One of the amazing things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in an age with a twenty-four-hour news cycle, with more sources for news than you can shake a smartphone at, and with interest in movies based on superheroes at an all-time high—not to mention the sheer number of people involved in making these films—is how tight a lid they’ve kept on information. Even though Infinity War and Endgame were filmed back to back, and had long post-production times—long enough, in fact, that Captain Marvel was made after these two, and yet was released between them—very little information came out about either until they were released. Hell, the title of Endgame wasn’t released until December 2018, eight months after Infinity War hit theatres.
And then it took three months after Endgame’s release for any news about any of the 2020 and beyond films to be released. In part, that was because so much happened in Endgame, and so much of the status quo was upended.
While this movie was originally announced as Infinity War Part 2, at some point they declared that it wasn’t going to be a two-part movie, that this movie would get its own name. While they were right up to a point—Infinity War did have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and came to a conclusion (if not a happy one)—this is still, really, a two-part story. But giving each their own distinctive title makes sense, because the movies are indeed separate.
The film has, at once, a smaller and bigger cast. For most of the movie, we just get those who weren’t dusted at the end of Infinity War, plus some others. But then, for the big climactic battle against Thanos and his minions, it’s all hands on deck.
At the heart of the movie, though, is time travel. Time travel has been part of the Marvel Comics Universe since Fantastic Four #5 by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, which introduced Doctor Doom. Victor von Doom created a time machine, and sent the FF back in time to retrieve Blackbeard’s treasure. Time travel has been part of many Marvel stories, including classics ranging from “Days of Future Past” by Chris Claremont & John Byrne in Uncanny X-Men #141-142 and its various sequels and related tales in assorted mutant books; to Avengers Forever by Kurt Busiek & Carlos Pacheco; to various stories involving Kang the Conqueror, the original Guardians of the Galaxy, Cable, Bishop, Two-Gun Kid, and other folks from different times who would wind up in the present, or whom our heroes would visit on time-travel adventures of their own.
However, the MCU’s version of time travel used a different mode, one from the two Ant–Man movies—the quantum realm, itself based on something else introduced in a battle between the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom, the Microverse. First seen in Fantastic Four #16, also by Lee & Kirby, the Microverse was the home of the Micronauts (at least when Marvel had the rights to that toy set; their comic was very popular, written primarily by Bill Mantlo, with art by Michael Golden and Jackson Guice, among others), and has been visited by Henry Pym in his various identities as well as the FF and more.
And so Endgame included the “time heists,” which inserted our heroes into previous movies, including Avengers (mostly taking place between the end of the Battle of New York and the go-their-separate-ways scene in Central Park), Thor: The Dark World (taking place between Jane Foster being brought to Asgard and Frigga’s death), and Guardians of the Galaxy (taking place during the opening-credits scene of the movie).
In addition, we get the first MCU versions of two variations on characters from the comics. Clint Barton takes on the Ronin role that Hawkeye adopted after he was killed and resurrected as part of the “Disassembled” storyline. And Bruce Banner is now the “Professor Hulk” version, first seen in The Incredible Hulk #377 by Peter David & Dale Keown in 1991, in which David built on the childhood trauma established in Incredible Hulk #312 by Bill Mantlo & Mike Mignola to diagnose Banner with what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder, with Bruce Banner, the gray Hulk (the original version of the Hulk, who was eloquent, if obnoxious), and the green Hulk (the most well-known version, who talks like a four-year-old) as the three personalities. In the comics, Doc Samson was able to merge Banner’s personalities into a single version, with the green Hulk’s looks and strength, Banner’s brains, and the gray Hulk’s attitude. This proved a very popular version of the Hulk, and has been returned to in the comics any number of times, referred to as “Professor Hulk.” Mark Ruffalo gets to play that version for most of this movie.
Back from Captain Marvel are Brie Larson as Captain Marvel and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Back from Ant-Man & The Wasp are Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, Evangeline Lilly as the Wasp, Michael Douglas as Henry Pym, Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet van Dyne, and the character of Cassie Lang, now played by Emma Fuhrmann. Back from Black Panther is Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda. Back from Thor: Ragnarok are Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie and Taika Waititi as Korg. Back from Spider-Man: Homecoming are Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan and Marisa Tomei as May Parker. Back from Doctor Strange is Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One. Back from Captain America: Civil War are Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, John Slattery as Howard Stark, and Frank Grillo as Brock Rumlow. Back from Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 are Sean Gunn as Kraglin, Sylvester Stallone as Stakar Ogord, Michelle Yeoh as Aleta Ogord, Michael Rosenbaum as Martinex, and Ving Rhames as Charlie-27 (all in brief blink-and-you-miss-it cameos). Back from Avengers: Age of Ultron are Linda Cardellini as Laura Barton, Ben Sakamoto as Cooper Barton, and the character of Lila Barton, now played by Ava Russo (daughter of co-director Joe Russo). Back from Thor: The Dark World are Rene Russo as Frigga and Natalie Portman as Jane Foster (visually, Portman was seen via archive footage, but Portman recorded a new voiceover for this movie). Back from the Agent Carter TV series are Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter and James D’Arcy as Edwin Jarvis. Back from Captain America: The Winter Soldier are Robert Redford as Alexander Pierce, Callan Mulvey as Jack Rollins, and Maximiliano Hernández as Jasper Sitwell. Back from Iron Man 3 is Ty Simpkins as Harley Keener.
And back from Infinity War is, well, pretty much everyone else.
Introduced in this film are Alexandra Rabe as Morgan Stark and Hiroyuki Sanada as the Yakuza boss Barton goes after.
“Let’s go get this son of a bitch”
Avengers: Endgame
Written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: April 26, 2019
We look in on the Barton family, with Clint Barton wearing an ankle bracelet that looks very much like the one Scott Lang was wearing in Ant-Man & The Wasp. He’s teaching his daughter Lana how to shoot with a bow (she gets a bull’s eye), while Laura makes hot dogs for them and the two boys (including Nate, with whom Laura was pregnant when last we saw her in Avengers: Age of Ultron).
Then Thanos snaps his fingers, and Laura and Barton’s three kids are all dusted.
A month or so after the snap, and we see Tony Stark and Nebula on the Guardians of the Galaxy’s ship playing flick football (with “Dear Mr. Fantasy” by Traffic playing), and the air is running out.
But then Carol Danvers shows up and brings them back to Earth.
Stark is reunited with Pepper Potts as well as what’s left of the Avengers (Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, James Rhodes, Bruce Banner, and Thor) and the Guardians (Rocket, along with Nebula). Stark rants and raves about how he wanted a suit of armor around the world, and nobody listened to him, and how he said they’d lose and Cap said, “then we lose together,” and then they weren’t together. And then Stark collapses.
While Stark has no idea where Thanos is, Nebula and Rocket do. Thanos told Nebula he wanted to retire to a garden after saving the universe, and Rocket found an energy surge similar to the unique one that went off from Earth when Thanos snapped his fingers in Wakanda on a garden planet.
They head there in the Guardians’ ship (which Rocket has repaired) and find Thanos all alone—no army, no nothing. Thanos announces that he’s destroyed the stones—that was the energy surge Rocket detected—and so Thor cuts his head off.
Five years pass.
In New York, Rogers is leading group therapy sessions for people. He’s telling them they have to move on, the way he did when he woke up seven decades out of his own era.
In San Francisco, Scott Lang finally finds his way out of the quantum realm, only to find himself and the X-Con Security van in a storage unit. For him, it’s five hours after he went in—but it’s five years later in the real world, and the place is a mess. Houses and cars are abandoned, and garbage isn’t being picked up consistently. Golden Gate Park has a memorial for “the vanished,” and while Lang is relieved to see that Cassie’s name isn’t on it, his name is. He goes to his house to find Cassie there—but she’s a teenager now.
In New York, Romanoff is continuing to coordinate superheroic activity from Avengers HQ, and we see her getting updates from Nebula and Rocket, from Danvers, from Okoye, and from Rhodes. Danvers says she won’t be back on Earth any time soon, as there are too many planets that need help in the wake of the snap.
After everyone signs off, Rhodes stays on and talks to Romanoff about the latest batch of corpses they’ve found, which they know is Barton’s work—he’s been killing criminals. Both are conflicted about it.
Rogers shows up and they talk about how neither of them have moved on, but for Romanoff, the Avengers are the only family she’s ever had. She’s found fulfillment as part of the team, even now after all this.
Then Lang shows up in the X-Con van. The time differential between him in the quantum realm and reality is nagging at him, and he thinks that if they harness that chaos, they can travel in time. But that requires scientific expertise none of them have, so they go to the cabin where Stark is now living with Potts (whom he’s married) and their four-year-old daughter Morgan. Stark has built a suit of armor for Potts, though he doesn’t expect that she’ll wear it.
Rogers, Romanoff, and Lang arrive and propose their plan. Stark thinks it’s impossible and crazy and too risky. He has a life now, and he won’t risk it for such a ridiculous idea, particularly since it sounds like Lang wants to save the universe by citing Back to the Future.
They go to their next biggest brain: Banner, who has found a rapprochement with the Hulk and they’re now merged. Banner doesn’t think he has the scientific expertise for this, but he is willing to take a shot.
Stark can’t stop thinking about the problem, especially after looking at the picture of himself and Peter Parker that he keeps in the kitchen, so he works on it—and actually figures it out, to his abject shock. After putting Morgan to bed (after he says “I love you tons,” she replies with “I love you three thousand!”), he talks to Potts. He’s figured it out, and he’s willing to put a pin in it and ignore it if Potts wants him to. But Potts, basically, tells him to go be a hero, because not everyone got the happy ending they got.
Banner modifies the quantum tunnel in Lang’s van to build a time machine, and it doesn’t quite work—he sends Lang through his own timeline, being a teenager and a baby. Stark shows up, says, “You turned Lang into a baby, didn’t you?” and shows that he (a) has a working time-travel GPS and (b) has Cap’s shield.
They need to assemble the troops, as it were. Rocket and Nebula return from space, and Rhodes also comes on his own. (“What’s up, Regular-Sized Man?” he says to Lang.) Rocket comes with Banner to Tønsberg, which is now New Asgard. After the snap, the remains of Asgard’s population (including Valkyrie, who’s a bit freaked out by the new Hulk) settled there, with Thor as their king. However, his kingly duties seem to consist entirely of eating junk food, drinking beer, and playing video games with Korg and Miek. He’s suffering from spectacular PTSD and nearly loses it at the mention of Thanos’s name. However, he agrees to come along when Rocket tells him there’s beer.
Romanoff tracks Barton to Japan, where he kills a high-ranking overlord in the Yakuza. Barton doesn’t wish to be given hope, but he reluctantly goes along anyhow.
Stark, Banner, Rocket, and Nebula construct the time machine, Rocket reminding Stark that he’s only a genius by Earth standards. They only have enough Pym particles to give everyone one round trip each, plus one test. Barton volunteers to be the test subject, and they send him to his own house more than five years previous, and he hears his kids (though he doesn’t get to lay eyes on them before he’s whisked back to the present).
Now they need a plan. Rhodes and Lang think they should go to Thanos as a baby on Titan and kill him, but Banner explains that that will just create an alternate timeline and won’t change their present.
They need to retrieve the stones from the past. They go over the events of previous movies. They know the power stone is on Morag in 2014, where Peter Quill stole it in Guardians of the Galaxy, the time stone is in possession of the sorcerers, as per Doctor Strange, the soul stone has been on Vormir for ages, as established in Avengers: Infinity War, the reality stone is on Asgard when it’s infused in Jane Foster’s bloodstream in Thor: The Dark World, and they all dealt with both the mind stone and the space stone in the Battle of New York in Avengers. It’s Romanoff who realizes that the time stone is in the sanctum sanctorum in New York City, which means half the stones were in New York in 2012.
They break up into three teams. One goes to New York in 2012, another to Morag in 2014 (that team will then split, with one sub-team going to Vormir), and the third to Asgard in 2013.
New York, 2012: Rogers, Stark, Lang, and Banner arrive in Manhattan while the Avengers are fighting the Chitauri and Loki. Banner heads downtown hoping to find Strange, but instead finds the Ancient One, who declares that Stephen Strange is performing surgery elsewhere in town. Banner realizes that she guards the time stone, and he needs it. The Ancient One won’t give it up, and shoves Banner’s astral form outside his body the same way she did to Strange when she met him.
Asgard, 2013: Thor and Rocket arrive. The plan is for Thor to distract Foster while Rocket drains the Aether from her, but Thor instead wants to go to the wine cellar. He starts to have a panic attack, and Rocket has to talk him down.
Deep space, 2014: Rhodes, Nebula, Romanoff, and Barton arrive on Morag in a ship that presumably Nebula took them to. Rhodes and Nebula stay there and wait for Quill’s arrival so he’ll lead them to the stone, while Romanoff and Barton head off to Vormir.
Elsewhere in 2014, Nebula and Gamora are on a mission for Thanos, and 2014 Nebula’s mind is flooded with images from 2023 Nebula—they’re linked by the cybernetic implants Thanos put in her. Thanos is about to send Ronan to retrieve the power stone, as we saw happen in Guardians of the Galaxy, but he changes his mind upon seeing what the 2023 Nebula has experienced.
New York, 2012: In the aftermath of the battle, Loki is handcuffed and taken downstairs, along with both the Tesseract and the scepter. Some S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, led by Brock Rumlow and Jasper Sitwell, take the scepter. All the Avengers take Loki into the elevator (save for the Hulk, who’s too heavy and Rogers, who’s going to coordinate search-and-rescue). The Hulk, reluctantly and angrily, takes the stairs.
Stark and a miniaturized Lang watch, and Lang sits on Stark’s person until they get downstairs. (While observing, Stark says that the suit Rogers wore then didn’t do a thing for his ass. Lang disagrees, declaring, “That’s America’s ass!”)
2023 Rogers enters the elevator with Rumlow and Sitwell and says the secretary asked him to take charge of the scepter, and whispers “Hail Hydra” as a bonafide.
Downstairs, Secretary Alexander Pierce tries to take custody of Loki and the Tesseract, but Thor refuses. As a distraction, Lang goes into the ARC reactor in 2012 Stark’s chest and causes a cardiac infarction. In the confusion, 2023 Stark (disguised as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent) grabs the Tesseract—but then the Hulk crashes through the staircase door and sends the case flying. While everyone’s trying to revive 2012 Stark, Loki grabs the Tesseract and disappears through a portal.
After exiting the elevator, 2023 Rogers encounters 2012 Rogers, who thinks he’s found Loki (who created the illusion that he was Rogers earlier). They fight, with 2012 Rogers wanting to know where “Loki” got the compass with the picture of Peggy Carter. 2023 Rogers distracts his younger self long enough to use the scepter on him. As he walks off, he admires his prone form. (“That is America’s ass.”)
Banner’s losing his argument with the Ancient One—until he says that Strange gave up the time stone to Thanos willingly. The Ancient One knows from the time stone that Strange is destined to be a great sorcerer, so she trusts that he did what he did for a reason, and gives Banner the stone.
Thanos’s ship, 2014: Ebony Maw examines 2014 Nebula and discovers that her neural network is entangled with that of 2023 Nebula, whose memories indicate that she’s now working with the Avengers—the same team of heroes who stymied Thanos’s efforts on Earth two years previous. Thanos watches, basically, all of Infinity War and Endgame.
Asgard, 2013: Thor has snuck away from Rocket and is watching Frigga, who then finds him hiding behind a pillar. The daughter of witches, she instantly recognizes that this is a Thor from the future. And sometimes when you’re hurting, you need your Mommy, and Thor pours his heart out. She gives him a pep talk while Rocket extracts the Aether from Foster by himself. Once he’s successful, Thor takes a shot and summons Mjolnir, which is still intact in this era. It comes to him, and Thor cries with joy to realize that he’s still worthy to wield it.
Morag, 2014: Rhodes and 2023 Nebula watch Quill dance across the field dancing to “Come and Get Your Love,” except he’s wearing headphones, so they can’t hear the music, they just see the dancing. (“So, he’s an idiot.” “Yes.”)
They knock him out and take his lockpick, stealing the power stone, Nebula severely damaging her mechanical left hand to retrieve it. Rhodes goes back with the stone, but Nebula can’t go back thanks to interference from her 2014 counterpart. Realizing that 2014 Thanos now knows everything, she tries to contact Romanoff and Barton, but is instead captured by Thanos.
New York, 2012: Stark and Lang inform Rogers that they’ve failed and the Tesseract is gone with Loki, somewhere. They only have enough Pym particles for one trip back each, so they’re screwed. But then Stark realizes he knows where there might be both. S.H.I.E.L.D. has had custody of the Tesseract since World War II (except for the period between the late 1980s when they lent it to Mar-Vell and when Goose horked it up some time after 1995, anyhow), and Pym worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. up until 1989. They go back to Camp Lehigh in 1970, right before Stark was born.
New Jersey, 1970: Stark is wearing a suit and has his MIT ID for some reason, while Rogers puts on an Army uniform. They ride down in an elevator with a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Stark finds the Tesseract and puts it in a briefcase, but then also bumps into his father. Identifying himself as Howard Potts, a visiting professor from MIT, they talk for a bit, in particular about Howard Stark’s wife being about to give birth (to Stark himself, of course), while Stark talks about his own recent foray into fatherhood.
Rogers, meanwhile, calls Pym to the mailroom about a package that’s glowing, which gets him out long enough for Rogers to swipe some Pym particles, which they can use to get home.
The agent in the elevator thinks something’s fishy about Rogers and Stark, and so calls the MPs. Rogers slips into the director’s office to hide, where he sees Peggy Carter, who was running S.H.I.E.L.D. at this point.
Howard Stark finishes his chat with “Howard Potts,” who surprises him with a hug and a thank-you—for, Stark hastily amends, all he’s done for the country. Then he and Rogers head home.
Morag, 2014: 2014 Nebula and 2014 Gamora beat up on 2023 Nebula. 2014 Nebula is disgusted by her counterpart’s behavior, while 2023 Nebula tries to convince Gamora that she needs to switch sides, especially once she explains how, in her future, Thanos found the soul stone.
Vormir, 2014: Romanoff and Barton arrive at Vormir and are confronted by the Red Skull, who identifies them as “Natasha, daughter of Ivan” and “Clint, son of Edith.” It becomes clear that one of them must sacrifice themselves to get the stone. Barton tells her not to necessarily believe this guy because he knows her father’s name, and she quietly says, “I didn’t.”
They fight over who gets the right to sacrifice their life, and Romanoff “wins” and dies, leaving Barton with the soul stone.
Avengers HQ, 2023: Everyone comes back—except for Romanoff, who’s dead on Vormir, and 2023 Nebula, who’s been replaced by 2014 Nebula.
First they hold a memorial for Romanoff (though Thor refuses to accept that she’s all dead, figuring she’s only mostly dead and they can bring her back with the stones). Then they put the stones into the Iron Man gauntlet that Stark has built. Then they argue over who will wield it—Thor thinks it should be him, but Banner says it has to be him. The snap burned Thanos on half his body—the Hulk is the only one who has a chance of surviving.
Everyone suits up, and Stark has F.R.I.D.A.Y. put the compound in defense mode. Banner puts on the gauntlet and then screams in agony from all the power coursing through his body, but he snaps his fingers.
A minute later, Barton’s cell phone rings with a call from his wife, who is very confused.
It worked.
But while they were restoring half the living things in the universe, 2014 Nebula powers up the time machine and brings Thanos’s ship through, which destroys the time machine. Then Thanos’s ship fires on the compound.
Banner, Rhodes, and Rocket are buried far underground, with Lang heading down to rescue them. Barton and the gauntlet are elsewhere, and Thanos’s Chitauri minions start chasing him down for the gauntlet.
Thanos sends 2014 Nebula after the stones, while 2023 Nebula convinces 2014 Gamora to join the good guys.
Thor summons both Stormbreaker and Mjolnir to his side, and he’s now in Asgardian armor. He, Stark, and Rogers confront Thanos. At one point, Rogers picks up Mjolnir, prompting an “I knew it!” from Thor.
2014 Nebula captures Barton and grabs the gauntlet, but then 2014 Gamora and 2023 Nebula stop her. Seeing no other choice, 2023 Nebula kills her younger self.
Rogers, Stark, and Thor do their best, but are defeated, Cap’s shield shattered. Thanos declares that, while all his other murders weren’t personal, he’s going to enjoy destroying Earth.
But then Rogers’s earpiece crackles with a signal from Sam Wilson, who says, “On your left.”
And behind him and to his left, a mystic portal opens, and T’Challa, Shuri, and Okoye step through, followed by Sam Wilson, M’Baku and a mess of Wakandan soldiers, Wanda Maximoff, Bucky Barnes, and Groot.
More portals open: Quill, Drax, Mantis, and Peter Parker come through with Doctor Stephen Strange. The armies of Asgard, led by the Valkyrie. Wong and a mess of sorcerers. The Ravagers. Hope van Dyne and Pepper Potts, the latter in the blue armor Stark was making for her.
And then Lang grows out of the wreckage of the compound holding Banner, Rhodes, and Rocket in his hand.
T’Challa leads another “Yibambe!” chant and then Rogers says, “Avengers—assemble.”
The battle is joined.
At one point, Parker fills Stark in on what happened when he reappeared alongside the Guardians and Strange. Stark cuts him off and hugs him.
2014 Gamora saves Quill’s life. Quill is shocked to see she’s alive, and then gets kneed in the groin for his familiarity.
They need to send Thanos back to 2014, but the time machine’s busted. Lang points out that they’ve got another quantum tunnel, and he activates the “La Cucaracha” horn on the X-Con Security van. Lang and van Dyne head there to activate it.
Barton still has the gauntlet, and he starts a game of gauntlet rugby. He passes it to T’Challa, who is stopped by Maw, so T’Challa passes it to Parker, who evades capture for a bit.
Thanos orders his ship to fire on the ground. Wong and the sorcerers protect everyone, but that effectively takes them out of the fight—Strange also, as he has to hold the river back.
Stark asks Strange if this was the future he saw where they won, and Strange says he can’t answer.
Maximoff confronts Thanos, accusing him of taking everything from her. This version of Thanos hasn’t met her yet and says he has no idea who she is, and Maximoff declares that he’ll learn.
Thanos’s ship stops firing on the ground and turns toward orbit, confusing our heroes. F.R.I.D.A.Y. informs Stark that there’s something entering the atmosphere—it’s Danvers. Thanos’s ship fires on her to no avail, and she utterly trashes Thanos’s vessel.
Danvers takes the gauntlet from Parker and then plows through, while Valkyrie, Maximoff, van Dyne, Potts, Okoye, Shuri, Nebula, Gamora, and Mantis help clear her path.
Thanos blows up the X-Con van just as Danvers is approaching it, causing her to lose the gauntlet. He grabs it, but is only able to fight off Danvers when he removes the power stone from the gauntlet and hits her with it.
Rogers, Thor, and Stark once again try to stop Thanos, but he blasts them away. Strange looks over at Stark and holds up one finger.
Stark goes after Thanos again, grabbing the gauntlet and struggling for it, but Thanos tosses him aside again. However, the gauntlet and the Iron Man armor are the same tech built by the same guy—unbeknownst to Thanos, Stark shifted the stones to his armor while they struggled. Thanos says, “I am inevitable” and snaps his fingers—and nothing happens, because his gauntlet is empty.
The stones now part of Stark’s armor, he says, “I am Iron Man,” and snaps his fingers.
Thanos and all his forces fall to dust. The power overwhelms Stark and, with his best friend (Rhodes), his protégé (Parker), and his wife (Potts) by his side, he dies, knowing he saved the world.
Barton returns home to his family. Parker returns to Midtown High and is reunited with Ned. Lang and van Dyne are seen together with Cassie, while T’Challa looks out over Wakanda with Ramonda and Shuri.
Stark made a recording before going off on the “time heists,” and Morgan, Potts, Rhodes, and Happy Hogan watch it before having Stark’s memorial service at their cabin. Also in attendance are most everyone who was in the final battle, along with Maria Hill, Thaddeus Ross, May Parker, Harley Keener, Henry Pym, Janet van Dyne, and Nick Fury.
Potts sends a wreath of flowers out into the water, the centerpiece of which is the original ARC reactor in the container that reads “PROOF THAT TONY STARK HAS A HEART.”
Barton and Maximoff have a moment to mourn Romanoff and the Vision. Hogan sits with Morgan, who declares that she’s hungry and wants a cheeseburger, and Hogan promises her all the cheeseburgers she wants.
In Tønsberg, Thor cedes the throne to Valkyrie, since she was really running things anyhow. He needs to be a hero, not a king, and certainly not a drunken absentee king. He instead goes off with the Guardians, where he and Quill seem to be vying for leadership, Thor’s protests that Quill is in charge not reassuring Quill in the least, with the other Guardians mostly just amused.
Rogers will go through time and return the stones, as well as Mjolnir. Banner says he tried to revive Romanoff when he snapped his fingers, but it didn’t work. She’s really gone.
Before going, Rogers bids adieu to Wilson and Barnes. His goodbye to Barnes is more final than the “see you soon”-type exchange with Wilson.
After Rogers goes through the time machine, Banner can’t get him back, and while Wilson and Banner are panicking, Barnes isn’t—and then he points out the old man sitting nearby.
It’s a very old Rogers, who decided to stay in the past and live a life. Wilson says he doesn’t want to live in a world without Captain America, but Rogers bequeaths his shield (now once again intact) to him. When Wilson asks about the wedding ring he’s wearing, Rogers keeps mum.
Then we flash back to the late 1940s, where Rogers and Carter finally get their dance.
The credits, in a nice touch, includes the actors playing the original six Avengers each getting a screen that includes their credit, their autograph, and clips from their previous films in the MCU. But no mid- or post-credits scene, aside from the sound of Tony Stark forging his armor from Iron Man.
“Everybody wants a happy ending, right?”
I love this movie and I hate this movie, and I was really worried about rewatching it because I was filled with so many mixed feelings when I saw it in April, and that hasn’t really gotten any better in the months since.
I’ve previously discussed some of the things I love and hate about this movie on this site. I love that there’s at least one reference to every single one of the previous twenty-one films in the cycle. I hate that they seemed to assassinate Steve Rogers’s character in order to give him an artificial happy ending. But there’s a lot more to love and a lot more to hate. And while numerically speaking, there’s more to love, the stuff I hate, I really really hate.
I want to end this piece on a positive note, so I’m gonna start with what I hated the most: the final fate of Natasha Romanoff.
I can think of about half a dozen ways to bring Romanoff back without even trying hard, and it’s perfectly possible that the 2020 Black Widow movie will find a way to do so in a framing sequence or a credits sequence or some such. But while that would obviate the sin Endgame committed with Romanoff, it wouldn’t change the fact that the sin was committed.
There has been a hue and cry to do a Black Widow movie practically since the character was introduced in Iron Man 2 in 2010, and certainly since the character impressed in Avengers in 2012.
We finally got word that a BW film was being filmed, ten years later, and then just as the excitement about that starts to build, Endgame comes out and kills her off. It’s frustrating because Romanoff has a great story in this movie. She leads the Avengers in the post-snap world, coordinating the work of the superheroes, both on Earth and in space. She talks to Rogers about how she was alone her entire life but she found a family with the Avengers. (She didn’t even know her father’s name until the Red Skull told it to her.) And the culmination of this is to—kill her off? Both from a story perspective—seems she should be given the chance to thrive in a fixed world, not just the broken one—and from a marketing perspective—you’ve just cut off all the good will you’ve generated with the overdue production of a BW movie at the knees—this was a mistake.
On top of that, the mourning for her is muted because it happens halfway through the movie when there’s still work to be done, and then it’s overshadowed by Stark’s death at the climax, which becomes the big thing everyone remembers, with Romanoff reduced at the end to a footnote conversation between Barton and Maximoff. (Though given the friendship—and brief romance—between those two in the comics, that scene was entertaining.)
Speaking of Stark, the fates of both him and Rogers are frustrating because you can see the strings. It’s very obvious that Stark dies and Rogers goes off to live a life in the past because Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are done playing those two roles. It feels a little too constructed.
Banner’s transformation into the “Professor Hulk” persona happens off-camera, and that’s even more frustrating, because Banner’s arc through Avengers, Age of Ultron, Ragnarok, and Infinity War was enjoyable as hell, and then the next stage of it happens during the five-year gap with a very unsatisfying explanation while sitting in a diner and taking selfies. Maybe we’ll be lucky and Disney+ will give us a Mark Ruffalo miniseries that adapts Incredible Hulk #377 and shows the process by which he merged the personalities, but I’m not holding my breath.
Having said that, I do love the use of Banner in this film. Prior to this movie, the Hulk smashed Harlem and the Abomination, he smashed the helicarrier and the Chitauri, he smashed Johannesburg and Iron Man, he smashed his opponents in the Grandmaster’s arena and the Fenris Wolf, and he tried to smash Thanos. And yet, he’s the one who restores everyone. The greatest act of construction, of re-creation, of resurrection, comes from the character who is synonymous with destruction. It’s a beautiful thing.
(Banner’s transformation isn’t the only untold story from this movie that really needs to be seen at some point. In the end, Rogers has to put all the stones back, and while I’m sure replacing the scepter, the Tesseract, the time stone, and the power stone were all pretty straightforward, replacing the Aether would involve injecting it back into Jane Foster, which can’t have been fun on any level, and replacing the soul stone involves confronting Rogers’s enemy from World War II—something he’d have no preparation for, since Barton didn’t know he was that guy. These are stories that really really need to be told, y’know?)
When I first saw Endgame, I despised PTSD Thor, as I saw it purely as a source of grade-school humor. (See Sylas Barrett’s excellent piece written shortly after Endgame’s release on this site for a very good takedown of this story choice.) I hated that they focused so much on fat jokes and drunk jokes and such.
But in the months since, and rewatching it now, I’ve softened my view on it. Part of why is because Chris Hemsworth elevates the material above the shallow scripting. Another part is because, while I appreciate very much the issues that Sylas (and many others) had with it, I’ve also seen a lot of people with PTSD sing the praises of Thor’s portrayal in the movie, recognizing their own lives in Thor’s response to failing to stop Thanos (right on top of losing Asgard and so many of his friends and family dying). And part of it is seeing all the people who have been cosplaying PTSD Thor at conventions since the spring.
Part of it might also be seeing it on a smaller screen in my living room with just my wife and cats for company as opposed to on a big screen in a packed theatre, because I was much better able to appreciate Thor’s panic attack in Asgard, his overwhelming relief at realizing he was still worthy to wield Mjolnir, and his insistence that he be the one to snap everyone back, so he can finally save someone and get it right for a change.
But there really needed to be fewer fat jokes. And did they have to spoil Frigga and Thor’s beautiful mother-son chat by ending it with her saying, “Eat a salad”? Seriously?
The big climactic battle with everyone is a bit of a mess. You don’t get much of a sense of the scale of the battle, just individual bits, and it’s so huge as to almost become meaningless. The start of it is excellent, with a reprise of “Yibambe!” and—after being teased with it more than once—finally hearing Captain America say, “Avengers assemble,” but after that it devolves into a CGI mess. There are moments, from the Stark-Parker hug to Captain Marvel’s arrival (which got the same type of punch-the-air cheers that Thor’s arrival in Wakanda got in Infinity War) to all the female heroes taking charge of getting the gauntlet down the rugby pitch.
But that leads to the biggest problem, as the movie doesn’t make it at all clear why they have to get the gauntlet to the quantum tunnel (which just gets blown up in any case). I mean, they needed to send the stones back in time, but they couldn’t just throw the gauntlet into the quantum realm, could they? I mean, I guess to keep it out of Thanos’s hands? I dunno, it just wasn’t clear, and the Barton-to-T’Challa-to-Parker-to-Danvers passing of the gauntlet just felt silly.
Having said that, the opening act of the climactic battle, where the Big Three go up against Thanos, was beautifully done.
As was a lot of the movie, truly. Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, and the Russo Brothers had a lot of balls to juggle, and it’s to their credit that only a couple of them fell to the floor. It’s a lovely culmination of a decade’s worth of stories, in part by actually revisiting several of them. It’s a joy to see Rene Russo as Frigga again, even with the salad line (honestly, her scene here is by far her best in three movies), Stark getting to have the rapprochement with his father that his death never allowed him to have (especially now that Stark himself is a father) is beautiful to see (and both Downey Jr. and John Slattery play it elegantly), and the Ancient One knocking Banner’s astral form out the way she did Strange.
Plus, the Banner-Ancient One conversation combines with Banner’s discussion with Rhodes and Lang to show that Markus and McFeely did their research and actually followed along with actual physicists’ notions of how time travel is likely to work, rather than depending on pop culture. Not that pop culture is completely trashed, given that the only reason why the Avengers are capable of saving the day at all is because Lang has seen too many science fiction movies, and it put ideas in his head when he realized time moves differently in the quantum realm. We’ve got a couple of alternate time tracks at this point, thus bringing Marvel’s concept of the multiverse front and center (setting up two of the announced Disney+ series, Loki with the trickster gadding about with his very own Tesseract, and What If…? which will explore alternate histories, not to mention providing an explanation of why Rogers’s final decision doesn’t make him an indolent murdering sack of shit).
Plus the story themes that have run through all of the MCU are here: heroism, family, response to stress, dealing with the aftermath of disaster, trust.
While Thor’s PTSD is the butt of jokes, Stark’s PTSD is longer-standing and in its way much worse, as he’s been like this since he blew up the Chitauri ship in Avengers. It informed the texture of Iron Man 3, it informed the plot of Age of Ultron, and the events of the latter movie led to the big blowup in Civil War, which brings us to where we are in Endgame, with Stark giving Rogers a big fat I told you so.
But in the end, Rogers and Stark restore their comradeship. Too much water has flowed under the bridge for their disagreement in Civil War to even be relevant anymore, and both of them are heroes—Rogers by nature, Stark by trauma-related choice. The moment when they shake hands when Stark returns to Avengers HQ, and again when Rogers declares his trust for Stark before they jump back to 1970, are glorious.
For all that I hated their endings, the arcs for both Stark and Rogers are excellent. I love that Rogers is worthy to hold Mjolnir (it’s right up there with Superman wielding it in Avengers/JLA #4 by Kurt Busiek & George Pérez), and I love that Stark is such a good father (mostly because he’s pretty much still a child himself).
I also like that, while there is plenty of brute force action against Thanos, that’s a side effect of their heroism, and one they have to deal with, but the actual heroic act they perform initially is to retrieve the stones and restore the dusted half of life in the universe. And to do that, they had to think—first Stark had to work out the time travel theory, then he, Banner, Rocket, and Nebula had to build it, then they had to figure out how best to retrieve the stones. I love the way they thought through it all (while also taking a fun nostalgic look back at the last decade of movies), in particular Romanoff realizing that half the stones were in New York in 2012.
The time heists themselves are tons of fun, from “That’s America’s ass!” to “So, he’s an idiot” to Robert Redford coming out of fucking retirement to reprise the role of Alexander Pierce. (I generally love that the Avengers used their knowledge of Hydra’s infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. to good effect here, as well as providing a belated explanation for how Hydra got their hands on the scepter after the Battle of New York. And seeing Chris Evans whisper “Hail Hydra” was a delightful riff on the recent idiotic storyline in the comics that tried to establish that Cap has been a Hydra sleeper all this time.)
So many great performances here, from Don Cheadle providing commentary on the action all throughout (“What’s up, Regular-Sized Man?”) to Scarlett Johansson’s understated but powerful taking over as leader of the remnants of the Avengers to Mark Ruffalo’s much more relaxed version of Banner to Alexandra Rabe’s adorable portrayal of Morgan (“I love you three thousand!” will always melt my heart) to Bradley Cooper giving us most of the most wonderful bits in the movie as Rocket. Seriously, Rocket is just the best, and he makes so much of this film, from his smacking Thor around to “Don’t throw up in my ship” to “He’s pretty good at that” after Rogers’s inspirational speech before the time heists. (A deleted scene has another classic Rocket bit, as they’re watching footage of the Battle of New York, and Rocket is amazed it took them so long to take out the Chitauri, who are, he says, the worst army in the universe. “You just gotta take out their mothership.” And when Rogers says they didn’t know that was a thing, Rocket just laughs his ass off.)
But the best performance in the film is Karen Gillan, playing two different versions of Nebula, sometimes in the same room. The character’s torment, her growth, her anguish, her anger, it’s all beautifully played, at two completely different intensities, depending on which version we’re seeing. It’s a magnificently nuanced performance, showing her love/hate for Thanos, her hate/love for Gamora, and her general tortured existence.
The five-year jump was an interesting choice, providing much deeper consequences than one expects from a superhero movie. It’s unlikely that a series that only provide a few two-hour stories a year will be able to go into any kind of depth with how the world is recovering from this (Far from Home will take care of it in a student-news prelude that is both amusing and woefully inadequate), and that’s a bit frustrating. But it also adds to the pathos, especially since Stark has to, in essence, give up the first happiness he’s had in his life since his parents were killed in order to restore the universe to what it should be, rather than what a powerful psychopath thinks it should be.
All the female heroes gathering around Spider-Man to get the gauntlet to the X-Con van (and seriously, the moment when Lang plays the “La Cucaracha” horn was just fabulous) was absolute self-indulgent fan service, and I totally don’t give a fuck, because Marvel has so many fantastic women (most especially the one they idiotically killed off), and any showcase is a good one. (The packed theatre when I saw this in April of this year all cheered loudest at this part of the film, by the way.)
Overall, this is an amazing accomplishment, bringing together a score of movies over a decade and bringing them to an amazing climax, while still leaving plenty of room for more stories to follow.
Next week, we’ll be off for Thanksgiving, but in the first week in December, we’ll cover the first of those stories to follow, as Phase 3 gets a coda with Spider-Man: Far from Home.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at GalaxyCon Louisville this weekend in Kentucky. He’ll be at Bard’s Tower, Booth 1140, selling and signing books, and he’ll also be doing some panels. Click here for his full schedule.
So it’s a comedic parody of the scene you want to see, but check out the How It Should Have Ended clip on YouTube for Rogers returning the stones. It was hilarious how not-easy it was for him to return everything.
Yeah, my feelings on the film are basically the same as KRAD’s.
Overall, I like Infinity War more . But in some ways, Endgame was more enjoyable to watch because for once, knowledge of the source material didn’t help and I had no idea what the hell was going to happen. Yeah, we knew the broad strokes going in: Surviving Avengers and Guardians regroup, Carol and Scott join the team-up, they go after Thanos, they undo the Snap, etc.
But how we got there was up in the air (as was whether anyone who met the Grim Reaper before the Snap would be coming back). And with the added advantage of Endgame not having to reset the status quo like the comics Marvel Universe, anything could happen and anyone could die.
Overall, I’m grateful to Kevin Feige for doing for me and Marvel what Bruce Timm did for me and DC Comics in the 1990s and early 2000s. I’d always traditionally been a casual Marvel reader and not really interested in anyone outside of the X-Men.
But the Cinematic Universe (and the Netflix spinoffs) finally got me interested in seriously checking out the other side of the fence and I’m grateful because I’ve been introduced to so many runs and writers that have become favorites in the years since: Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers and Fantastic Four, Ed Brubaker’s Captain America, Jason Aaron’s Thor, Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkwye and Immortal Iron Fist, Kieron Gillen’s Journey Into Mystery, and on it goes.
And what’s also funny is that for literally the first time since the Cinematic Universe began in 2008, I have no idea where it’s going next. We’ve always known for the last 11 years what the overarching story would be. From the end of Iron Man onward, it was the march towards The Avengers. From the end of Avengers onward, it was Thanos (and from The Dark World onward, confirmation that The Infinity Gauntlet was being adapted).
But even with the Phase Four and Five production slates, I have no idea what the overarching story of the next decade will be (though I have ideas). Gonna be a fun ride.
I think this works far better as a series finale than a season finale, what with the sloppier character decisions and increased amount of fan service. Marvel can and is continuing past that. However, I doubt there will ever be anything like this executed as well again.
I enjoyed all of it. I particularly liked that the filmmakers showed just how much Thanos’ desire for killing half the universe’s population was him fooling himself, as he just wants to kill everyone. Also, the moment where he sticks his massive bladed weapon into the ground takes off his helmet, and waits for the Avengers is an all-time great badass moment.
The Black Widow denouement IS annoying as she deserves a far greater spotlight than she appears to be getting. It’s especially frustrating as the moments featuring Captain Marvel here executed with such a heavy hand. I’m thinking Danvers’ scenes as the equivalent of Thor in the waterfall in Age of Ultron: A clumsy insertion to set up something in the future that will not quite work out as well as they intended.
But the MVP is seriously Nebula. A far cry from the genocidal maniac I knew from the Roger Stern Avengers run, this version seriously rocked.
It il be interesting to see if/when the time comes around again to a new Avengers movie what they will do, as the usage of Time Travel here precludes them wanting to use Kang the Conqueror anytime soon…
It’s a very old Rogers, who decided to stay in the past and live a life.
This is a little complex to reconcile with the can’t-change-the-past-just-makes-an-alternate-universe rules of time travel that were used to explain why the events of Infinity War couldn’t be erased. Having two Steve Rogers and having Peggy Carter marry early definitely changes the universe, even assuming that Rogers just stayed home and didn’t get involved in the inevitable world-shaking-crises that she must have been involved in. The only thing that makes consistent sense is that his time travel did create a parallel universe and he lived out his life with Peggy in that (probably heroically foiling Hydra in the 1940s, etc), and then time travelled (when she died in the early 21st century) back to our timeline, but I’m not sure that’t the intent?
Other mild things that would have been nice to see include every other scientist in the world working on the time travel (I know it’s comics trope that lone geniuses trump everone else, but the time travel should have been a Manhattan-Project-scale effort of the world). And I would have loved beyond anything to see a bunch of Shield agents (led by Melinda May – she wouldn’t even have to have a speaking role) show up in one of the portals in the endgame, but recognize why that wasn’t going to happen.
@3, I mean, I assume Kang will be appearing at some point in the coming decade as well. Introducing time travel does open the door and he’s one of the few antagonists whose threat-level to Earth and the Universe could match Thanos.
And there’d be no problems using Kang now (since I think he was off-limits before the Fox acquisition since he technically started as a Fantastic Four character). At least I think his film rights were tied up with Fox, anyway.
bmac: I’ve said my piece elsewhere on this site about the issues with Rogers’s final fate…..
https://www.tor.com/2019/06/05/avengers-endgame-the-character-assassination-of-steve-rogers/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@bmac
I thought this was pretty explicitly the intent. Never really understood the public confusion over it. I guess as a culture we really are too attached to Back To The Future style time travel. They had multiple scenes specifically calling out that it doesn’t work that way in this universe but as soon as people walked out of the theatre a whole contingent went “Hey, assuming you can change the past like in Back To The Future this is a huge plot hole”
My blog review:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2019/05/01/spoilery-thoughts-on-avengers-endgame-with-spoilers-spoilers/
Excerpts:
I complained last time that there was too much plot to the detriment of character development, but Endgame avoided that since it had half as many main characters and nearly all of them knew each other already so they didn’t have to waste time on introductions. And basically the two films split the character focus, with the characters who were downplayed in part 1 getting the emphasis in part 2 and vice-versa, with some exceptions. As I predicted, the film was used to wrap up the arcs of the main MCU characters to date and pass the torch to the new generation. Which had the unfortunate effect of marginalizing most of the thrilling new characters we’ve become hyped for, so it felt like kind of an odd step backward while the MCU is moving forward. But it did provide an effective coda for the MCU to date so the new guard can really take the lead going forward.
…
The use of Carol Danvers in this film is also quite unsatisfying, after all the hype and buildup and so soon after seeing her star in her own film. …It doesn’t help that her part in this film was shot first so that the filmmakers didn’t even necessarily know her backstory, so that she’s more a plot device here than a character. It’s also awkward that the film just assumes we’ve all seen Captain Marvel and its mid-credits scene, giving Carol no introduction whatsoever within Endgame itself. That’s a narrative shortcut that was presumably dictated by how jampacked the film was with other storylines, but it’s still a serious structural flaw. It’s a pretty basic rule of storytelling never to assume your audience’s familiarity with earlier stories, always to provide some exposition about whatever’s relevant to the current story. Within the context of this film, even of this duology, Carol just shows up with zero explanation, a deus ex machina with magical powers, used to solve a couple of otherwise insoluble problems and otherwise marginalized. It’s a pretty clumsy way to handle any character in any story, but particularly one who’s been hyped as such a core player moving forward.
On the plus side, I gotta say, I love it that this time-travel movie finally comes out and says that the way almost every other time-travel movie does it is dumb and wrong. I’ve been saying that for ages. I love it that they actually consulted with physicists and went with a model of time travel that makes scientific and logical sense, and that serves the needs of their narrative as well. (Star Trek 2009 did the same thing, only to be trashed by fans who thought its scientifically valid time-travel model was “wrong” because they’ve been conditioned to believe the fanciful version used before.) Bruce/Professor Hulk did a terrible job of explaining the reason all those movies are wrong, but he’s right. Quantum physics says that if you travel to the past, you entangle that past with the future you came from and thereby guarantee that that’s the future you’ll create — or else you’ll follow two or more parallel paths, one of which is the original unaltered timeline. So either way, the movie is absolutely right that changing the past will not alter or erase your original timeline, but will only create alternative branches. Tony even tosses out some real physics terminology about temporal theory and it pretty much makes sense! Yay, science!
…
I also have a big problem with the Vormir sequence with Black Widow and Hawkeye. So… you can only claim the Soul Stone if you lose someone you love? Dude! Clint lost his whole damn family! Condition met! Although if the rule is that you have to destroy someone you love, then surely suicide wouldn’t cut it (unless you’re a narcissist). So Nat and Clint trying to sacrifice themselves for each other should not have met the conditions for getting the Stone. To be consistent with the previous film, it would only count if one of them killed the other, not themselves. And as they’re both assassins, they’re the only two O.G. Avengers who should have been capable of making that hard choice. (Well, maybe a warrior like Thor could have, if he hadn’t already been so guilty about the uncounted lives he failed to save.) And I would’ve preferred it if Clint had been the sacrifice; honestly, I’ve never found Jeremy Renner an appealing performer. But I guess Natasha’s been the bigger part of this series, and the goal here was to bring the top leads’ story arcs to a decisive conclusion.
…
Oh, and when everybody was trying to get through the horde of bad guys to get the glove with the Infinity Stones to the time portal… you could say they were running the Infinity Gauntlet Gauntlet. I wonder if devising the sequence that way was some sort of subtle pun on the filmmakers’ parts.
Finally, for ease of reference, here’s a handy chart plotting the time travels in the film.
I agree Keith that if Rogers stayed silent about the future while living his life in his ‘home’ timeline that would be out of character.
But I see nothing in either the film or the comments by various creative team members that suggests he didn’t simply have his happy ending in an alternate timeline, made the world a better place in that one (destroying hydra, saving Bucky etc), then at the end of his life, once Peggy had died and the other cap came out of the ice in the new timeline, simply used Pym particles to get back to the original timeline to handoff the shield and say goodbye.
That to me makes sense, is most consistent with the character and nothing seems to act against that interpretation.
Agreed with you too on how frustrating the death of Romanoff is. Thor leaves me conflicted. On the one hand I agree about the fat jokes and in screenings I was in couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable at all the people laughing for the ‘wrong’ reasons. On the other, I like you have seen people with similar ptsd talking about how true to their experience it is. It’s also, arguably, a long-overdue depiction of someone with a larger body type in a heroic role, whose ‘recovery’ (ie him being ready for battle with Thanos at the end) doesn’t involve the magical loss of his weight.
Overall I enjoy the film, though it’s so long I’m not sure I’d watch it again in a hurry.
I’m not sure how they could have set it up, but even prior to seeing this film, I thought it would be a more satisfying ending for Steve and Tony to die together. I feel like that would have been the best resolution to their relationship and the Civil War arc. Maybe suggest that one of them alone wasn’t powerful enough to activate the gauntlet, so they do it together? I don’t know exactly how to get there, but I think it would have been great, and avoided all the time-travel weirdness at the end as a bonus.
Good ol’ Doctor Strange: Killing both Peter Parker (in Infinity War) and Tony Stark (in Endgame) to, ultimately, protect the time stone.
He said he’d sacrifice both, if needed. And he did.
Ironically, found that Thor’s survival ironically bothered me more than Steve’s.
As a long-lived demigod, I can buy Thor sticking around in the MCU for a while longer. But I also would’ve preferred that Endgame be the last time we saw Thor (or any of the Avengers’ Holy Trinity) and that we’d hear tales of his travels among the stars off-screen and in passing from hereon out.
I’m just not especially enthused about the Loki series on Disney+ or Thor: Love and Thunder. I just think they’ve taken the Cinematic Loki and Thor as far as they can go and I’d rather have had the Asgardian focus shift completely to Valkyrie (and Sif since her story’s still unresolved).
That being said, if Loki finally introduces Thori the Hel-Hound to the Cinematic Universe, heh, then I’ll be game. :)
I don’t really disagree with what you’ve written here. I enjoyed the movie, although it at times felt like there was so much to keep track of. While I don’t enjoy time travel on principle, it was fun seeing the movies from different perspectives and tickled my nostalgia buttons. The ‘hail hydra’ part might be my favorite joke in the film (thanks to Tor I understood that reference!)
Correction, Tony and Nebula were not on Maw’s ship, they were on the Guardians ship. Quill flew it there after they left Knowhere, but it was damaged on Titan during the fight (Nebula got there on a stolen fighter, which crashed). She and Tony repaired it enough to get off the planet but ran out of fuel/power. Maw’s ship was utterly destroyed when it crashed on Titan.
BonHed: DERP!!!!!!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, running to the edit function
The movie is more judgmental of the fact that Thor got fat and sad than that Barton spent I guess five years murdering non-white people.
Seriously, how could they have been so bone-headed to let Romanov sacrifice herself, when Barton is the one who has some serious bad karma to atone for? Yes, I know that Romanov probably has bad deeds in her past, but it matters what we see onscreen. And from a completely mercenary standpoint, why would you want to keep Renner in your lineup instead of Johansson? And the stuff with Nebula is great, but given how well-developed she is now really hammers home how poorly Gamora’s story was botched.
But hey, I still liked this movie quite a lot–way more than I could have anticipated after Infinity War. It’s a story! It’s mostly about people rather than MacGuffins! It’s not just a series of quippy vignettes, but rather is about decisions and consequences! It’s mostly really good stuff, and if the third act goes on too long well, I guess they earned that indulgence.
I personally kind of like Black Widow’s story ending in tragedy, in the end the only person who couldn’t see her worth was her. I like challenging stories that don’t always go for a happy ending, and frankly I think her death worked better than Tony’s for me. It wasn’t forgotten because it was at the halfway point at all, instead it cast a shadow over the entire rest of the film. The film absolutely forgot about her death for the Tony funeral scene though, which was a goddamn travesty. They should have been equally mourning both of them.
For me, the biggest problem with this movie is Steve’s ending. The directors did come out and say that Cap lived out his life in an alternate universe because obviously his going back in time and staying would create one, but the movie implies that he lived out his life in the same continuity we know and love while just letting evil win over and over again. Worse for me, that breaks the established time travel rules set up in this very movie, it shouldn’t be possible with what we’ve been told so far. For some reason poor internal consistency for a single character isn’t as big a crime as poor internal consistency for the rules of the entire setting as far as I’m concerned. I hope they clarify what exactly happened in-universe at some point, maybe in the next Multiverse of Madness film they can give Cap living his life with Peggy as an example of how alternate universes are created or something.
I’m always a bit puzzled by the “fat Thor” references. I didn’t see Thor as fat, just out of shape, gone to seed. He had what’s actually a pretty normal body type for a man who doesn’t go to the gym religiously.
@16/Colin R: “It’s mostly about people rather than MacGuffins!”
I would quibble that that’s not a dichotomy. The definition of a MacGuffin is that it’s an object that’s important to the characters but inconsequential to the story; it doesn’t matter what it actually is or does, only that it gives characters a goal to pursue and come into conflict over. The point of a MacGuffin is to catalyze a story about people, to spark their actions but stay out of their way. If the object overshadows the characters, then it’s the opposite of a MacGuffin.
KRAD, this is an expertly written essay! I thank you for writing it.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see any huge flaw in Steve having his happy ending and not changing anything. If Iron Man gets that “out” of not going back in time and changing five years to save his kid, I don’t see anything wrong with Steve getting his happy ending and hanging up the shield.
Further, there’s nothing in the previous films that contradicts “second Steve” from existing in the same timeline.
Additionally, Cap didn’t love “a” Peggy Carter, he loved “the” Peggy Carter from his world. My idea is that he did go back and lived a happy life with the Peggy we first met in CA: FA. End of story. It’s well-earned by then
“Rhodes, Nebula, Romanoff, and Barton arrive on Morag in a ship that presumably Nebula took them to”
Actually, that’s the Guardian’s ship and Hawkeye carried it with them miniaturized. Then they enlarged it when they got there. Rocket, before they leave, tells him not to get a scratch on it. Of course, Hawkeye then proceeded to lose the antenna.
@ZetaStriker
Where? Where does the movie do this? I find this the most frustrating part of the fanwankery around the idea that Steve lives this entire life in hiding in the main timeline. It’s built on a premise that has been waved into existence. He went back in time. Lived his life in an alternative timeline and then used his suit to come home. It’s mechanically identical to what Steve and Tony did in the time heist.
I thought the girl power scene with all the female superheroes banding together was a bit overkill and laying the whole “women are awesome” thing on a bit thick.
KRAD, I’m glad to see you put in the bit about hearing those of us who have experienced PTSD finding the treatment of Thor to be acceptable. I certainly gained some weight dealing with depression and anxiety stemming from trauma I experienced in the past, and I found it reassuring to see this kind of response to it. I didn’t have much problem with his closest friends ribbing him about it, especially his mother. These are the only people that can get away with it, they know who he is and what he’s gone through. And he was still worthy!
The audience I was with lost it when Cap picked up Mjolnir (I know I cheered loudly), as well as the ladies coming together to help Peter. That was a serious collection of bad asses. I figured that the use of Danvers would be somewhat subdued, in that they didn’t want this new character to come in and save the day. She did some amazing things, stopping the massive ship and going toe-to-toe with Thanos. Him using the Power stone to knock her away was great for showing how powerful she is.
I didn’t have a problem with Natasha sacrificing herself. For one, it was her agency, no one was forcing her to do it. I think she couldn’t bear the thought of telling his family that Clint was gone if they were successful in restoring the Snapped. And her family is right there, fighting to restore the universe. She did the math, and knew this was her play. It sucks that she can’t come back, she was an amazing character, and I hope the upcoming movie will do her justice.
I’m not going to rehash a bunch of arguments that have already be had on many aspects of the movie, but I do want to say one thing about Black Widow’s sacrifice.
I think it was completely true to her character, and her wanting to erase all of the red in her ledger. I think the filmmakers needed a “death that sticks” to have more impact than Hawkeye (who many have said even here that they didn’t care as much about) would have.
But I think the biggest issue was I think that the filmmakers found themselves in a “Catch 22” when they sent these two to Voromir, because you had to choose to kill one of them. You choose Black Widow, and you get the type of reactions here about her future potential being wasted, and arguments about “of course they killed the girl because the man was more important.” (not necessarily an argument heard here, but elsewhere.) If you choose Hawkeye, then you get all the “White Savior” arguments, since all of the sacrifices in the movies would have come from white men, and the “why are only the men heroes” type of arguments.
It was a no-win situation in my mind, so they chose the one whose sacrifice not only made the most sense, but the most impact. And I agree that there should have been more of an on-screen acknowledgement of the loss than the very little time that was given.
Apologies for being nit-picky, but I’m pretty sure that WASN’T Ebony Maw’s ship Tony and Nebula were in. I believe it was the Benatar.
Steve must have spent his time with Peggy in an alternate reality, because otherwise, where did the shield come from? His original shield was destroyed by Thanos, and yet, he has a perfectly intact shield to give to Sam. I believe that he took Peggy’s advice from the Winter Soldier to heart when she said, sometimes “you just need to start over” and created a reality that fixed all the things that was wrong with his home reality where he rooted out Hydra from SHIELD and warned the Universe about the threat of Thanos so that the snap never came to be. How he managed to return to his home reality isn’t a question that I really need answered as there are plenty of potential answers. Perhaps with the help of Pym and Stark from the alternate reality they were able to build a machine to send him home. This explanation both prevents the character assassination of Steve Rogers and stays consistent with the movies own rules on time travel. YMMV.
Also, I never got the impression that Steve had to restore everything exactly the way it was in the various alternate realities, he just had to return the stones to their proper timeline. Therefore, he didn’t need to inject the Reality Stone back in to Jane Foster, he just had to return it to its home reality. He could just hand it to Odin or Thor and say “here you go” and be done with it.
@28/Steven McMullan: You’re quite right about returning the Infinity Stones. Returning them wasn’t about “preserving the timeline,” because they’re using realistic time-travel physics where no timeline can be erased or changed, and time travel just creates a parallel alongside it. The point was that those parallel timelines were just as real and permanent as the originals, and their inhabitants would need the Infinity Stones so they could fight bad guys like Malekith and Ronan when the time came. So it was more just a matter of being polite and returning what we borrowed from our neighbors. (Although, really, most of the time it was the Stones that gave the villains their power in the first place…)
Rhodes, Nebula, Romanoff, and Barton arrive on Morag in a ship that presumably Nebula took them to.
No, they took it with them, you see Rocket threaten Barton if they break it, to which Barton shrugs(they should just recast him with Jensen Ackles for the Hawkeye TV Show)
Wonderfully written, kudos!
@29, On the subject of the Stones, one thing I did like was the destruction of the original Stones in addition to returning their doppelgangers.
The Stones are an existential threat in both the MCU and the 616 Universe and I was wondering how they were gonna deal with it within the context of the former during Endgame and moving forward.
Granted, the Russos have confirmed the Stones technically exist on the atomic level, but I ideally hope we don’t see them again in some form after this movie (barring stuff like the Alternate Loki and his stolen Tesseract in the upcoming Disney+ show or theoretically the Mind Stone in WandaVision).
The Stones have been a great narrative engine to drive the last decade, but I think they’ve been taken as far as they can.
Also, screw anyone who begrudges Steve the peace he was able to find in a past where he wasn’t needed.
@29 and @32, That being said, I am interested in seeing how the destruction of the Time Stone impacts Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
After the Snap, keeping any of the Stones intact wasn’t an option. They had to be removed lest someone else tried to assemble them and try another Snap (or worse).
But that doesn’t change that Stephen orchestrated the destruction of the Masters of Mystic Arts’ greatest weapon against the forces of darkness. So I expect there will be some anger and blow back within the organization.
@29, CLB,
Exactly. My big takeaway from the Ancient One’s conversation with Bruce was that they were creating new timelines which were in danger due to the removal of the stones. By returning them, Cap has ensured the safety of the new timelines, not erased them.
If a key objection to Infinity War was “Thanos has a short-sighted plan to solve a valid problem, and why doesn’t anybody say so?”, then Endgame’s counterpart is “did the Avengers consider the practical implications of restoring those people?” On Earth alone, the normal reaction to depopulation would be to reduce food production and demolish buildings. Out in the universe, there are probably space stations that have been abandoned or relocated because population dropped below a critical level, and if those people return — oops, nobody’s been running life-support for five years.
(That would be an interesting plot in GOTG 3 or Captain Marvel 2 — the rest of the universe has just grown accustomed to its reduced population, is again upended — then learns who’s responsible. There are presumably species who are less sentimental about broken families and don’t see the restoration in those terms.)
The Infinity Gauntlet itself acts like a genie, somehow able to extrapolate specifics from a single command. For Thanos, “delete half the life in the universe” might be shorthand for “half the sentients on the worlds in the known universe”, because he’s got the smarts and life-experience to name all those species and worlds — but Bruce Banner doesn’t have that knowledge. In Lensman terms, it’s plausible that Thanos has a better Visualization of the Cosmic All.
So, the operational nature of the Infinity Stones is problematic, but it’s way down the list of “comic book expediencies” in the MCU.
(Peripheral IMHO: Now that the MCU’s gone cosmic, the scale of threats is easier to stomach if you pretend “universe” is shorthand for (a) “the known FTL jump point network”, and (b) assume said network covers a few thousand systems, not billions. The same way the 3,600 space sectors patrolled by the Green Lanterns belie the grandiose name of the self-appointed “Guardians of the Universe”.)
The ship being the guardians ship is important to my head cannon since (although not stated in the movie) my timeline of events is that:
1.Captain Marvel arrives at Avengers headquarters (in post credit scene from CM)
2. Rocket is able to track his ship and sends her to go look for it since he knows they were going to Nowhere last he saw the Guardians.
3. Captain Marvel finds he ship she was searching for and doesn’t just stumble upon them by accident.
My ponderances:
How was Antman able to convince anyone that the quantum realm was the key to time travel? His time in there only proved that time moves more slowly in the quantum realm. How did that translate into you being able to exit in the past?
Next, the Ancient One said that removing a stone from its correct point in time would screw up the Universe, so they agreed to return them all to the exact moment they were removed, meaning that they never left. Er, Thanos destroyed all of the stone in the present (or 5 years ago or whatever). What the hell happens to the Universe now?
In Ragnarok, Thor learned that he didn’t need his hammer to access his powers, so why did he so desperately need a new weapon in Endgame?
I found Professor Hulk extremely uninteresting. His absence during Infinity War promised so much more for its sequel. My wacky theory after I first saw Infinity War was that he refused to come out because he knew Thanos was going to win. He saw himself and Banner as two separate entities and figured that if he was out during the snap, he might be dusted, leaving Banner alive. Hulk therefore stayed hidden, waiting for Banner to get dusted and leaving himself alive for round 2.
Another nonsense theory: How are they going to intergate mutants into the MCU? Putting aside for a moment the fact that in other media mutants have existed throughout human history, what if it’s the post-snap-post-snap Returnees that suddenly start developing mutations. What if they came back from wherever with the x-gene?
One minor beat I liked — when they returned to New York 2012 and needed Professor Hulk to pretend to be the old Hulk, and he very half-heartedly smashed a motorcycle or something.
I’ll be interested to see what happens to Loki and Gamora next time we see them, since technically these versions did not undergo the various character developments (Gamora joining the Guardians; Loki making some kind of peace with the Asgardians) that happened in the previous films.
@39– I think the key to bringing mutants into the MCU was presented right here in Endgame with the Infinity Stone powered energy waves that circled the globe each of the three times the gauntlet was used on Earth. Perhaps the mutant population on Earth was so low prior to Endgame (let’s say perhaps 98 worldwide just use a number from the comics) that they were able to functionally keep their existence a secret through the efforts of Charles Xavier and perhaps Magneto. We know that Wanda, Pietro and Carol all obtained their powers do to exposure to Infinity Stone energies. Who knows how many X-genes were activated by the trio of snaps?
Crap. My above comment should be directed at 38, not 39.
@35 – Except that the Ancient One created a magic line in the air to demonstrate the alternate timeline. And when Hulk put the stone back at the beginning of the timeline, the alternate one died away, leaving the original line. I think it’s meant to show that these timelines were erased.
@39, Yeah, that admittedly is the one of the few things about Loki that’s of interest to me.
It gives them a chance to return to a more villainous Loki without undoing the character development of The Dark World and Ragnarok (while setting him on a much different path because the diverging timeline). Though I still think Hiddleston and Marvel Studios have taken the Cinematic iteration of character as far as they can.
That same situation with 2014 Gamora is much more interesting to me, as will be the changed family dyamics, as it were, for the Guardians in their next film. They’re missing their Gamora, Rocket and Nebula are 5 years older and are closer friends, Quill’s no longer the only one onboard who’s spent time on Earth and his uniqueness is thus diluted, etc.
“I can think of about half a dozen ways to bring Romanoff back without even trying hard, and it’s perfectly possible that the 2020 Black Widow movie will find a way to do so in a framing sequence or a credits sequence or some such.”
Far more likely is that the Widow movie will be a prequel, avoiding any problems with her fate.
@44 – Umm that’s already been established.
@38/Moses: Scott didn’t need to convince anyone that the Quantum Realm allowed time travel. These are scientists; what convinced them it could work was the math and physics. Once Scott gave them the idea, they could run the numbers for themselves and calculate whether it would work.
About returning the stones, see comments #29 & 35.
@42/Austin: I do not understand the logic of ascribing more weight to a line in the air than to the inherent logic and physics of the situation as established everywhere else in the film. The explanation is in the scripted dialogue throughout the movie, as well as in the real-world theoretical physics they were guided by; if the visual effect conflicts with that, it means the VFX designers got it wrong.
There is absolutely no way the story of Endgame makes any sense if time travel can “erase” timelines. If that were true, then Thanos, Gamora, and Nebula leaving 2014 would’ve erased everything they did after that, including GotG and Infinity War itself. The whole story depended on the principle that any timeline that exists will always exist, that nothing can undo it.
@38 All Ant-Man convinced them of was that time worked differently in the Quantum Realm, and they should talk to someone smarter to see what they could make out of it. His time travel ideas are all pop-culture related, and are wrong.
It’s not that the Stone being missing will ‘End the Universe’ it’s that the Stones are powerful, and are used to deal with a variety of threats. Notable to that conversation, if the Time Stone isn’t returned to that timeline branch, what happens when Kaecilius summons Dormammu? Strange wouldn’t have studied the time stone and wouldn’t be able to create the time trap. Now, maybe he finds a different way to win, but maybe not.
2 reasons. First, like Odin’s staff/scepter thing, it acts as a conduit or focus above & beyond being a physical weapon, and secondly, much like getting his eye back (a step back from wiser one-eyed King Thor) it underscores the fact that Thor at this point is already hurting. Losing Heimdall & Loki after getting spanked by Thanos is just too much and is a grand failure for the new king of an already exiled people. He just can’t handle it and ends up trying to retreat back to who he was prior to Ragnarok, before the losses started to pile up. Which is the crux of the pep talk with his mom in Endgame, that he’d been failing at ‘who he was supposed to be’ rather than just being who he is.
Professor Hulk is the natural endpoint of Mark Ruffalo’s Banner. His first appearance in Avengers is him asking if it’s him they want or ‘the other guy’. But there is no other guy, Hulk is not a new being that came into existence somehow tied to Bruce, he’s always been a part of him. I too would have liked to see how that integration happened, but we may get that from cameos & flashbacks in new movies or shows.
Just off the cuff, 3 possibilities: There have always been mutants, but they’ve been fairly successful at staying hidden up until now, and its the larger social awareness / acceptance of super-powers that draws them out of hiding (the Morlock solution), mutation is a new side effect of the Snap & the cosmic energies being thrown around Earth the past couple decades (the New Mutants solution), or Reverse House of M – a powerful Scarlet Witch, maybe suffering a bit after what happens in WandaVision & Multiverse of Madness maybe just tired of being feared & misunderstood, reshapes the world so that everyone has powers a la House of M, but when it all goes sideways and has to be undone, some people don’t go back to normal.
@42– I think the Ancient One was just demonstrating to Bruce how that timeline would go wrong without the stone present. It was already an alternate reality from the moment The Avengers arrived there.
@39, 43 Yeah, the MCU Loki that dies in Infinity War was the one who was changed by causing Frigga’s death, starting the slow reconciliation with Thor. Disney+ Loki is, I hope, going to be a Loki fresh from the battle of New York finding out that the trickster had been tricked. He was being played by Thanos and the mind stone in the scepter had a bit of a whammy on him.
2014 Gamora is in an odd place. She nominally has exactly what she wanted, Thanos dead & gone, with no fundamental cost to herself and without any other deep-seated emotional bonds. Given that Big T defined her life since childhood, I am fascinated by the questions who is she when she’s let to her own devices, and what will she want now?
Towards the end a quote from MST3K’s Time Chasers episode popped into my mind:
“So history’s just circling the drain at this point.”
ragnarredbeard: Black Widow is a prequel. That’s why I said, as you quoted, that such an establishment would be in a framing sequence or a credits scene.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@49, Yeah, and I keep wondering if Disney+ Loki will be tied to Thor: Love and Thunder (in the same way WandaVision is tied to the Doctor Strange sequel).
On the one hand, I’d prefer to have a Thor film without Loki this time. There are still other villains in the Odinson’s rogues gallery (Ulik the Troll, Gorr the God Butcher, etc.)
On the other hand, it’d be interesting to see Alternate 2012 Loki’s reactions to the post-Endgame Thor and that Asgard and Odin are gone.
There is only one time-travel movie I like: Cyborg 2087. It is simple and to the point, and makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than Endgame‘s temporal quantum entanglement machinations.
KRAD, you reminded me of this since you brought up Karen Gillan’s performance (which I also agree was brilliant).
If Gillan was the unsung hero of Endgame, I’d also argue that Marvel Studios’ Casting Director Sarah Finn has been the unsung hero of the entire MCU.
She’s been just as invaluable to the MCU as Andrea Romano was to the DC Animated Universe during the 1990s and early 2000s. Sure, there have been casting missteps along the way, but Finn’s successes outweigh the failures. She’s done excellent work matching the right actors for specific parts and Gillan is definitely one of those successes.
Watching Gillan develop Nebula from Guardians Vol. 2 onward trough Infinity War and Endgame has been one of my favorite parts of Phase Three.
@51,
It was pretty clear to me in that paragraph that you were after ways to bring Natasha back from the Soul Stone death. A prequel would by definition occur before she died, ergo, not bringing her back. Endgame was the endgame for her.
@53/Paladin: Endgame is one of the very few time-travel movies that actually do make sense. The problem is that audiences have been conditioned by the totally nonsensical model of time travel used by most fiction, so when they come across a sensible one, it seems wrong to them.
Basically, the only time travel movies that make sense are the ones where history doesn’t “change,” either because there’s a stable time loop (like The Final Countdown or 12 Monkeys) or because the time travel creates a parallel timeline alongside the original (like here or in Star Trek 2009, though there’s a ton else about both movies that makes no physical sense).
@55/ragnar: That’s twice you’ve missed the part where Keith said he knows it’s a prequel and is suggesting that her death could be reversed in a frame sequence around the prequel story, or in a post-credits epilogue. Much like how Captain Marvel takes place in the 1990s but has a post-credits scene set after Infinity War.
@56/CLB: That’s why I like Cyborg 2067–history does change but only for the better! The Cyborg completes his machine and, in doing so, prevents the development of a future dystopia. However, once the Cyborg’s temporal mission is completed, he is erased from history, because there was no need for him to exist in the first place. No temporal loops and/or endless historical repeats. Btw the Cyborg does all of this through the power of intellectual persuasion! Quite a remarkable little movie.
@52– Loki will actually be tying into the Doctor Strange movie as well. Whether it will also tie into love and thunder remains to be seen, though it seems like a safe bet.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/hype.my/amp/2019/176645/loki-will-be-connected-to-dr-strange-in-the-multiverse-of-madness/
@57/Paladin: I haven’t seen that movie, so it might execute the concept well, but the premise you’re describing is the same as a thousand other time-travel stories, and it doesn’t make any more physical or logical sense than they do.
aaargh. that final fight…
i mean, there are LOTS of problems with this movie, but let’s just talk about the big three fighting thanos.
we’re talking iron man, with five years of evolutions to his armor, the nanotech armor that fought thanos to a standstill. talking about the odinson, with the hammer of kings, a weapon able to punch through the FULL force of ALL the infinity stones to smite thanos in the heart in the LAST film. we’re talking about cap, worthy, possessing the power of thor AND wielding mjolnir.
and they’re fighting a WEAKER thanos than the one they faced before, one sans infinity stones, while they have ALL leveled up.
it’s RIDICULOUS. i know WHY it’s done, so there’s the rest of the movie and the rest of the CHARACTERS get to come back, but the three of them should have been able to STOMP thanos into the GROUND.
just bad writing.
@60, I’m not sure how much weaker 2014 Thanos really was or if it’s really lazy writing. His 2018 counterpart kicked the Hulk’s ass effortlessly and without having to use the Power Stone (something which went over a lot of people’s heads during that establishing moment last year).
Also, keep in mind the Avengers’ Holy Trinity had just had a building dropped on them in addition to having been run ragged with the Time Heist whilst Thanos was fully rested.
And even with Stormbreaker, Thor of course, was out of shape and practice and in no condition for taking on Thanos in his prime (let alone snapping the Stark Gauntlet).
@61
see, that’s the thing… banner…he’s a scientist, with super strength and anger issues. he has NO idea how to fight.
we saw it in thor ragnarok, where even BEFORE thor decanted into the lord of lightning, that he was able to dodge, kidney punch, parry and counter every move hulk made, before making the mistake he OFTEN makes, which is the ‘attempt to save banner from himself’.
and as such, thanos was able to beat hulk down doing the EXACT same thing, using pugilistic skills…. the sweet science, as it were.
so you know, even, soft thor(?) with the hammer of kings, cap, with all of his fighting skills AND the power of thor AND the weapon (ok, ONE of the weapons of thor), and tony in his MOST advanced, PINNACLE armor, they should have been able to make short work of the mad titan.
don’t get me wrong, i know why…they hadda bring everyone back. there were more movies to be made, but damn, that fight shoulda been short.
Didn’t Thor actually throw the hammer to Steve during the battle? That is, it wasn’t Steve happening to pick it up when it was handy, it was Thor already being sure Steve could use it and deliberately giving it to him.
@37, I always assumed they found Tony because those messages he was sending to Pepper were going home, even though he didn’t know for sure if they were or not, which is literally his first line in the movie, that he doesn’t know if she’ll ever get them. Once they started getting the transmissions, Pepper could command Friday, whose central computer was still on Earth, to track him, and then Carol knows right where to go.
I don’t think Rocket knew they would find his ship, his face is too unbelievable when he sees it, that and Nebula are all he has left of his family.
@37 and @64, the Russos confirmed there was a homing beacon on the Benatar:
“The missing narrative of course is that [Carol Danvers] came to Earth, met the Avengers [in her film’s mid-credits scene], was brought up to speed on what was happening, and there’s some sort of homing beacon on that ship that she tracks and brings the two of them back to Earth.
But like CLB complained about in @8, there should have been an in-story acknowledgment or even dramatization of it. It was lazy, strange storytelling and it disrupted the beginning of Endgame for me.
@63, No Steve first uses it when he summons while Thor is under attack.
In re the Time Travel thing, I agree with those who say that the other timelines closed, except for the one created when Loki fled with the Tesseract. And the reason why Steve could travel back to his own timeline(IMO, I know most people, including the Russos, don’t agree with me, but the writers do so…) is because he traveled FROM a time with no Infinity Stones “creating what we know as the flow of time”, and therefore could travel back in time without creating a new timeline. Which is why, IMO, he was ALWAYS Peggy’s secret husband.
Yes, time and universes in the future Marvel universe are ABOUT TO GET WONKY. Without the influence of the stones in this world, and a version of Loki with one hopping dimensions, we’re probably about to experience some collapses in the space-time continuum, causing difference universes to meld(thus eventually reintroducing the stone from another universe and stabalizing the timeline), and characters we know having experienced stories we don’t know, and being different. (Like a Clint Barton who never got married or had kids, portrayed by Jensen Ackles, as an example).
It gives Marvel a way to maintain the consequences of Endgame, a way to bring back Tony Stark or Stave Rogers years down the road when they are ready to recast them. A way to make mutants a part of this universe. But that’s just my thought.
I was interested that the movie has two huge bursts of cosmic radiation within a couple of hours, in nearly the same place in upstate New York. Granted, they don’t say it’s Westchester County, but it’s possible.
@66, Yeah, that’s been my thought about the Multiverse, too: It gives them an out for recasting Steve, Tony, etc. down the road with new actors (in addition to, as you said, bringing in the Mutants).
I would personally prefer the recasting not happen. I like that the old guard’s stories have actually run their course and ended (something that will never happen in the comics because of the Marvel franchise mandates). I would prefer we never see new versions of the old guard again (plus, really, who’d want to try and follow Downey or Evans’ iconography?)
But, this is Hollywood and the Mouse needs his cheddar cheese, so I expect given enough time, new versions will appear.
But yeah, the removal of the Infinity Stones, I think…with all the focus on the Multiverse, I think an adaptation of Secret Wars is the next endgame down the road.
@59
It makes sense in the *heart*, though, which is all that really matters.
@65, That’s the problem with the Russos, when Tony’s messages to Pepper are an in story acknowledgement, and they ignore it to make up something in an interview they have to tell, rather than SHOW during the movie.
Like they completely forgot in Civil War to have another character point out to Tony, that he TOTALLY violated the Accords by recruiting Spiderman, who was absolutely a minor and incapable of signing them(something glossed over in Homecoming when Tony tries to make him an Avenger). With that action, Tony loses any moral high ground the audience grants him for his “principled stand to save the Avengers”, because Steve is the only one sticking to his principles here, in openly refusing to abide by the Accords, while Tony is just lying for convenience’s sake, with no true intention of being beholden to the restrictions on his use of power by the Accords he lobbied into existence, to assuage his own guilty conscience.
Of course, in a lot of the Russo interviews surrounding Civil War, they completely miss that fact. They think Tony HAS a moral high ground over Steve. They’ve stated it repeatedly. They thought “both had a point” when no, only Steve has a point, because Steve’s the only one being honest about his values. Markus and McFeeley both get Steve, and the other characters, better than the Russos do, and I’m sure they wrote that scene, with the specific line of dialog from Tony stating he hopes Pepper gets this, thus foreshadowing how they will be found, for that very purpose.
And the Russos missed that beat, like they miss a LOT of the small notes that make these stories. Don’t get me wrong, they are very capable directors. But Markus and McFeeley wrote ALL the Cap movies and IW & Endgame, and they are the ones who gave this story it’s heart.
@68, Well, I’d like to see the movies explore like a TRULY asshole Tony. Not a Tony that learned to be a better person in an Afghani/Pakistani cave, but one who came out of that experience bitter and resentful, not ready to destroy his own wealth to stop making the world a dangerous place, but one who makes a suit to protect himself forever, but is still recruited to the Avengers because of his skill with tech.
Or a Steve that, after Irskine’s death, was instantly recruited to become some sort commando, instead of a propaganda tool, and didn’t learn the humility that Steve did from that time, who’s more cocky and self assured in his new strength.
IDK, I’d like to see different iterations of these characters. But not for awhile yet. Not for years. You couldn’t do it and not feel defined by what has come before.
@71, Right, go Superior Iron Man with an alternate Tony. That could work.
Anyway, I think What If…? will tide us over on that score in the interim.
I always thought Agents of Shield season 5 would have been a good venue to explore the post snap world and season 6 the pist blip world but they made the dumb decision to separate the show from the movies.
@65/Mr. Magic: I wasn’t saying there should’ve been an in-story explanation of how Carol found Tony. I was saying there should’ve been an in-story explanation of who the hell this flying, glowing blonde woman even was. Anyone who saw this movie without having seen Captain Marvel first would have no idea where this incredibly powerful superwoman randomly came from. They might recognize that her costume had the same logo that was on Fury’s pager in the IW post-credits scene, but that wouldn’t tell them nearly enough.
True, they undoubtedly had to cut out a lot to get the film down to a reasonable running time. But this was a detail that should’ve been left in. It’s always important to re-establish anything integral to the story you’re telling, for the benefit of new viewers or ones who need reminders of things they’ve forgotten.
@66/Aeryl: Once again, this film is using physically plausible time travel theory in which nothing can be erased or rewritten. So there won’t be any “melding” or “collapse” of timelines in the way that past fantasy stories have portrayed. The history is what it is. There can be alternate paths in parallel, but nothing can be undone or edited after the fact.
It is so weird to me that even though this movie made a point of having scenes where the characters clearly stated “The way past movies have portrayed time travel is wrong and it works differently here,” so many viewers still expect MCU time travel to work the same as in those past movies.
CLB: James Blish’s The Quincunx of Time (1973) (expanded from Blish’s 1954 short story Beep) is one of the better novels I have read on time, quantum entanglement, determinism and free will. What I find most interesting about Quincunx is that Blish writes about temporal quantum entanglement (using the fictional Dirac Communicator) and how it could effect our decision making at different points in time. Moreover, Blish discusses through Quincux’s characters the various theories of determinism, foreknowledge and free will. Good stuff all around!
@74 CLB, The movies clearly establish that it’s the stones creating these rules, and this universe no longer has stones protecting it’s timeline. Nature abhors a vacuum, and there is a very literal power vacuum in our version of the MCU right now with the absence of the stones, so I think that’s a pretty explicit statement that the old rules no longer apply.
@CLB: The issue is that the ‘you can’t change the past’ explanation is undercut by its very own movie. In particular the way Rogers appears is heavily suggestive that he didn’t actually ‘appear’, he was already there. People coming to that conclusion aren’t idiots: that’s how the scene is framed, and they’re reacting to what was actually put on screen.
Notably, the argument that he just time-travelled back from a separate timeline is post-hoc hogwash, because if that were the case Rogers would have literally no reason to not appear on the platform proper. Why give Banner et al a heart attack by not coming back when and were he’s expected? Just to troll them?
@76/Aeryl: No, it’s not the Stones creating the rules, it’s the filmmakers making a choice to do their homework, to consult with physicists and get time travel theory right for a change instead of settling for the abject absurdity and wrongness of past movies’ time travel fantasies. The technobabble Tony used when solving the problem was essentially real science terminology, and he even name-dropped a real physicist or two. They cared enough to get it right. So as long as the same people are in charge of the franchise, I presume they’ll stick to that commitment to do it right.
(Incidentally, Agents of SHIELD has been essentially consistent with this model too; when they prevented the future Deke came from, he wasn’t “erased” but still existed, proving that they just created a parallel branch. Also, the only way they could have both a time loop and the avoidance of the time loop is in a split-timelines model where both alternatives happen in parallel.)
@77/foamy: If you mean old Steve, the fact that he was already there proves the fixed-timeline model, because it means there was no change, just a single consistent set of events, which allowed him to know where and when he had to be at that particular moment. It’s the Bill and Ted time travel model — if you know for a fact that an event will happen a certain way and your actions in the past won’t change it, then you can go back in time and prepare for it in advance. Steve knew when he went back that the team would be gathered in that place at that moment, so when it was time for him to go there and pass the torch, he returned to that place in that timeline a little early and arrived unobtrusively so he’d be waiting nearby when the time came. He didn’t appear on the platform because he wasn’t there for everyone, just for Sam and Bucky. He wanted it to be a more private exchange with his old friends. And because he probably used a separate method to return to that timeline, having exhausted the original supply of Pym particles decades before.
And yes, what appears onscreen does seem to suggest a time-travel model that contradicts everything else clearly stated in the film, which is a flaw in how it’s constructed; they compromised the logic of the story for a sentimental moment. But if most of the film says one thing and a single part says another, it’s totally backward to throw out the rule in favor of the exception. Fortunately, the scene can be reconciled with the model the rest of the film follows, regardless of how it superficially appears.
And even if Steve was in the past of the original timeline, that doesn’t mean he changed that past — it means he was there all along in secret. Which is what one set of filmmakers is saying was the case, while the other set (I forget which is the writers and which is the directors) is saying he was in an alternate past. But neither of them is saying that he altered the past, because that would contradict the entire logic of the movie and the way the Avengers played merry hell with past events without affecting their own history.
My limited understanding is that there are two main theories of time: 1. tensed; and 2. untensed. The tensed theory claims that time exists and flows like a river from the past to the present where humans can only perceive an existent present, because the past ceases to exist and the future does not exist.
The untensed theory claims that all events exist simultaneously and that our human perception of time is an illusion. Untensed time is like looking at a meter stick and seeing all the millimeter markings at one time. Some believe untensed time can only be perceived by beings who transcend space and time (usually God or gods).
@79/Paladin: Umm, that’s maybe a vague approximation of a couple of schools of thought about the nature of what time is in general terms (though I’ve never heard it labeled that way), but there are far more rigorous calculations that have been worked out about what would specifically happen in the event that an object traveled back in time and interacted with its own past. And the fundamental rule is self-consistency. An interaction cannot cancel itself out but must resolve in a mathematically consistent way — it can cause itself, but it can’t prevent itself, because that results in an irresolvable contradiction and is physically meaningless.
So it’s not about the flow of time at all, about whether or how time passes. It’s about the consistency and resolvability of the physical equations that govern an interaction or event. That’s got nothing to do with the passage of time as we perceive it; physics doesn’t really have a clear “arrow” of time (as far as we know — see above link), which is why there’s nothing in the theory to preclude the possibility of time travel and backward causality. The only thing the physics requires is a consistent result, an interaction that produces a physically meaningful outcome rather than a self-contradiction. When physical entities interact, regardless of what times they came from relative to each other, the interaction has to happen in a consistent, resolvable way, which means it can’t erase itself from existence. The only way it can happen in two or more contradictory ways is if they happen in separate, non-interacting parallel realities so that each independent measurement history has a consistent result within itself.
@krad:
Maybe we’ll be lucky and Disney+ will give us a Mark Ruffalo miniseries that adapts Incredible Hulk #377 and shows the process by which he merged the personalities, but I’m not holding my breath.
I remarked at the time that this was a missing piece that I really wished could get its own story. But presumably this is tangled up in the Universal character rights quagmire. That’s a solvable problem, of course, but one suspects that the window to do it with Ruffalo would be relatively short, if for no other reason than he’s aging and the time period in which that story has to take place is fixed. So, I’m not holding my breath either.
@81 and KRAD, there’s actually a production-related reason we didn’t see the merger take place on-screen:
Markus said that in the early version of Avengers: Infinity War, Bruce and Hulk united spontaneously while Bruce was inside the Hulkbuster armor, and there was a scene where the Hulk burst free as he transformed. As for why it was cut, Markus explained, “It didn’t work! It was completely the wrong tone for that moment in the movie. It was this moment of victory while we were headed toward defeat.”
By the time Professor Hulk was cut from Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame had already been shot, so it needed a slight rewrite to explain the existence of this smarter version of the big green guy – which was why Markus and McFeely came up with the line about Banner working in the gamma lab. Markus said that they didn’t want to go much deeper into the explanation than that:
“You don’t have to explain as much as you think you have to. Okay, he’s the culmination of Hulk and Banner, just give me a crumb to hold on to… Part of the challenge and part of the pleasure… of these two movies… is how do you tell everything you need to tell… and keep it light enough you’re not bogging it down?”
Personally, I’m fine that we didn’t see it on-screen. It’s a nice surprise (and one I figured was coming based on Banner’s arc across Ragnarok and Infinity War, knowledge of the source material, and the conspicuous absence of Banner and Hulk from the pre-release marketing). It helped sell the passage of 5 years and how much the status quo changed during the time-jump.
That said, the She-Hulk series on Disney+ theoretically does give them an opportunity to dramatize Bruce’s research and merger on-screen if they so choose.
@82: The last sentence should read: “And, finally, you are correct about most time travel movies: they get time travel all wrong, including Cyborg 2087.”
@29
TBH, I feel like people put a little bit too much weight on what Banner is saying, because the rest of the movie seems to contradict it multiple times. Take this for example. We’re told that by removing the stones from the timeline, those timelines will be spun off into ‘dark futures’ where things like the Time stone aren’t available for use by the heroes. Banner suggests they’ll bring the stones back, but critically this, as far as I can tell, actually solve the problem. The act of removing a stone from the timeline spins off two futures; one where the stone was not removed (presumably “Actual” history) and one where it is removed. Bringing the stone back to the removed-stone-timeline also generates a split, though, a timeline where the stone is returned and a timeline where it isn’t.
But, the way the AO and Banner talk about the issue implies that the stone *can* be returned to the timeline and the timeline will continue on its way without any ‘dark future’ splits occuring. In this, the return of the stone corrects the timeline to the “actual” history timeline. In fact, I’d argue that this style of time travel is really what the MCU has been leaning into: when Strange first plays with the time stone, he presumably isn’t spinning off a trillion parallel universes where the apple exists in every gradient state of decay on a desk. Similarly, in the first test of Banner’s attempt at time travel, it results in Antman being shifted back and forth through their own timeline.
Further, the end scene with old Steve is *literally* built on the premise that he went back in time, married Peggy, and took the slow road to get back to the current year and sit on that bench.
I really think Banner’s explanation about time travel and ribbing on other pop culture examples of time travel is probably just unreliable narration rather than a concrete explanation of what’s going on here.
@85/xomic: Now, you know why I have such difficulty with time-travel movies in general. These movies either have no physical rules governing the time-travel process or the characters expound on the physical rules of time-travel, but do not apply those rules consistently.
@82/Paladin: Again, the question of the fundamental nature of time is irrelevant to the question of what would happen if you traveled back in time, just as the question of how life evolved is irrelevant to the question of what to do if you’ve been shot.
Also, philosophy is not physics. Physics is about observation, measurement, and math. Philosophy is just throwing abstract ideas around; you can propose anything if it’s just an idea. Physics is about how things actually work in the real universe, so only ideas that actually make physical sense are valid.
“So, under the presentism A-theory, the Avengers could not go back in time, because there is no “back there” to go to.”
As I already said, the relative order of where the participants in an interaction came from is physically irrelevant, because time is not an absolute anyway. What’s relevant is the self-consistency of an interaction. A time traveler cannot erase an event that has occurred, because that creates an inconsistency. The only way to consistently have two versions of a history is if they coexist in separate timelines, so that an observer in either single timeline will only see one consistent version.
“Now, could the Avengers or the Cyborg change their respective futures by traveling back in time and altering the past?”
What does “change the future” even mean when it hasn’t happened yet? They could go back from their subjective present and create an alternate timeline that would exist alongside their original timeline rather than destroying or replacing it. As far as moving forward into their future, there are many possible futures that could branch off from a given point, but an observer will only perceive one.
@85/xomic: “The act of removing a stone from the timeline spins off two futures; one where the stone was not removed (presumably “Actual” history) and one where it is removed. Bringing the stone back to the removed-stone-timeline also generates a split, though, a timeline where the stone is returned and a timeline where it isn’t.”
I don’t agree. There’s only a split if there are two contradictory versions of events. A version where a time traveler briefly took away the Infinity Stone, then came back a few minutes or hours later and returned it is a self-consistent sequence. (See the timeline chart I linked to in my first comment — it’s a good illustration.) The only way there’d be a second split is if they tried to return the Stones before they took them, which would create another contradiction.
“Further, the end scene with old Steve is *literally* built on the premise that he went back in time, married Peggy, and took the slow road to get back to the current year and sit on that bench.”
Once again: The filmmakers offer two interpretations for that — one, that he did so in a parallel timeline, and two, that he always did so in the main timeline and we just didn’t learn about it until now. At no point has it ever been proposed that he altered the original MCU history by going back. After all, if it were physically possible for Steve to alter history, it would certainly have been morally reprehensible for him to allow all the evils of the past 70-odd years to happen.
Enjoying this discussion on time travel. Thanks.
On the subject of unique depictions of time travel, I’d like to recommend an animated short from 1997 called Redux Riding Hood. It’s a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood but with time travel, and it goes in some interesting directions. Well, interesting enough to get an Oscar nom anyhow. You can probably find it on Youtube.
Not only would it be morally reprehensible for Steve Rogers to go back in time and just allow his wife to run a spy organization that he knew would have been thoroughly compromised and allowed his best friend to be used as a brainwashed murderer, it would be completely out of character.
Living in an alternate timeline he still would have been with “his” Peggy because up until the point of the split it was the same Peggy up until that point. Again, the physical evidence supports the notion that he was in an alternate timeline. Nobody has ever come up with an explanation as to where the shield that Steve gave Sam came from, if not from an alternate timeline.
@CLB: The problem with Steve staying in the original timeline is that there is absolutely zero way, both on a character and on simple physical plausibility basis, that Steve’s presence would result in the timeline we saw. Even if Steve — completely atypically — looked at the eventual defeat of Thanos and decided he shouldn’t do anything to interfere with it, and therefore just sat by and let things like the Stark assassination and Peggy’s organization’s infiltration by Super Nazis happen because ‘it all works out in the end’, we know from the events of Endgame itself that fixed time loops are not enforced. The actions of the timetravelling Avengers spawn at least two irreconcilably different timelines from the one we’ve seen in the movies: One where the events of GotG and anything subsequent involving Thanos don’t happen, because he jumped to the main timeline, and one where Loki escapes in NYC instead of winding up in Asgardian custody.
Given that, Steve’s simple existence — eating food, breathing air, and taking up space in general — is going to butterfly things. Any more significant interaction, such as, let’s say, seeking out his love and dancing her while another copy is still frozen in a glacier, will be even worse. This is not a By His Bootstraps model and I trust Steve to be intelligent enough to realize that.
That the scene is still obviously telling us that that’s precisely what happened is why so many people are so annoyed at it. Under the rules of the movie Rogers had to have come from an alternate timeline, which neatly sidesteps the ‘Rogers allowed all the bad stuff we see in the Marvel movies to happen’ issue. But that scene doesn’t follow any of the other time travel stuff we see. Steve isn’t in a suit, he doesn’t appear on the platform when he comes back, he doesn’t appear at functionally the same time he left, etc. It’s all shot to say on the trip back, Steve didn’t time travel at all, and took the long way.
And this isn’t just some random scene: this is the one that they cap the movie with. It is saying, very deliberately, exactly what the film-makers mean it to say. That also contributes to it weighing heavily against a mid-movie tech rant, particularly when said rant is coming from someone whom we a. see make other mistakes in the movie and b. personally propose keeping timelines from diverging to the only person in the whole movie who actually does understand time at a deep level (and who accepts Banner’s suggestion).
@87/CLB: It sounds to me like you are claiming that any single universe in the multiverse is hard determined* (tenseless and immutable and without cause and effect), which would leave very little room for any kind of agency within any given universe.
*Because if someone goes back in time to change the future of his present universe, he does not change his own universe’s history, but creates an entirely new universe with a different future history (maybe).
@90/foamy: “The problem with Steve staying in the original timeline is that there is absolutely zero way, both on a character and on simple physical plausibility basis, that Steve’s presence would result in the timeline we saw.”
Which is why I favor the alternate-timeline model. I’m just saying that no matter which officially endorsed model you favor, neither one involves altering the previously established MCU history.
“But that scene doesn’t follow any of the other time travel stuff we see. Steve isn’t in a suit, he doesn’t appear on the platform when he comes back, he doesn’t appear at functionally the same time he left, etc. It’s all shot to say on the trip back, Steve didn’t time travel at all, and took the long way.”
Of course he did — but that doesn’t rule out hopping between two parallel presents. So there’s nothing to stop us from assuming he took the long way in an alternate timeline and then found a way to jump the tracks in order to pass his shield on to Sam.
And yes, I know what the scene implies, thank you, but it does so for sentimental reasons. It makes a concession in the plot logic for the sake of an emotional moment. And that does not mean that they threw out the logic of the rest of the movie, merely that they bent it a bit at that one moment for the sake of poetic license. One moment of unreality in a movie does not require throwing out the entire logic of the overall story; it just requires understanding that stories are flexible things and sometimes the rules are bent a little for dramatic effect.
@91/Paladin: “It sounds to me like you are claiming that any single universe in the multiverse is hard determined* (tenseless and immutable and without cause and effect), which would leave very little room for any kind of agency within any given universe.”
Not at all. Free will exists; we make our own decisions. But each decision is only made once. The absence of free will is an illusion created by time travel, because doubling back on your own past creates the illusion of having a second chance to make the same decision. But the event isn’t happening again; it’s happening the one and only time, but you’re seeing it twice from different points on your own worldline. By analogy, if you watch a replay of a ball game, it doesn’t mean there’s a chance for the game to turn out differently. It was only played once. But if you watch it over again, that creates the illusory perception that its outcome is predestined because you can’t alter it.
Of course, with multiverse theory, a single event can have two or more different outcomes, as long as they’re isolated in alternate tracks and an observer in any single timeline sees only one outcome. But — and here’s the really obvious part that most people overlook because they’re mistaking the time traveler’s “replay” for objective chronology — those different versions of the event happen at the same time. Of course they do — they’re literally the same moment. So one does not come “after” the other, even if the time traveler experiences them consecutively due to rewinding through time. Objectively, they are simultaneous, so one cannot be said to have “changed” into the other or to “replace” the other. Rather, the timeline branched into both (or all) of them at once. The time traveler’s presence creating one of those branches is not “added” to the timeline; rather, the time traveler is simply there in one branch and not in the other. It only looks to the time traveler, subjectively, that the different timeline is “new,” because the time traveler didn’t know of its existence until then. But objectively, it was always there from the moment of its creation, running alongside what the time traveler subjectively considers the “original” history.
@93/CLB: You made great arguments with good examples! Now, I understand where you are coming from. Thanks.
I just want to point out htat Ant Man is the real hero. Without Scott Lang, his van, and his experience with the quantum realm, the Avengers would still be where they were before he showed up at their doorstep.
I’m in the large crowd that didn’t like how they treated Black Widow, but I also think she should’ve had her movie before Captain Marvel did seeing as we know Widow and it would make more sense for her movie to be in phase three instead of throwing in a random Cap Marvel movie AND THEN just throwing her in Endgame kind of unnecessarily save as a way out by saving Stark and Nebula from space and destroying Thanos’ ship later.
But whatevs I loved the movie regardless, where you know, they were able to win because of Ant Man, the saviour of the universe.
I would’ve loved for Monica Rambeau to have her own movie… but beggars can’t be choosers :/
I was taught (or mislearned) that there were at least four types of universes:
1. The “(pre)determined” universe, which has absolute rigid order. but no cause and effect, no natural laws and no agency. In this universe everything happens, because it is supposed to happen. Obviously, agency would be an illusion in this universe.
2. The “cause and effect determined” universe, which has natural laws and cause effect, but no agency. In this universe, every effect has at least one cause. Obviously, agency would be an illusion in this universe too.
3. The “cause and effect with agency” universe, which has natural laws, cause and effect and agency. In this universe, agency can break the chain of cause and effect. This, I believe, is the type of universe we live in.
4. The “random or chaos” universe, which has no order, no natural laws, no cause and effect and no agency. Not a good place to be.
@95, Loungeshe: Heh, one could argue the rat was the real hero (and it amused me to no end that a Disney film featured a rodent playing a crucial role. And it’s also hysterical that in all the timelines Strange previewed during Infinity War, the one where they defeated Thanos all hinged on a rat being at the right place at the right time to unintentionally free Scott).
Seriously, I loved that Scott Lang was the MVP and that despite needing help with the science and logistics, the plan to stop Thanos all began with him.
The fallout from Endgame is definitely giving Peyton Reed, Paul Rudd, and the rest of the Ant-Man crew some great material to explore in Ant-Man 3.
@96/Paladin Burke: I think agency is relative. It depends on your perspective of the universe. Quantum theory says that everything that ever happened or will happen in the entire multiverse is already written into the universal wavefunction — but the only way to know it would be to have complete knowledge of every particle in the infinite universe, which is impossible. As long as total knowledge does not exist, there is uncertainty; we don’t know which of all the possible alternate futures our decisions will take us down. Now, you could argue that means there’s no free will, but I think that’s taking the wrong perspective, like looking back on the ball game after it ended. Even if the universal wavefunction encompasses all events, then our decisions are included among those events and are thus as valid a part of the whole as anything else. They’re still the result of our choices while we’re making them.
After all, it’s not like we and the universe are separate things. We’re part of what makes up the universe. So our actions and choices are part of what shapes it. Whether that looks like a fixed phenomenon or a developing process is merely a function of whether you look at all of time at once from the outside or move through it second by second. The same thing can have two different natures depending on your frame of reference.
A chaos universe with no order would have no material objects or living beings in it anyway, by definition. It sounds like what our universe would become trillions of years in the future on reaching maximum entropy, when all matter has dissipated and there’s just nothing there anymore.
@97/Mr. Magic: Keep in mind that the van was in a storage facility for 5 years, so there were probably lots of rats crawling on it during that time. So it’s not that huge a coincidence that one of them eventually hit the right buttons.
@78, Both can be true. I acknowledge that the writers spent time getting the physics of time travel correct, and that part also made me happy. I can also acknowledge that the limits of physics don’t matter in regards to whatever they decide to do later. The laws of physics says Tony’s suit is impossible. The laws of physics say Tony should have died in that desert after fleeing his cave considering the velocity he hit the sand at.
The laws of physics don’t actually matter, and when the story demands they cast them aside, they come up with a semi plausible reason(like the absence of the infinity stones) to break them.
You can also turn down the condescension a notch.
@99/Aeryl: “I can also acknowledge that the limits of physics don’t matter in regards to whatever they decide to do later.”
It’s not about the limits of physics, it’s about the fact that the writers chose to honor them. What matters is how the creators choose to define their universe. Since they’ve chosen to use a realistic time-travel model here, since they cared enough to do their homework and get it right, it is reasonable to expect them to continue caring and to stay consistent with what they’ve already established.
Though if new creators took over, there would certainly be nothing to preclude them from replacing the plausible model with the usual idiocy. That happens far too often to screen SF series that aspire to some degree of credibility, Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda being one of the most extreme examples.
@98/CLB: In my youth, I had a mentor (a devout Christian) who once informed me that God has ultimate free will or agency. God can make any choice He wants and guaranty the result. Whereas, humans have limited free will. Humans can make choices, but cannot guaranty the results.
@101/Paladin: Free will is always constrained by opportunity and circumstance. In an open field, you can freely choose to move in any direction, at least in two dimensions. If you fall off a cliff, however, your freedom to choose your direction of motion becomes far more constrained. So when people argue about free will as if it were an absolute, either always there or never there, I think that’s a gross oversimplification.
@102/CLB: “Free will is always constrained by opportunity and circumstance. In an open field, you can freely choose to move in any direction, at least in two dimensions.”
But, I cannot will myself to fly! A being with ultimate free will can choose to will anything and make it so–no matter what the circumstances are.
Otherwise, I agree with most of what you have posted, supra.
@98/CLB: Yeah, I agree the accidental activation probably would’ve have happened sooner or later with that kind of rodent activity in the storage facility. And I remember you pointed out in your Blog Review that it explained why it had taken Scott so long to come back.
But it also brings up another interesting question: What would’ve happened if one of the Rats had activated the controls sooner and Scott had come out of the Quantum Realm earlier during the time skip? Would the Time Heist have been successful? Would it have even still happened at all?
For instance, I don’t think trying to recruit Tony earlier in that 5-year interim would’ve worked out in this scenario. The scars from Peter’s death on Titan and his fears for his family would’ve been still too fresh.
@103/Paladin: You missed where I said “at least in two dimensions.” Like I said, all free will is constrained by circumstances. It’s never absolute. We are free to choose, but only within the degrees of freedom available to us.
@104, Actually, something I forgot to add:
I wonder if Steve and Nat went into that visit at Tony’s cabin knowing that even if he said no, Tony wouldn’t be able to help himself and would eventually start tinkering with the problem. They’d known him for a decade at this point and his psychology.
Then again, I doubt that was the intent. Nat and Steve seemed genuinely frustrated at Tony’s initial refusal (and the latter was genuinely surprised Tony changed his mind when he arrived at the Compound). But nonetheless it’s something I remember wondering after seeing the film back in April.
“I love this movie and I hate this movie”
Of course you do. I don’t love everything about Endgame but damn, Is it an experience and an impressive piece of film making overall. Captain America getting a TDKR ending is just the icing on the cake for me.
@97: Which is why I like the fan theory that the rat was actually Loki in disguise.
Rewatched this tonight with my 8 year old grandson. When the women come together on the battlefield he said: “A team of girls? Give me a break.” I should not have laughed, but then he hasn’t kissed a girl yet.
Regarding some of the earlier comments about recasting, my sense is that they will be moving on to the next generation and working toward a Young Avengers. Now that time travel has been introduced it’s also likely Kang will pop up, just as he was a prime YA antagonist in the comics.
We may also get an Iron People movie with Morgan Stark as Irongirl, an Ironlad, and a version or Ironheart. Perhaps also Shuri as the Panther at some point.
Steve’s ending with Peggy made my head hurt but my heart happy. Which pretty much sums up my feelings on the movie. Count me as one who DOESN’T need shows that explain Steve’s adventures bringing the stones back, or Professor Hulk’s origin, or Rodin’s adventures. Backstory tales are tedious; let’s move forward.
@110/Alan: I don’t consider the reconciliation of Banner and Hulk to be backstory, though; it’s more like the climax of his ongoing arc throughout all the previous movies, and they just jumped over it. If you spend several movies setting up a conflict, and then in the last movie you just say “Oh, we fixed that offscreen in between installments,” that feels incomplete.
They even admit that they set up Banner/Hulk’s arc in IW to have a setup and a payoff, and then they cut the payoff because it didn’t fit the dark tone they needed for the rest, but they’d already shot Endgame so they couldn’t do much to compensate for omitting it. So it’s literally a hole in the middle of his story arc, a piece that the arc was designed to include but that got left out.
I just thought of something. If Ant-Man only experienced 5 hours, then why did Janet Van Dyne age in real time? She should have been almost the same age when they rescued her.
@112/Austin: The idea is that the Quantum Realm is a region where time works in unpredictable ways. It’s quite vast (proportionately) and has many domains that aren’t in temporal sync with each other. That’s how the Avengers were able to use it to go backward in time.
@112 / Austin:
Yeah, I’d wondered about that too. The real-life answer, of course, is plot convenience.
In-story, though…given how the Ant-Man films stressed the unpredictability of the Quantum Realm and how laws of space-time go out of the window…I guess we could assume sheer chance played its part, that Scott was in a different region or it was a different experience for him than it was for Janet (and indeed that specific scenario may have been what Strange was aiming for when he previewed possible timelines).
“Stark is wearing a suit and has his MIT ID for some reason”
Nanoparticles. They’re basically like Spider-man symbiote costume, with none of the downsides! So basically, a great way to fix any plot hole!
It’s interesting that they got Sylvester Stallone and Michelle Yeoh for a cameo that is barely noticeable, but didn’t bring any characters from the TV shows beside Jarvis.
Again, “Eat a salad” is Frigga giving Thor the kick in the butt he needs. Because she knows he sadly has no one else to do it. Korg, Miek and Valkyrie are providing some form of support that is helping him go on, but not get better. “Eating a salad” is just a first step in the long process of taking his life and his health back into his hands. It’s not fat-shaming (whereas lots of jokes at his expense were), because this is not Thor’s normal body, it’s a symptom of his depression: it’s normal to want someone you love to get better.
The film never explains how the universe is supposed to go on without the Infinity Stones… and they have been absent for five years by the end of the movie, so you’d think the effects would be noticeable by then, if they were that important… I guess we’ll learn more about that in The Multiverse Of Madness (or maybe the people who said the Ancient One meant that the heroes had needed them in their respective movies, and so they have to get them back)
@9: Reason why Steve Rogers cannot have come back to the original timeline after living his life in the parallel one: if he had used the Pym particles to return, he would have materialised where the others were expected him. But that’s a minor inconsistency, and the alternatives don’t make sense at all, so I’m going with time travel after Peggy’s death too (I do wonder who Peggy married in the original timeline though, since her biography in Civil War says she did marry…). Especially since, as Steven McMullan points out, he returns with his shield, which he left the present without, and which, at the point at which he gets back to Peggy, was with his body in the Arctic. Which also shows that this parallel timeline is one where Steve Rogers was awaken and was told that Peggy Carter enjoyed a happy life with his older doppelganger from another dimension… I wonder how the hero of First Avenger took the news! Anyway, let’s just accept that, when it was time to return, Steve Rogers decided to pull a prank on his friends for some reason and materialised a little way off.
@krad,
To add to what you said about the Hulk’s role in the climax earlier and specifically:
And yet, he’s the one who restores everyone. The greatest act of construction, of re-creation, of resurrection, comes from the character who is synonymous with destruction. It’s a beautiful thing.
What I especially loved about that was how Endgame revisited that plot point from the first Avengers about how the Tesseract (and the other Stones by extension) were emitting Gamma radiation.
I remember wasn’t crazy about that plot point back in 2012 because it just felt like a contrived way of justifying Banner’s inclusion.
But I loved how it paid off here during the ‘Un-Snap’ and also paid off that discussion between Tony and Bruce about the Hulk saving Bruce’s life during his irradiation and for what possible purpose. It dovetailed nicely with the conclusion of Banner’s character arc.
@115/Athreeren: “It’s interesting that they got Sylvester Stallone and Michelle Yeoh for a cameo that is barely noticeable, but didn’t bring any characters from the TV shows beside Jarvis.”
I gather the movie division doesn’t have much use for the TV shows. The only reason we got Jarvis, I assume, was because Agent Carter was developed and showrun by the writers of this movie.
“The film never explains how the universe is supposed to go on without the Infinity Stones…”
Didn’t they say the Stones still exist on an atomic level? Their essence is still part of the universe, it’s just dispersed so that it isn’t practical for anyone to obtain them anymore.
As for the Pym particles, here’s the thing: IIRC, Steve had a supply of particles sufficient for the jumps to return the Stones to where and when they were taken (roughly), plus one more jump to return home. Now, none of the Stones was taken from the late 1940s; the earliest was the 1970s. So that means he must have used his last dose of Pym particles to go back to the 1940s for his dance with Peggy instead of coming back to his own timeline. So he didn’t have those particles anymore and couldn’t have used them to get back. However, he had 70-odd years in that alternate timeline (yes, I’m sticking with that model) to figure out an alternate mechanism for time travel and dimension-crossing, or to get to know Hank Pym, Tony Stark, etc. and nudge them to figure out a mechanism. So there’s no great difficulty figuring out how he could be back in our timeline after living out his life in an alternate one.
@117 / CLB: Right, with the Infinity Stones, the Russos confirmed that was the intent with 2018 Thanos reducing them to atoms.
And as I was more or less saying earlier (@65), that’s the best approach for solving the existential threat of the Stones in the MCU narrative moving forward.
great post![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@117: Thank you, I missed the information that the stones still existed at the atomic level. I hope no one ever assembles them again, that would be tedious: they’ve served their purpose in the MCU, let’s move on.
Did they really say Steve had just enough Pym particles for each stone? That would really feel contrived: Hank Pym must have synthesized more, and Steve has seen that having spare samples to handle mistakes could be useful: why wouldn’t he have brought more?
@120/Athreeren: Okay, maybe I’m misremembering that, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, he would’ve had decades in an alternate timeline to come up with a different way to come back to the main timeline, so the mere fact that he didn’t materialize on the platform or whatever does not in any way disprove the alternate-timeline idea.
If we go with the alternate reality for Old Steve, one possibility is he could have arrived back on the large pad after they did but before Thanos appears (I think there was a brief period when no one was in the room) and hightailed it out of there before Thanos shows up.
One question remains if he had always lived in the reality as Peggy’s husband: where did he get the shield? Was there a point when there were multiple shields made from Vibranium? I do find it hard to accept that he could stay in the world and not do something to stop the atrocities and horrors, especially Hydra’s infiltration of SHIELD. Even knowing this is how everything is supposed to unfold, and that the Avengers will step up eventually, It’s a stretch.
@115– Steve wouldn’t necessarily have had to reappear on the time platform if you’d work with Howard Stark and Hank Pym to build a Time platform in the alternate reality. The hard work, the time GPS unit, was already done by Tony Stark. Of course, he could have just used his wrist unit to appear on the platform as an old man, but I’ll let the directors have that emotional moment with Steve and Sam on the bench where they find him. also, did it seem to anybody else that bucking knew that Steve wasn’t coming back?
@120 / Athreeren: Right, as I was saying earlier, I also agree that ideally, we never see the Stones again from this point forward. They were a terrific narrative engine for driving most of the last decade’s films, but they’ve absolutely run their course.
That’s why, with the focus on the Multiverse between Loki, WandaVision, and the Doctor Strange sequel, I’m wondering if the next decade will be building towards an adaptation of Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars.
It’s another long-term threat that’s as dangerous as Thanos that justifies bringing everybody together again, but it’s also completely different: A threat of nature, one that you can’t punch, blast, or magic away.
@123 / Steven McMullan: Yeah, that was also my interpretation when I saw Steve and Buck’s good-bye. The Russos have also confirmed that was their intent.
Bucky remaining behind is really what bothers me about Steve’s return to the 1940s rather than his survival. I’m personally fine with Steve going back in time. With the prevalence of time travel in the 616 Universe, the comics have had to justify over the years why Steve doesn’t just take a time machine and go home. By not introducing time travel to the MCU until now and with the specific kind of time travel, it’s finally justified in this instance.
What I’m not fine with is Bucky being left behind. There are any number of explanations that are in-character for Bucky, from feeling he needs to atone in the Present to not feeling he has a time to go back to. But I wish they’d acknowledged it in the dialogue because it just leaves Steve looking kinda selfish in the film’s final cut.
@125/Mr. Magic: Would it really be feasible to take the bionic-armed Bucky back to the 1940s, though? Either he’d introduce an anachronistically advanced bionic technology that would probably invite the interest of all sorts of supervillains and evil governments, and would have no way of being repaired when it eventually broke down, or he’d have to ditch the arm and settle for the primitive state of prosthetic limbs at the time. I’d say he’s better off in the present. (Well, I guess they could’ve disguised his bionic arm as a regular one and he could’ve used it in secret to fight crime, Steve Austin-style. Still, how to maintain it?)
@126 / CLB: Oh, yeah. I hadn’t thought about the ramifications of Bucky’s bionic arm if he went back. Good point.
It just bothers me that there wasn’t an on-screen acknowledgment from Bucky choosing to stay, though I expect Falcon and the Winter Soldier will delve more into that (and take influence from Ed Brubaker’s Captain America about living in a world without Steve Rogers).
#127–. It seems to me that Falcon and Winter Soldier will be taking its cues more from Mark gruenwald’s “The Captain” story from the late 80s, for the government essentially fired Steve Rogers from his role of Captain America and gave the shield to John Walker. except it seems in this adaptation they will be replacing Steve’s part the story with Sam.
@128, Good point, yeah. Gruenwald’s run will be definitely be a foundation with Johns Walker’s role.
As much maligned as it is, I also expect elements of Nick Spencer’s run, specifically Sam-as-Cap’s storyline, will be an influence too. There were elements of that particular storyline I did like and would work well as commentary on the current sociopolitical climate.
Anyway, with the influence from Brubaker’s run, what I meant there was…I was thinking along the lines of the Death of Captain America storyline when the characters were moving forward and trying to come to terms with a world without Steve Rogers or the original Captain America.
And this, again, is the advantage the MCU over the 616 Universe: There’s no status quo resets. This iteration of Steve is gone and we’ll never see him as Captain America again.
@126: I was about to suggest asking Howard Stark to build Bucky sufficiently advanced, but time appropriate prosthetics, but with his track record… it would be safer to live with one arm. No, the only place for Bucky would be in Wakanda, if they’d even allow a foreigner in before the time of T’Challa. Which makes me wonder: how advanced was Wakanda when Howard Stark obtained the Vibranium that made Steve’s shield? They can’t have had Shuri-like geniuses forever, or they would have transcended the limits of humanity a long time ago!
@130/Athreeren: “They can’t have had Shuri-like geniuses forever, or they would have transcended the limits of humanity a long time ago!”
There have always been geniuses; human intelligence hasn’t changed over the course of our history, only the amount of knowledge that intelligence had available to work with. Geniuses don’t exist in a vacuum, but build on the work of their predecessors and contemporaries.
Wakanda must have been highly advanced even before the era of European exploration of Africa in the mid- to late 19th century, because it was able to cloak itself and avoid discovery by the colonial powers.
Um, I think you saw a parallel world version of this movie.
…
Could I borrow it?
One thing– this recap is the only place I have seen the claim that Stallone, Yeoh, Rhames appeared in this movie. They are not listed as having appeared at the MCU wiki. I know that Gunn was present for the big battle, but by all accounts I’ve read Kraglin was CGI’d out of the movie.
@8 / CLB: Coming back to Nat’s sacrifice:
And I would’ve preferred it if Clint had been the sacrifice; honestly, I’ve never found Jeremy Renner an appealing performer. But I guess Natasha’s been the bigger part of this series, and the goal here was to bring the top leads’ story arcs to a decisive conclusion.
Actually, Clint was the sacrifice originally:
McFEELY: …Jen Underdahl, our visual effects producer, read an outline or draft where Hawkeye goes over. And she goes, “Don’t you take this away from her.” I actually get emotional thinking about it.
MARKUS: And it was true, it was him taking the hit for her. It was melodramatic to have him die and not get his family back. And it is only right and proper that she’s done.
I mean, I get their reasoning. We the audience knew one of the Avengers going to Vormir wasn’t coming back. And Nat’s death carried more emotional resonance than Hawkeye because she’s the better developed character (not Clint’s fault). It’s one of the reasons I’m hopeful for the Hawkeye limited series (especially if Matt Fraction and David Aja’s 2012-2015 run is a foundation). And, yes it pays off the tragedy of clearing the red out of ledger from the first Avengers.
But, yeah, her death just…rubs me the wrong way.
@17 / ZetaStriker: On the subject of Nat’s death, as you pointed out…
The film absolutely forgot about her death for the Tony funeral scene though, which was a goddamn travesty. They should have been equally mourning both of them.
The interview in @135 also clarified why she didn’t get a joint-funeral:
“Tony gets a funeral. Natasha doesn’t. That’s partly because Tony’s this massive public figure and she’s been a cipher the whole time. It wasn’t necessarily honest to the character to give her a funeral.“
Again, I get their reasoning and it does kinda fit the character. But the Avengers mourning her on the dock just doesn’t do it. It feels inadequate and a token mourning, almost.
That’s a good way to tie them in.
In my head they could make another XMen film, and this time introduce Quicksilver’s sister, Scarlet Witch, played by Elizabeth Olson. Then by some kind of House of M, “No More Mutants” -style reality warping, she links the two universes.
(and probably in a post-credits scene we see a familiar foul-mouthed merc entering the MCU, and then cut him off mid swearword ;)
Anyway, I’m just watching and waiting for them to keep introducing the various Young Avengers (we’ve already got Cassie Lang, and now Kate Bishop will be in the new Hawkeye series)
Regarding how time travel is depicted in popular media and people’s inability to understand a different model: I guess Dragon Ball Z wasn’t as popular with my generation as I thought it was. The shonen manga / anime is probably the most popular anime in history, but apparently it didn’t “train” people to understand this kind of time travel as “Back to the Future” trained people in the “wrong” kind of time travel. Maybe my sample is biased and far less people saw Dragon Ball Z than I thought.
Time travel happens in Dragon Ball Z when Future Trunks suddenly arrives at the end of the Freeza saga and tells the main heroes, especially Goku, that there’s going to be another enemy, much more terrible, who’s going to appear a few years from now. He warns Goku so that he should train to deal with these enemies, the androids, because in Future Trunks’ timeline Goku was caught by surprise and killed along with most Z warriors. Only Trunks and a one-armed Gohan lived, and eventually even one-armed Gohan was killed by the androids. This time travel was a hail mary by Future Trunks to see if Goku, the greatest warrior in history (and the main character) could come up with a way to defeat the androids given time. Lots of stuff happens, but when Future Trunks arrives in Goku’s timeline a few years later, he learns a way to defeat the androids (how to get more powerful by becoming a super saiyan 2). Then Future Trunks goes back to his own timeline, uses that technique, and defeats Androids 17 and 18. The only thing he got from time travelling was basically experience. When he goes back to his own time / reality, Android 18 is still evil and not the nice girl that will eventually marry Krillin. What he did in the past / other reality changed nothing about the future / his reality. And his reality didn’t collapse from what we see, it’s just that the story follows the main reality because that’s much more interesting, since it has more characters.
@137/Ryamano: There have always been various time-travel stories that used an immutable-history model, going back to Wells’s The Time Machine. I’ve mentioned some notable examples like The Final Countdown and 12 Monkeys; there’s also the animated series Gargoyles from the ’90s and the third Harry Potter book/movie (although the Potter stage play broke that book’s rules and made timeline changes possible). The Time Tunnel back in the ’60s generally went with a fixed-timeline model, assuming that the only things Tony and Doug could influence were events unrecorded by history so that their outcome was unknown. Some later episodes ignored this and involved trying to stop people from changing history, but they never succeeded, so the timeline remained unchanged in practice, at least.
But fixed-timeline stories are heavily outnumbered by the stories in which time travelers can change history, and I can understand why from a dramatic standpoint; there are higher stakes if the existence of the protagonists’ reality is in danger, and it limits the storytelling if the protagonists can’t do anything to affect events. So audiences expect the flexible-timeline model to be the default.
I do have a plot issue that i haven’t seen questioned anywhere… maybe i don’t remember correctly but didn’t they only have pym particle for one round-trip each? That means 2023 Nebula had pym particle only for her way back, 2014 Nebula stole it and went to the future, so no more pym particle left. How then did she bring Thanos and the whole ship to the future? If the machine can get people back without particle then most of the plot is mute right?
@139/Angel: I think the particles are just needed to open the portal between times, so once 2014 Nebula used 2023-N’s particles to open the return portal, the whole ship etc. came along for the ride.
After all, the whole idea was to bring something back with them (the Stones), so it had to be possible for them to return with more mass than they had when they started. Although bringing through a whole huge starship and its crew is pushing it, admittedly. But hey, the amount of energy within a single Infinity Stone is probably far greater than the energy equivalent of the rest mass of that huge ship.
Assuming there is a Reboot THOR in twenty to fifty years time, I really hope they cast Mr Chris Hemsworth as VOLSTAGG THE VOLUMINOUS; it would almost certainly be the most entertaining way for him to make the Gratuitous Reboot Cameo and throughly enjoyable for the rest of us!
By the way, excellent Review Mr DeCandido – please pardon my seizing the opportunity to use it as forum for my Pet Theory!
Not sure if this has been mentioned in the past 141 comments, but
Shouldn’t that read Hope van Dyne?
@138 and @139:
The Russos have clarified that Ebony Maw was able to reverse-engineer and mass-produce Pym Particles from the sample 2023 Nebula was carrying.
It makes sense, but I kinda wish it had been addressed on-screen.
The big plot hole that as far as I know hasn’t been answered (and which is still bugging me) is how the hell Carol knew to head back to Earth when she did during the climax.
I assume she was kept in the loop about the Time Heist plan since Nebula and Rocket were recalled back to Earth. But since we never saw it on-screen, I can only assume that either Strange contacted her while coordinating the Army’s arrival at the destroyed compound or she headed back once she realized the Snap had been reversed.
Strange’s coordination makes the most sense, but still, I wish how Carol knew how to head back then and there had been addressed.
LazerWulf: DERP! Yes, it should. Will fix. (In my defense, the Wasp has been Janet van Dyne in the comics for several decades………………)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@CLB
it is reasonable to expect them to continue caring and to stay consistent with what they’ve already established.
Except by the end of the movie, with Old Steve’s reappearance, they aren’t consistent with that.
Again, ignore the Russos. I love their movies, but they are TERRIBLE at this. They always ignore Markus and McFeely’s writing to come up with plot hole explanations after the fact. Markus and McFeely said, for them, their ending meant Old Steve had been in this universe this whole time, it meant that he’d been Peggy’s secret husband. Considering Markus and McFeely are the ones who wrote the damn Time Heist in the first place, that is a pretty explicit statement they have no intention of staying consistent with what they’ve already established.
Except paying attention to the writers at the expense of the directors means you accept that these writers don’t actually understand a damn thing about the character they’ve written in five movies. Because there is absolutely no way the Steve Rogers we’ve seen in more than half a dozen movies just sat around doing nothing the last 70 years knowing what was going on.
https://www.tor.com/2019/06/05/avengers-endgame-the-character-assassination-of-steve-rogers/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@146, What Steve knows is that the last 70 years, while bad things happened, they were FINE without him. That’s not character assassination, that’s weighing the stakes, and recognizing he’s more needed in the future than in the past. And as I said in my initial comment, screw anyone who would begrudge Steve his peace.
I think the Russos get the character just fine, what they don’t get is getting from point A to B. That’s why things like “How did Carol find Tony” don’t click for them and they have to scramble for an explanation after the fact when asked, though the explanation is IN THE DIALOG!
Character assassination of Steve Rogers, IMO, is asking us to believe he never sat down with Tony and said “Hey Tony, when I was learning about HYDRA inside of SHIELD, I discovered that they were responsible for your father’s death, and as sorry as I am to learn it, my childhood friend is who they brainwashed into doing it”. Not that a soldier, who was NEVER obligated to fight in any wars, is entitled to a break.
@145/Aeryl: “Except by the end of the movie, with Old Steve’s reappearance, they aren’t consistent with that.”
I have already expounded at length on why I reject that interpretation. Just because it superficially gives the impression that it’s inconsistent does not make it impossible to reconcile. It’s actually quite easy to reconcile with only slight effort.
Aeryl: only a sociopath would live with a woman and share his life with her and never tell her that her life’s work was compromised by Nazis. Not to mention the dementia scene in Winter Soldier, which only works with Steve being there all along if Peggy is faking dementia to fool young Steve.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@149 I’d also argue it works surprisingly well if Peggy is reliving her reunion with Steve in the past.
I agree with Aeryl on this one, and will simply note, as I did on your original post, that there are other ways to be a hero than by trying to change the known events of the past. But I think both sides are firmly entrenched on this particular argument.
The gist I am getting from reading all of are discussions on time-travel is that time-travel would be an easy way to replicate people and things. Do you want two Hulks? Send him back in time a few seconds or minutes. Do you want two sets of infinity stones? Send them all back in time a few seconds or minutes. Do you want two earths? Send it back in time a day. Do you want to end starvation in 1980’s Ethiopia? Gather up all our leftover crops from today and send them back in time!
Question: If I go back in time one minute, will I meet myself? Or, is there some quantum mechanical or natural law that prevents this? And, if so, why?
@150/hummingbirdrose: Again, it’s important to remember that per the movie’s time travel rules, one cannot change one’s own past, only create an alternate alongside it. If Steve did live out his days in his own past, that means he always did, that he was there all along in the original history. It also means that he could not change things even if he tried, and he would know that from the start. It would be as impossible as jumping to Mars. It’s off the table. It’s not even a consideration.
The problem is, if he was part of the past all along, then that means the past we got was the one that he was already in. And that’s what’s hard to reconcile — that a past he was present for from the start would turn out so badly for SHIELD, for Bucky, and for the world. It’s not even a question of what he would change, because change is not a possibility. It’s just a question of whether he would’ve allowed those things to happen in the first place.
Also, since we know the MCU follows the multiverse model, that means that Steve couldn’t alter the events of his own past, but he absolutely could act in a way that would create a parallel timeline. So he might not have any choice in the matter. If he did anything at all that caused an event in his original past to turn out differently, then he would be in an alternate timeline from that point onward, because that’s just the way it works. And it’s just hard for me to believe that he wouldn’t try to change anything. He’d know that it would just create an alternate, but that alternate world would still be real, and at least there’d be a version of the world where the people he cared about led better lives. I can’t believe he wouldn’t do that. I think it’s inevitable that he would end up creating a parallel world where things went better.
So I just don’t think the “he was secretly in his own past all along” interpretation makes sense on any level — not physically, not causally, not in terms of character. The only thing it provides is a simple explanation for why Old Steve was on that bench, and that’s not enough to make sense of it. It’s just a bad idea.
@krad: someone mentioned it earlier, but Hawkeye is still ““Clint, daughter of Edith” in the article.
Regarding where Steve went, I definitely prefer an alternate reality where he and Peggy cleaned up everything. Then they lived a happy, peaceful life together and when Peggy died, old Cap returned to the main timeline. That still doesn’t explain why he ages so much, unless the serum was extracted or wore off as it did in the comics.
The problem is then that by doing that Steve didn’t “clip all the branches” of those “nasty alternate realities” Banner warned him about. This is why we’ll get a multiverse going forward, from Doctor Strange 2 to the What If… stories, where Peggy Carter becomes Captain Britain, bearing a shield.
Sidenote: about the moment when Thor is relieved to find he is still worthy. This is the best explanation I’ve run across about why Thor became unworthy in the comics (which didn’t handle the issue well at all). Essentially, Thor loses faith in himself and his abilities:
According to lore, the hammer is sentient and has a trapped goddess inside, Tempest, the Mother of Thunder. “The hammer responds to whoever is willing and able to perform a specific duty, unto death if need be. Which is why Jane Foster (or Beta Ray Bill, Volstagg the Voluminous or Captain America) were able to lift it.”
Unworthy Thor
@152 I don’t have a bird in my name.
Again, I think we need to agree to disagree, because your conception of Steve is not the same as mine.
@151/Paladin Burke: “Question: If I go back in time one minute, will I meet myself? Or, is there some quantum mechanical or natural law that prevents this? And, if so, why?”
Per quantum physics, parallel timelines cannot interact, ever. The entire reason they exist as parallels is because the laws of physics require them to be non-interacting. As I said above, physics demands consistent results, an equation having a single solution. It doesn’t work if there are two contradictory solutions. So if an interaction can have more than one outcome, those outcomes have to be causally isolated from each other. No individual measurement history (“timeline”) can ever interact with or be aware of any of the others existing alongside it. So because they’re causally independent of each other, they effectively can be considered separate “universes.” That’s where the idea of a multiverse comes from in the first place, that need to isolate the different outcomes from each other.
However, there is a possible out to this, a variant on the theory called non-linear quantum mechanics:
http://mist.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw48.html
In a normal quantum system, the probabilities of all possible states of a particle or outcomes of an interaction must add up to one. This is fairly intuitive; if the probability of getting any given number on a die is 1/6, then the sum of all the probabilities is 6/6 = 1. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way the full range of probabilities can add up to more than 100% (= 100/100 = 1). This is called unitarity, and it’s basic to linear quantum mechanics. Violating unitarity, allowing a total probability greater than 1, would mean that you could have more outcomes than you have events — that a given event could have more than one outcome. So if QM is non-linear, then that allows for a single observer to perceive more than one outcome of an event, which would mean they could potentially interact with an alternate timeline. Non-linear QM also makes it theoretically possible to interact with your past self or communicate faster than light. It’s only conjectural, but in fiction you can certainly say it’s real.
I do want to see a story about what would happen if you do interfere with your past self. What would happen?
There are already countless such stories, a notable recent example being the movie The Flash.
In a fixed-timeline model, you would have met your future self all along, and when you caught up and became your future self, you’d say and do exactly what you remembered your future self saying and doing. Examples include Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the third Harry Potter novel/film. In a parallel-timeline model, you’d just create a new timeline where you interacted with your past self and things went differently. There are lots of examples of that in fiction, though (like The Flash) they’re usually using the fanciful “changing history” model where the traveler’s own past is changed or threatened with erasure.
As Peggy said, “sometimes the best you can do is to start over”.
@155/CLB: IIRC in Endgame didn’t some of the future Avengers go back in time to when the Battle of New York was being fought to steal some Infinity stones? And, didn’t they make an effort to avoid their past individual selves? Wouldn’t that constitute a linear, mutable, self contained timeline rather than a branching mutliverse? Or. am I wrong?
@157/Paladin: Except they totally failed to avoid affecting the past — remember, Loki escaped with the Tesseract, which he didn’t do before. They absolutely did create an alternate timeline there.
I don’t recall the exact dialogue, but I think the reason they wanted to interfere minimally with events was just to avoid distractions from their mission — to keep things as simple as possible by getting the Stones in the least obtrusive way that would attract the least interference from the people around them in that time.
Also, I think it’s just a matter of being considerate. They may have created new timelines by going back, but the people in those timelines were just as real as they were, and they had their own issues to worry about without a bunch of time travelers barging in and making a mess of their lives. The 2023 Avengers had their priorities, their past selves had other priorities, and it was just a matter of keeping them separate for everyone’s sake.
Which, of course, they failed at monumentally in almost every instance, especially 2014.
hummingrose: Your conception of Steve is that he would lie to the woman he loves for decades? That he would let her life’s work be undermined by the very same Nazis they both fought against in the war? That every day when she came home from work and talked about the latest bit of tech they got from Arnim Zola’s research, he just nodded and didn’t say a word about Zola’s long con?
You do you, but that is 180 degrees from Captain America, to my mind.
Plus, it’s already established that he would break the Avengers to save Bucky in the 2010s, and I don’t see how you reconcile that with him sitting on his ass while Bucky is being brainwashed and made into an assassin throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who has finally fixed the “daughter of Edith” thing
In an alternate universe, I wish Marvel and Sony had kept the existence of Spider-Man: Far from Home as classified as it could get from any media outlet, to the point keeping that trailer locked in a vault, and blocking IMDb from creating the movie’s page. Then, they’d wait about a week following Endgame’s opening and then finally release the news that a Spider-Man sequel was imminent.
Of course, movie marketing doesn’t work this way at all, but it would have been a clever surprise to the moviegoing public.
But seeing Far From Home’s trailer so far ahead of Endgame was to me the biggest indication they were going to de-snap Peter Parker and company.
I’m just following the conversation with interest, but I have to say, that (regardless of the science involved) one thing that for me would feel really unsatisfying is that even if I DID create an alternate timeline where my loved ones lived better lives – it would still gall me that there’s still a timeline where there are NOT. To the point that I’d probably start dwelling on it all so much it would feel meaningless. Which I realize is a bit illogical; does our suffering in the past mean our pleasure in the future is meaningless? Or suffering in the future mean pleasure in the past is meaningless? I don’t know. I suppose we’re mostly linear beings (or at least I am) so for me it’s kind of hard to wrap my mind around it and I do tend to get stuck on the end point as being ‘more’ significant.
I don’t even have a strong opinion on the character assassination but I think it just goes to show there are so many different interpretations of what ‘makes’ a person’s character. In some ways it reminds me of the myriad debates about Han/Luke/Poe, etc and if their actions are consistent or not.
However, this may be the first superhero movie rewatch to break 200 :)
Eduardo: One of my biggest problems with Infinity War was something I outlined in the review I wrote for my Patreon when the movie came out:
“And then we have the ending. In the moment, watching people crumble to ash was very effective. But it’s also so very obviously not permanent. And the reason why I know it’s not permanent? Because there are four movie series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that a) are only one or two movies old, b) have been huge successes, and c) will have more movies in their sequence because Disney is not going to decide not to make money anymore. For that reason, I don’t believe for even the tiniest nanosecond that Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Black Panther are really dead. And that leavens the tragedy a lot.”
The notion that they would permanently kill any of those characters is, bluntly, ludicrous.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Now for Endgame. I tend to write these comments while listening to Silvestri’s themes, most notably the Portals track he created for this film. I never quite held Silvestri in the same league as Williams or Goldsmith. But this majestic orchestral take on the Avengers theme puts him up there. Easily the best MCU score in these past 11 years!
When I first saw Endgame, I described it as an ongoing collection of third act climaxes from start to finish. It certainly feels that way to me. Every scene feels loaded with stakes. Meanwhile, the characters are front and center, and even within the mind-boggling time travel plot, the movie never loses sight of them.
At the same time, it works as a fitting tribute to every MCU production of the preceding decade and a beautiful distillation of the MCU narrative, containing the best aspects of all previous films into one tight, cohesive and memorable end result.
So many moments to love, cherish and applaud. And plenty of fun and laughs. I never quite held superhero films in the same level of esteem as I do Star Wars. Infinity War and Endgame were the first ones to fully engage me on that same emotional level that only a Star Wars film is able. Films that I eagerly waited in a long line for the opening. That’s what Markus, McFeely and the Russos were able to accomplish.
When I first saw the Arrested Development pilot back in 2003, I certainly admired their direction and visual style, but there’s no way that I could ever imagine these two would become the biggest names associated with blockbuster filmmaking 15 years later. But in a way, their TV work informs a lot of why these films work so well, given their ongoing focus on character over plot, the same way Whedon’s own films did prior. It helps to break the notion that a TV director can’t handle a big film, a notion that’s become increasingly outdated.
The Avengers Assemble sequence is a worthy culmination of everything that came before, and probably why I keep coming back for this film. It’s the payoff for 11 years of mostly thoughtful storytelling (and I keep hoping for a similar scene to present itself in December at the end of Rise of Skywalker, culminating the entire nine-film saga on their end).
Nebula has certainly shot to the top of my favorite MCU characters. Now there’s a complete redemption arc superbly brought to life by Gillan.
Personally, even though I could tell this was the end of the road for both Rogers and Stark, I still feel the plot allowed for them to reach a conclusion in a mostly organic way. Does it feel tied to Downey Jr.’s contract? A little, but it doesn’t feel so constructed to me. Feels natural enough.
And I was pleasantly surprised by Thor’s own arc. It’s funny, but I don’t feel the whole weight angle was necessarily so exploited for easy laughs. Overall, I feel Hemsworth successfully manages to convey Thor’s PTSD through all the layers of that fat suit, managing a performance that’s both funny and endearing. It feels like a real step in his own journey. Also, his joyous reaction to Cap handling Mjolnir is worth the 3 hour runtime.
In the end, it was all worth it. Feige took a big gamble when he started the whole thing in 2005, and it paid off beautifully.
@161/Lisamarie: “one thing that for me would feel really unsatisfying is that even if I DID create an alternate timeline where my loved ones lived better lives – it would still gall me that there’s still a timeline where there are NOT.”
Well, by multiverse theory (at least the fictional version), that’s pretty much a given anyway. There are always going to be a range of different timelines with different outcomes. So all you can do is focus on whatever timeline you have the power to influence — to decide for yourself whether you choose to make a difference where you can. And that’s basically the defining motivation of Steve Rogers — doing what he can to help, no matter how limited his ability. That’s what he did when he was Skinny Steve in the ’40s, and it’s what he did post-Snap when all he could really do was counsel people through their grief. He did what he could.
@162/krad: Don’t get me wrong. Even back during Infinity War, I was certain that there was no other direction this plot could have possibly taken other than bringing these characters back, as I am sure most of the moviegoing audience was also. I just wanted to indulge in the illusion, and part of me hoped that Disney and Sony would play off of that expectation and keep Far From Home a secret for a while longer.
@164, oh, I know, that’s why I hate multiverse theory, lol. It’s just one of those things I get sucked into an existential crisis over, sometimes to the point of paralysis and nihilism. (I’m not saying that’s a correct response to it, just how my particular neuroses manifest.) Of course, even in this one timeline, there’s so much we can’t impact and I can’t even think too much about THAT…multiple timelines is just a bridge too far ;)
Out of habit, I posted that “next week” I’d be doing Far from Home, but there won’t actually be a rewatch on Friday due to the Thanksgiving holiday, and also my being a guest at Starbase Indy. The rewatch of Far from Home will be on the 6th of December. I’ve edited the post above appropriately.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@166/Lisamarie: Well, if it’s any consolation, the difference between real and fictional multiverse theories is that in the real theory, what makes the timeline split isn’t human decisions, but quantum-mechanical processes on the level of subatomic particles. Unless the crackpot theorists are right, human thought is a classical process rather than a quantum one, so people’s actions and choices wouldn’t cause a timeline split or be affected by one. Whatever difference in quantum states existed between two divergent timelines wouldn’t have any effect on people’s choices, so they’d probably make the same choices in both. There’d only be a difference in special cases where a quantum-level change affected something macroscopic, like in the Schroedinger’s Cat experiment where the poison is triggered by radioactive decay. Maybe occasionally there would be cases where a person got a cancer-causing mutation in one timeline but not another. And maybe once we start using quantum computers to make decisions, the multiverse would have more of a macroscopic impact.
Then again, if the timeline has already split anyway, then it stands to reason that certain random factors might gradually diverge after the split, which would create an opportunity for outcomes to start happening differently. But I think most outcomes aren’t truly random or 50/50 — usually there’s a reason an outcome happens a certain way, due to the environment and the initial conditions. Some things would be chaotic enough for a slight change in the starting conditions to make a big difference, but other things would likely come out pretty much the same. If you have a specific reason to turn right at the crossroad, you’re not spontaneously going to turn left instead. It’s a common misconception that multiverse theory requires every imaginable outcome to happen somewhere, but that’s not really the case. It just says the universe is the sum of multiple parallel histories. In most of them, the most probable outcomes will prevail. So in practice, there’s probably not a lot of measurable difference between parallel worlds.
As for the existential question, I’m reminded of one of my favorite series in the Japanese Kamen Rider superhero franchise, Kamen Rider OOO (pronounced “O’s” or “Ozu”). Its hero, Eiji, was a rich heir who tried to make a grand philanthropic gesture and save a wartorn country, but things went wrong and he could only watch the chaos helplessly. So he became a drifter with no long-term goals and no desire for possessions beyond enough coins for his next meal and one extra pair of clean underwear. And he adopted a new philosophy: that he would “help as far as my hand will reach.” He couldn’t save the world, but if someone was within his reach, he’d be damned if he wouldn’t extend his hand to help them. He refused to let his guilt over the people he couldn’t save stop him from giving whatever help he still could. And because of that, when he accidentally came into possession of the OOO power that had been created to serve evil ambition and greed, he instead used it to become a hero, helping however he could with what was now a considerably extended reach — and eventually learning that he could reach still further with the help of his friends and allies. And so eventually, of course, he did save the world, as every Kamen Rider does after about 48-51 episodes. (Although part of it was learning that it was still okay to want things, that desire was fundamental to existence and could be positive as well as negative. It was interestingly nuanced and philosophical for a kids’ action show.)
I think that’s something all superheroes need to reconcile with — the fact that they can’t save everybody or end all suffering. What matters is focusing on what they can do. That’s really all anyone can do, is take responsibility for the part of the world within our reach. If enough of us do that, it adds up.
@162 and @165:
Yeah, your thoughts ties back into what I said back in KRAD’s Infinity War post.
The Snap wasn’t a surprise for anyone who knew the comics. You don’t adapt the Thanos story for the silver screen and not do its most horrific, iconic moment. So knowing the ending and the franchise financial stake, it was clear they’d be back.
But the thing is…we the audience knew it would be undone…but the characters didn’t. As far as they knew, the Apocalypse had come, ended, and they lost. So some of the appeal of Endgame was seeing how they copanyoned with, to paraphrase 2014 Thanos, the weight of their failure. The journey was more important than the end.
(And, as I said earlier, part of the drama was that we also didn’t know whether anyone visited by the Grim Reaper before the Snap would be getting a second chance).
And in a perfect world, Marvel Studios would’ve delayed marketing for Far From Home until after Endgame was released to downplay Peter’s return, but, eh, we can’t have it all.
This thread just beat The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel in number of comments. Age of Ultron (173) and Captain Marvel (188) are the only remaining threads with more
@65 / CLB:
Coming back to your earlier point (since I forgot to respond earlier)…
I wasn’t saying there should’ve been an in-story explanation of how Carol found Tony. I was saying there should’ve been an in-story explanation of who the hell this flying, glowing blonde woman even was. Anyone who saw this movie without having seen Captain Marvel first would have no idea where this incredibly powerful superwoman randomly came from. They might recognize that her costume had the same logo that was on Fury’s pager in the IW post-credits scene, but that wouldn’t tell them nearly enough.
True, they undoubtedly had to cut out a lot to get the film down to a reasonable running time. But this was a detail that should’ve been left in. It’s always important to re-establish anything integral to the story you’re telling, for the benefit of new viewers or ones who need reminders of things they’ve forgotten.
I wrongly remembered what you’d said, so apologies.
But yeah, you’re absolutely right. That detail should’ve been left in and it bugged me, too.
@168 – thanks, that was something I needed to read today :)
I am finding in some way that these kinds of stories resonate with me. A lot of this has been on my mind due to recently celebrating All Saint’s/All Soul’s day, and I was joking to people that in some ways, that I find these holidays more satisfying than Christmas (which always comes at a rough time of the year for me anyway)…I’ve accepted that my mind tends to the macabre/melancholy at times, so having a holiday to acknowledge the fact death waits for us all, but also that it’s not the end of the story is in some ways helpful to me. I definitely do not take it as an excuse to just be apathetic or complacent, but it takes some of the pressure off, I guess, in the face of how much I CAN’T do. Kind of like a ‘way of the little flower’/’small things with great love’ kind of thing.
As an aside, my son is really into anime right now, so I bet he would like this show :) Actually, the way you describe it makes me think of our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Or heck, even Frodo. Or the little actions in Les Miserables that lead Jean Valjean to a new path (and that he pays forward).
I just want to comment on the “girl power” moment in the final battle, because while it could be seen as a slightly cringy and mostly unnecessary demonstration of the power of the relevant characters, as well as tiresome virtue-signaling to the sheer number of female characters the movies have amassed, I found the whole thing much more palatable as a callback to when the heroes tried something similar in Infinity War – and could at that point only field Okoye, Wanda, and Black Widow. The lineup of female heroes (Which I seem to recall included Okoye, Wanda, Mantis, Rescue, Danvers, and at least 3 others) in Endgame took on a very distinct tone of “Let’s do it right this time” under that viewing, which elevated it to one of the standout moments in a final battle filled with them.
As best I can tell there are four referenced timelines now:
MCU-main: The Stones were destroyed, Thanos is dead, and Earth (and presumably everywhere else) is under tremendous stress from doubling its population so quickly (I’m guessing that Stark has an app for that, though, and gave it to Pepper :<)
MCU-Loki: Loki escapes with the Tesseract, presumably to appear on Disney+.
MCU-2014: Thanos and his army vanished and were never seen again.
MCU-Rogers: The timeline where Steve Rogers goes after returning all the Stones and the hammer. I do not agree with our esteemed reviewer that this the same as as the MCU-main and that he’s Peggy’s secret husband. I believe that he would have decided that forking off a new timeline from, say, just after he went into the ice was the right call. My headcanon says that he immediately tracks down Bucky, preventing him from becoming the Winter Soldier at all, and they prevent Hydra from infiltrating SHIELD, closing it down for good. I haven’t decided yet what else he would need to do, since so much of our world’s crisis points are shown to have originated with Hydra (Cuban Missle Crisis and the Kennedy assassination are specifically called out in Winter Solider, I believe). Maybe he could prevent the Apollo and Challenger explosions, although preventing the rise of communist China or the Soviet Union is probably a bridge too far.
As an aside, there might be two kinds of time travel in the MCU. In addition to forking timelines with major changes, it is possible to “rewind” time and change it with the Time Stone. Both Dr. Strange and Thanos use it to change their immediate past. What isn’t clear to me is whether or not that action forked new timelines as well (in which case, there’s a world where Dormammu won, and one where Thanos only had five of the stones).
TL;DR: Cap definitely forked a new timeline and wasn’t hiding in the shadows in ours.
@149: Doesn’t that only apply if the timeline is which the scene happens is the same as the one where he lived his life after going back? In MCU-main, he comes out of the ice to find Peggy married someone else. In MCU-Rogers, that scene never takes place.
@172/Lisamarie: Glad I could help. As for Kamen Rider, it’s a live action franchise (the sister show of Super Sentai, the series that Power Rangers is based on), though it often hires writers from anime, and the directors often use anime-like touches. The head writer of Kamen Rider OOO, Yasuko Kobayashi, has done some notable anime work including Witchblade, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and Attack on Titan (as well as writing many of my favorite KR & SS seasons including Kamen Rider Den-O, Samurai Sentai Shinkenger, and Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters).
@174/ssircar: I think Keith actually agrees with you that Steve was with Peggy in an alternate timeline. He wrote that whole article explaining why the idea that he did it in the main timeline would be total character assassination and makes no sense.
ssircar: Actually, as Christopher said, you agree with me. Cap had to have created another timeline where he was happy with Peggy and also saved Bucky and got a new shield and stopped Hydra and all that other fun stuff. It’s the only thing that makes sense in character terms (and in time-travel terms with the movie).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My take on the “if Steve Rogers is in the main timeline, it’s out of character for him to lay low and avoid fighting HYDRA” quandary:
Possibility 1: He tries, but is not successful. Events conspire against him to preserve a consistent timeline. (And he eventually takes up yoga to deal with the frustration.)
Possibility 2: He is successful, but only in mitigating HYDRA’s ambitions. That is, history-as-we-know-it is bad, but without Steve, things would be even worse.
@178/Phillip Thorne: But both of those are rather unhappy outcomes for Steve. Either way, he fails to save Bucky, to save Peggy’s life’s work from corruption. The intent was to give Steve a happy ending by putting him together with Peggy at last. The only way it is happy is if he’s in an alternate timeline where he actually can make things better. Otherwise it’s dooming him to failure. And that wasn’t what the ending was intended to achieve, so it’s odd that the writers want to interpret it that way.
@179, I don’t know why people get so hung up on “happy endings”. Life isn’t happy ending, life is struggle.
What I want for Steve is peace. Not a fairy tale.
Aeryl: If he lived in a timeline where he lied to his wife every single day and/or failed to save his wife’s life work from being corrupted by Nazis, then he didn’t have peace.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@180/Aeryl: Who said anything about “people”? I’m making a specific point, not a generic one. I’m saying it was the professed, explicit intent of the makers of this movie to give Steve a happy ending. So interpreting that ending in a way that’s actually a lifelong failure for Steve kind of misses the point.
@@@@@#8–“…you could say they were running the Infinity Gauntlet Gauntlet.” No, you actually could say they were running the infinity Gauntlet Gantlet. A Gauntlet is an armored glove; a Gantlet is a test of strength, will, and endurance. Maybe just a typo….
@183: Not a typo–both are accepted spellings!
I’ve only ever seen it as “run the gauntlet.” The Wiki article says that American English prefers “gantlet” there, but then the article itself mostly uses “gauntlet” for it.
@krad Who says he lied to Peggy? Peggy in Winter Soldier, for all her “dementia” seemed VERY AWARE of what SHIELD had become.
Again, as I said at the time Endgame was released(before the attitude about it got so toxic it led to go away for awhile), what happens to HYDRA if it’s forced out of the US? Does it find a more hospitable alliance? The very need to keep HYDRA a secret within the ranks of SHIELD hobbled it’s growth and influence far more than if Zola had gone to the USSR and openly worked with Soviet era KGB.
Steve has no way of knowing what unforeseen impact trying to openly shut HYDRA down would cause. I find it very likely that he’d tell Peggy what he knew of what was going to happen, they’d both agree that moving against HYDRA openly could have dangerous repercussions, and instead work quietly to thwart HYDRA from the inside. Without Steve and Peggy’s stealth intervention against HYDRA in the past, the MCU doesn’t even happen, as HYDRA becomes more powerful than it was in Winter Soldier, and completes their plan for world domination during the Reagan years.
See that’s why absolute statements about fiction are ludicrous, and trying to “convince” someone that their interpretation of a story is “objectively wrong”, as tends to be the habit around here, is pointless.
Aeryl: I’m willing to concede that that’s a good counterargument with regard to Peggy and S.H.I.E.L.D. Though I still don’t see how the dementia scene in Winter Soldier works at all with Steve being Peggy’s husband all along.
However, I still maintain that there’s no way he’d just sit around and let Bucky be brainwashed into an assassin for seven decades when he has the power to do something about it. Just a couple movies ago, he broke the Avengers to save Bucky. He wouldn’t just sit around when he knows exactly where to go to save him.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@186/Aeryl: I don’t agree that Hydra (at least the branch of it featured in the movies, never mind Gideon Malick’s more ancient branch from Agents of SHIELD) would be more powerful without its infiltration of SHIELD. After all, as of 1945, Hydra was broken, defeated. All that was left, basically, was Arnim Zola and a few scattered loyalists. It was because Zola was brought into the SSR/SHIELD by Operation Paperclip that he was able to use its resources to gradually rebuild Hydra over decades.
So if Future Steve had gone back to the ’40s and exposed Zola, it wouldn’t have made Hydra stronger — on the contrary, it would’ve stripped Zola and his cronies of the means to rebuild Hydra’s strength.
Again, though, it should be remembered that there’s zero chance of Steve changing his own past. If he changes anything, it’s an alternate timeline, period. If he were in his own past, then by definition, everything he did would lead directly to the history he knows. So it’s not even a question of whether he chooses to try changing his own past. Personal choice is irrelevant when something is physically impossible to begin with. Because Steve listened to Bruce’s exposition, he would know from day one that he couldn’t change his own past no matter how hard he tried. If he has a choice at all, then he’s in an alternate timeline and there’s no reason for him not to change things.
@krad
Quick question: If Cap lived his life with Peggy in a different timeline (which, I think, is the only real possibility), was it one in which 1940’s Captain America died in the battle with the Red Skull?
Or, did the main-timeline Steve Rogers rescue him because he knew where he was, therefore making it where there were 2 Captain Americas living side by side?
Or, did main-timeline Steve just live with Peggy and let 1940’s Steve stay frozen until someone might find him in the 2000’s?
Just wondering other’s thoughts. Personally, I think the timeline where 1940’s Steve is dead is the most likely.
@189/Wookster: It wouldn’t be a pre-existing alternate. It would be one that branched off from the known history at the point of Steve’s arrival, because his arrival changed things. And I think the writers said he arrived c. 1948, so it’d be after the events of Agent Carter. So it’s definitely a past where Steve is already frozen in ice — and Bucky’s already been captured and experimented on. Certainly Future Steve would do something about the latter. What he’d do about the former is another question.
Does Steve even know the exact location where he was found? Even if he had that memorized, it wouldn’t be easy to retrieve him with ’40s or ’50s technology. So it might take a while.
This is now the rewatch post with the most comments, passing Captain Marvel’s 188. I think that the only one with a chance of beating it is Joker.
@188/CLB: “Because Steve listened to Bruce’s exposition, he would know from day one that he couldn’t change his own past no matter how hard he tried. If he has a choice at all, then he’s in an alternate timeline and there’s no reason for him not to change things.”
So, Steve can change his past in alternate time-lines?
@192/Paladin: He can create a different past, but the timeline he came from will not be erased or replaced. I thought that was clear enough from the movie itself. The time travelers wreaked merry havoc on events in the past years they went to, but it did not alter the events in their own past that led to that moment. Even though Thanos and his forces left 2014 and never returned, that did not erase the Thanos who did the Snap in 2019 and wiped out half the universe. The original history was unchanged because the altered history exists alongside it rather than “replacing” it. After all, they are literally the same period of time, therefore they exist simultaneously.
@Wookster: “2 Captain Americas living side by side”
That timeline would then have a very popular sitcom named “I Love Peggy” or perhaps “My Two Steves”, where the high-jinks involve either a throuple marriage or one Steve always being out of sight.
@190 Christopher–
As to whether or not Steve knew where to find his younger, frozen self, he might know the coordinates in 2011, but the opening lines of CA:TFA indictate that the Red Skull’s ship wasn’t always at that location…
Search Team Leader: Are you the guys from Washington?
SHIELD Tech: You get many other visitors out here?
SHIELD Lieutenant: How long have you been on site?
Search Team Leader: Since this morning. A Russian oil team called it in about 18 hours ago.
SHIELD Lieutenant: How come nobody spotted it before?
Search Team Leader: It’s really not that surprising. This landscape’s changing all the time.
@174 ssircar–
There would also be MCU 1970 where Steve and Tony stole the Tesseract and the Pym particles.
More alternate TV shows: “The Love Helicarrier” and “Mr. Rogers’ Fantasy Island”; and who could forget the classic “Three’s Company”, with pesky landlord, Mr. Limpet Stark, constantly snooping, always trying to find out what’s happening with the “twins”.
So, my understanding here is that given (how this movie has established it) that you can’t handwave it by saying ‘actually, Steve/Peggy WERE changing the timeline this whole time – perhals thwarting them in small ways – and it would have been worse were Steve not back in time, we just didn’t know that until now.
But basically, if Steven did ANYTHING, that would by its nature be a different timeline?
@198/Lisamarie: If Steve did anything differently than it happened in the original history, then it’s a different timeline. The other option is that it’s a closed loop and he was always there in the past without our knowing. Either way, the past the characters know is permanent — no time travel can erase that version of events.
I think the bigger controversy isn’t whether or not Steve lived his life time in which timeline, but whether or not the Avengers plan to restore everybody would have caused more harm than good. In Stark’s final message he commented that he hoped that the world had been restored to some sense of normality, and in Far From Home that’s the impression that we’re supposed to get, but it just seems that it wouldn’t be as simple as that. There’s no way any world could be restored to normal after a trauma such as half of the population disappearing for 5 years. People will return to find that their loved ones had moved on. The returning people might discover that their significant others had remarried or had died from other causes or even gone nuts from the pure craziness what had happened. Finances would have been distributed to survivors, homes will have been sold, jobs would have disappeared. Not that the people who were snapped away didn’t deserve to return, but the chaos that would ensue after their return would probably rival the chaos that ensued after they disappeared.
@200/Steven: Yes, there would be massive problems, but that’s not the Avengers’ fault, it’s a consequence of Thanos’s actions. Sometimes fixing things does damage. Major surgery is very traumatic to the body. CPR often breaks ribs. A brain deprived of oxygen for too long is damaged more by the sudden return of oxygen than by its absence. But it still needs to be done, because the alternative is terminal.
The movie implied that society was falling apart post-Snap — Thanos’s simplistic calculation about doubling resources didn’t work, because people are a resource too, and with half the population gone (and with many of the rest falling into depression, despair, and probably suicide), there just weren’t enough people left to sustain society. And the psychological toll was incalculable.
@krad, @clbennett: Ah, I see, we’re in violent agreement, carry on, nothing to see here :<)
@smcmullen: Possibly? Steve would have returned the Tesseract to that point, but the Pym particles should have been consumed. Perhaps post-restore he asked Hank Pym if he could get some more to replace the originals, and hence no new timeline was spawned.
The discussion between the Hulk and the Ancient One implies that removing the stones (or other major change like Pym particles) only forks a timeline if they’re not replaced “immediately” for some definition of immediately. It is not clear if the discussion Stark has with his father qualifies, but otherwise it seems likely that the 1970 trip did not fork a timeline.
One other plot hole from the Time Heist that keeps bugging me is why nobody thought to suggest grabbing the Tesseract from 2013 Asgard as a backup plan or alternate option for the 2012 NYC phase of the operation.
I mean, yes, it’s not hard to figure out why if you think it through. Dark World had that plot point about Odin’s Treasure Vault being locked down and the Tesseract being inaccessible (thus necessitating the Loki jailbreak). Combine that with 2013 Asgard being on high alert because of the Dark Elves and 2023 Thor being undependable and the 2012 Tesseract was the safer heist choice.
But I just wish somebody had addressed it in dialogue during the planning session.
@203/Mr. Magic:
Given the marginal supply of Pym particles, the first step in the heist should’ve been to secure the logistics. Go ask Hank Pym — or maybe Janet, she seems a friendly sort who’ll believe the story (“Time travel and magical gems? Oh, I saw weirder than that during 30 pseudo-years in the Quantum Realm”) and might know the secret. Or, raid the Pym shrinkable-office, just before or after the Snap, when Scott can identify where it’s located and if it’s accessible. If Stark can hack the SHIELD helicarrier with a button-sized device, he can do the same with Pym’s computers — unless Pym keeps key details in his head.
00 / KRAD:
A deleted scene has another classic Rocket bit, as they’re watching footage of the Battle of New York, and Rocket is amazed it took them so long to take out the Chitauri, who are, he says, the worst army in the universe. “You just gotta take out their mothership.” And when Rogers says they didn’t know that was a thing, Rocket just laughs his ass off.)
Yeah, I liked the touch of Steve’s embarrassed hesitation before he admits that to Rocket. I think he knew Rocket was gonna roast them and was resigned to it.
Tony’s reaction to Rocket’s mockery’s equally hysterical and in-character (plus it’s Tony unknowingly paying off Quill’s threat to shave Rocket back in Guardians Vol. 2).
That all said, I do get why they took it out that scene for pacing and continuity issues, though.