun asides to reward fans or even those who have just stuck out the franchise for the sake of occasional interludes of zippy entertainment. As usual there are dashes of effervescent humour, like Scott struggling yet again with being the hero no-one knows, Steve pausing to consider his own rear-end, or the newly cool hybrid Hulk going through the motions of smashing things – a particularly funny moment for the otherwise underemployed Ruffalo. Some long-mooted twists, as when Steve finally proves he can wield Thor’s recovered Mjolnir, arrive on cue and offer their little pulse of gratification before becoming more noise.
The long-delayed moment where the entire cast finally returns and confronts Thanos and his invading host is likewise properly and genuinely rousing. But once this piece of storytelling legerdemain is accomplished, Endgame falls in a heap even as it’s finally delivering the prerequisite big finish. This time around Thanos is back to being another one-dimensional baddie, his eventual defeat not conceded any of the notes of weird pathos he was allowed in Infinity War, and just how this works after all the breathless talk about timelines is left more than a bit vague. Even Justice League (2017) did a better job of portraying its heroes effectively combining their powers to bring down the bad guy; here it’s a visually slapdash, madly clumsy scramble. The script contrives to keep Carol, who’s exponentially more powerful than the other regulars, out of the story until a fitting moment for her to play deus-ex-machina. That wasn’t a bad idea, but it also feels like it was a bit of calculation by the Russos and the screenwriters to get around the fact that she’s an intolerably flat character for being rather too perfect amongst all these overcharged misfits and misbegotten demi-gods. The gestures towards moving on to a new generation include some that have force in their symbolic implications, like Steve handing over the Captain America mantle to Sam ‘Falcon’ Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Having the new roster of female heroes back up Carol in the big fight is by contrast excruciatingly ill-judged, both in its meme-like self-congratulation and also considering half of these characters, like Iron Pepper Potts, have no history and probably no future as genuinely realised heroes.
The final survey of the reunited survivors sees them all carefully segregated according to their franchise wings in what looks a bit suspiciously like some post-production cut and paste. This shot felt just a little too painfully revealing of the ultimate weakness of the film and the MCU as a whole: it’s the right gesture, but one offered without a sense of genuine intimacy or poignancy, no ragged edges or strangeness, just a plain, flavourless display of how many movie stars the franchise still has at its beck and call. At least Endgame does confront the end of the road for some of the franchise’s mainstays with good grace, giving Natasha and Tony heroically self-sacrificing ends and allowing Steve an extraordinary second chance at living the life he wanted, returning at the end from a time travel mission to return the stones as a wizened old man who stopped off for a few decades to live in connubial bliss with Peggy. You’d have to have a heart of stone if you’ve watched all these characters for over a decade now not to feel a little misty, although god help me the film doesn’t really deserve such emotional connection. Natasha’s death replays Gamora’s except as a willing fate, an unexpected end for a character who always seemed like the Avengers’ most paradoxically hard-edged member, and at least doesn’t feel like a retread, in the way Tony’s death does, as he’s already been around that lap a couple of times. Aged Steve’s return looks and feels a bit too much like a sentimental, lazily-shot TV commercial for seniors’ insurance, but it’s still affecting, and bears out one of the more unexpected, off-hand references earlier in the film, when Jeannot Szwarc’s romantic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time (1980) was included in the ranks of time travel movies: the very finish of Endgame aims for similar reaches of virtually metaphysical transcendence of time through love. It’s a nice place to leave the franchise, and I, like others I suspect, might be perfectly happy to part ways with it there.
Well, let's look at it plainly… What exactly is the MCU's one genuine mark of exceptionalism if not the unprecedented volume of characters and subplots that have been accessorized into a single shared continuity? Volume, and consistency in commercial-surface appearances. That's pretty much it. There is no real myth here, only branding. A grand studio vision, no doubt, but not necessarily a storytelling/filmmaking one. What might actually constitute myth in genre cinema? Something holistic in execution, for starters, that conveys through sci-fi/fantasy 'hero tales' a clear-enough psychology; something elemental with fear, awe, old wisdoms, cautionary tales etc. It doesn't have to do all these things outright nor categorically, just tap into the vein of such to a degree that resonates.
ReplyDeleteThe Matrix trilogy, for an example, on which I did read your thoughts over at Film Freedonia, and with more or less the same takeaway. It's hardly a perfect set and has long since grown dated with a number of end-millennium fetishes, but there remains about it proclivities deep and raw, and with a unified directorial vision that stakes its own movieverse. Sci-fi dreamscapes strive to make-and-maintain a chain of impressions, motifs are embolden, while emotional payoffs conclude primarily (successfully or not) on high-conceptual through-lines.
With these big MCU crossovers by comparison the dramatic investment is merely in the franchising itself: accessorized likables make their appearance in turn -- are each afforded their "moments" proportionately -- and we cheer, gasp or lament as a result. Where there exists any traces of a (potentially affecting) thematic structure and world-building tapestry, they do so in order to serve this process, not the other way around. The question, then, concerns what the custodial Russos were to do with a final act that is more Homeric in stature than it is in substance. Simply, it seems they've done everything they could. I sorta liked Endgame as much as I did Infinity War (or any of these Marvel movies at their best) in fits and starts, for the miscellanea of ideas or gestures that only ever work in isolation.
Thor is Thor until he's a silly ass for a while, or neurotic, until he's then Thor again. While fun watching Hemsworth elevate his signature role to a performance art à la Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, these handicaps never really prove all that consequential either way; a plus-size waistline never seems to diminish his swing, anyways. Another instance is the demi-apocalypse, as you call it, where I thought was best illustrated not with Steve Rogers’ survival group sessions but during Scott Lang’s initial reorientation, highlighting a rare use of visually staged atmosphere as the latter frantically scans a San Francisco park memorial for his daughter’s name and roams dilapidated neighborhoods, asking a kid passerby on a bike just what the hell is going on only to be answered with a cold stare of embitterment; a stirring, accumulated sequence in the way it contrasts one of our most affable MCU heroes with a horrifying unreality …but then, a few scenes later, tonally discarded in favor of the habitual drollery with Casual Hulk in a diner taking selfies with kids, as if the whole post-Thanos snap is just another thing.
Whether by choice or by showrunner insistence, the Russos can’t commit all that evocatively to a chosen tone via storied outcome equal to, say, Snyder with Batman v Superman. In place of such fidelity, the movie’s meaty section can only ever attempt to rouse audiences with a tour of previous franchise installments, a pseudo-clever time travel plotline device that might’ve impressed me more if a) Zemeckis hadn’t already dared it with greater precision 30 years ago in Back to the Future Part II (though I appreciated the ironic nod), and b) it didn’t vaguely, gradually come off like one of those obligatory highlight reel episodes of an 80s sitcom where the main cast is stuck in a storm cellar or some bullshit as an excuse to reminisce i.e., replay clips from past seasons. Sure, the Avengers team cramped together in a room like accountants doing meta-franchise Infinity Stone homework or Cap subverting elevator brawl expectations with a “Hail Hydra” password made for canny scripting but, as you detail, nothing is gained throughout this mid act in terms of storytelling. It’s mostly just recycled angst involving dads and sons, squabbling sisters, lost lovers and godly impotence, save for one compelling development that has the Ancient One astro-bitch-slapping Banner before cautioning him on the dangers of removing the Stones from their respective histories.
ReplyDeleteThis point raised an eyebrow in how it suggested the always inevitability of cosmic cost to whatever the heroic quest. But then it, too, is neutered in such a lazy afterthought plot wrap-up that left me dumbfounded. Excuse me, but we’re supposed accept that all the logistical zigzagging, subterfuge and sacrifice demanded by the time heist -- that required a team effort and at least an hour’s worth of narrative -- the very risk of cataclysmic temporality itself as stressed by the Ancient One, is neatly resolved just by having Cap disappear for 5 seconds before showing up on a nearby park bench with his AARP card? Isn’t there like a whole other movie there? If only Doc and Marty had it so easy returning the sports almanac…
And speaking of sacrifices, I for one found Black Widow’s demise oddly flimsy. I dunno. It just rang false. I get her whole ‘red ledger’ disposition established in the 2012 entry as a point of character conclusion, but it’s also one that by now already feels absolved, and having Gamora revived from the same fate one or two subplots down the hall (no matter the scripted circumstances) robs the scene dramatically. Moreover, it feels like an uninspired misuse of Widow’s contribution to the series—the team’s hidden dagger who, flying under the radar, has earned more screen time than any other MCU heroine, and yet is denied her rightful place at the foreground of that big finale Girl Power assault …or with keener set-piece dramatics coulda-shoulda been said dagger in Thanos’ back whilst he was dealing with all the superpowered babes upfront. Oh well. At least ScarJo is still getting her Black Widow standalone, hopefully affording her the spotlight to do what she does best with her Rorschach poker face persona.
I’m rambling at this point. My standing criticisms against the MCU have since been articulated (and better posited by you and others) to the extent that I’m just repeating myself. I certainly wasn’t holding my nose up to the movie. With current ticket prices and the hassle of reserving a three-hour screening, I wanted nothing but to enjoy the venue experience. And I did. I went along for the ride, getting as much from an enthusiastic audience (the auditorium was sold-out) as I did the movie itself. I shared in, generally, with the same reactions as everyone else, even if mine were somewhat more muted and with my higher functions always conscious to the hollowness of it all. Fleeting as they are, Endgame is not without its delectables.
ReplyDeleteNot even Captain Marvel irked me this time around (yes, I’ll take my Brie shorthaired, thank you) in that her one-note character plays better here as a bookending cosmic force of nature, though having, for example, Tessa Thompson back as Valkyrie makes for a comparison of one of these self-satisfied Marvel superheroine types who can still exude her own charm. While I wish Cumberbatch was given more to do, he nonetheless delivers what I consider the most poised split-moment throughout the whole three-hour jamboree where, amidst the chaos, Strange signals Stark with a single rising index, the fruition of his one-in-fourteen-million stratagem that afforded the movie its very title, and with Stark realizing the totality of it. And I suppose we must tip our hats to RDJ. Even after nine movies I still get a kick outta watching him lubricate the ridiculous with his language flexibilities, both verbal and behavioral, while maintaining a ballast of dramatic credibility. If Stark’s passing came off little more than a formality, it’s at least that much more affecting once his autographed silhouette comes around as the final entry of those nifty closing credits, warranting a nod of approval for movie star sportsmanship. An epitome, really: in place of pop-myth it is the charisma of casting upon which this franchise excels, if it excels at all.
The upcoming Dark Phoenix is now looking evermore like Marvel’s redheaded stepchild (literally, in this case) but on the same token I find myself eager to engage its Saturday morning cartoon schlock sans the illusory power of branding legacy trying to convince me it’s something more.
Hi CK. I was wondering what you’d make of this film and you didn’t disappoint. Yes, it ultimately seems true that this film, and the series, represent a total and effective rejection not just of any hope of making a proper pop mythology but also of any kind of specific artistic viewpoint a la the Wachowskis or Lucas or Jackson or Snyder or however many others. I definitely agree about the strength of the relatively downplayed Scott’s-eye-view of the aftermath and the incongruity of then going for laughs with Bruce-Hulk.
ReplyDeleteFrankly when I knew the time travel them was being introduced I cringed a little bit because I knew as if by telepathy that it would involve Back to the Future II riffing and the very thought was intolerably boring to me; and then the Russos didn’t even try for anything nearly so intricate as some of the near-miss paradoxes of that film. Not only am I not sorry that the replacing-the-stones bit was glossed over, I wish they’d cut that whole movement down to a fast and witty montage. Which, if you took out all the cliché parental meetings, is about what you’d have.
I also agree that Black Widow’s end feels weirdly off the mark in some manner. It just to emphasise that she was always kind of disposable in this setting, particularly compared to family man Hawkeye – yes, an unmarried woman is disposable! – and just seeming off for her general character. At least in how it played out. Also, it felt so lazy on a story level to circle us back to that point without thinking up a new twist for it. Why didn’t Nebula warn them about when she knew enough to tell past-Gamora? Also it seems a bit weird and clumsy to kill off the character and then circle back for an origin flick. Which hints that maybe this wipe-out isn’t as permanent as it pretends, which would be an egregious cheat. The movie’s deaths were all absent actual pain – no-one died with a goal unfulfilled or with a gasp of so-close-yet-so-far anguish. So the chief result of lamenting them was that if we enjoyed the actors’ performances then we’re bummed we won’t get to see them again.
I’d also like to have seen more of Strange – god knows I didn’t like his standalone much but Cumberbatch has fun in the part and frankly as Downey had been getting on my nerves for a few entries now I’d’ve gladly had them swap screen time. The one part of Downey’s performance that I really liked, and which indeed should’ve been tapped to fuel this film much more, was his spell of anger at Cap when they were reunited; there was a sense of something deeply personal and consequential given the long arc of the movies. But yeah, it got pissed away.