Well, I finally got around to seeing Avengers: Endgame, and I figured everyone could use a place to talk about it without worrying about spoiling the movie for other people. So be aware, anything in the comments of this post is probably a spoiler of some kind.
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Primarily I wanted to say that I loved it. I was a little disappointed that they resorted to time travel as a solution, as I think it’s a bit of an overused trope in sci-fi, but they way they implemented it in this movie was really good. I’m glad Marvel didn’t undo the last 20 movies, and the solution they came up with, i.e., bringing everyone back without undoing what had happened in the intervening time was great, because if they hadn’t done that, they would have been effectively killing all the children born in the intervening 5 years.
Which brings me to a problem the movie didn’t touch on, and I’m hoping is dealt with seriously in MCU movies going forward. There’s going to be a shitload of people who have met in the 5 years after, whether in some kind of grief counseling or just living their lives, who decided to move on and start new families with one another. Now, suddenly their old husbands and wives show up on their doorstep (or just reappear right in the living room) thinking they got dizzy and sat down for a minute, only to discover that their spouses now have a 3 year old and are married to some rando.
It’s going to be a fucking mess. Not to mention the suicide rate after the event. Your whole family disappears, or maybe just your kids, no one has any answers, even without people turning to religion and jumping on board the apocalypse train, how many people would have been returned by the stones only to find out their loved ones killed themselves? And in their mind, it went from nothing being wrong, “Hey honey, help me put away the groceries.” to discovering they’ve killed themselves in an instant. Of the 4 billion people left on Earth after the first movie, how many suicides do you think there’d be? 100 million? 500 million? After the other half came back, there’d be a whole new wave of them.
There’s a whole other discussion to be had about what would have happened to the world economy after the first movie, and what would happen after 5 years of readjusted food production, then suddenly there’s 4 billion people more to feed.
Of course with the Infinity Gauntlet, really someone could have fixed everything, but no one in the movie ever seemed to grasp its actual power. When Thanos started talking about remaking the universe, he seemed to finally start to be getting it, but obviously the film would have lost all its emotional impact if when Stark snapped his fingers, he fixed every problem. Brought everyone back that Thanos took, resurrected everyone who died in the intervening 5 years, healed all the emotional scarring that happened during the 5 year interlude, oh, and also halving the birth rate and making everyone really green so it even fixes Thanos’s complaint with the universe. (Something Thanos could have easily done if he’d had two brain cells to rub together.) So that’s the reason it didn’t end that way, and it’s probably a good thing.
I felt like the movie was shockingly well done for such a momentous and complex item- which made it even more bizzare to me that the several glaringly obvious plotholes they had we’re ones that should have been easily avoided.
Firstly, the whole “return the infinity stones to the exact moment we took them” bit. Did they somehow stick the infinity stone back in Jane with no one noticing? Did Steve just walk back up to Hydra, hand over the mind stone, and ask them to say hi to Bucky? And most of all, what did they do about Loki hightailing it off with the tesseract? Those are universes are alternative universes now, and they can’t change that. Just say that it’s ok if they alternative universes exist so long as they have the stones back and can “choose their own fate” or whatever.
Second, the bit with cap going back in time, traveling to the alternative universe, staying there, then reappearing in the normal universe? For that to have worked, he would have not only got the tesseract back in place- also how did they got it back into it’s case- but have lived his entire life without disturbing the timestream… Live with the knowledge that Hydra had infested shield, had Bucky, that Thanos was coming, that it would kill Tony, and do nothing???? That is not Steve in any way shape or form. Have him do his best to make a better world, then at the end of it, take the teleporter back and smile enigmatically about it.
Finally, not so much a plothole but a pet peeve. The powers of the gauntlet are enough to bring back every person Thanos killed, rend the universe to atoms, and create a new one from the ashes, but bringing back the two main female heroes who were both fridged for man pain is where they draw the line? That’s… That’s just stupid. They could have figured out a way to handle that without disposing of Natasha and never acknowledging her beyond going “oh no, just wanted to make sure everyone knew she’s really not coming back and other movies can’t change that!”
I loved the movie, and it was an amazing culmination of the MCU so far. So it’s a little frustrating to have it leave a sour taste in my mouth.
There’s a few possible reasons why those sacrificed for the Soul Stone couldn’t come back, and pretty much all of them touch on the mysterious and unexplored powers of the Soul Stone.
Speaking of the Soul Stone, has anyone considered that once it’s returned to the alternate timeline that it is still in the open now? That whoever next comes looking for it *doesn’t* have to make the sacrifice?
Keep in mind, the guardian skull said that an exchange was required, a soul for a soul, this could imply that an exchange needs to occur to put the stone back as well, so which soul would he get in return?
I would guess that depends entirely upon the method required to ‘return’ the Soul Stone. To get it you have to sacrifice someone you loved. What if to return it, you have to sacrifice someone you really hate?
Steve: “Red Skull, just the guy I was looking for!”
Insert endless butt-whipping, followed by the Skull arcing over the cliff face.
Skull’s last thought: Man, he can hold a grudge.
I wonder if he got Natasha back.
Alternatively, Natasha dying in an alternate timeline probably has something to do with why Bruce couldn’t bring her back.
I was wondering about that – Steve Rogers goes all over the place and gives the stones back but the Red Skull…? Ackward…
Awkward I mean
That too.
From the dictionary…
Ackward (n): contraction of awkward and Ackbar. Generally considered to be a tautology by all but the greatest fans.
Depends on whether souls are actually in the Stone, or the Stone just makes a space to see them. I never believed Gamora was in there, that was just the image Thanos had of Gamora in IW, she was even on his side, which wasn’t really the case with the Gamora he sacrificed.
In the original comics, I know the souls were literally stored within the soulstone–and in fact, Adam Warlock actually brings some of them out of it when he leads the anti-Thanos charge.
My roommate were talking about that. Wondering if he just dropped it off the edge and that was it.
But I’ll tell you the one I WANT to see. Captain America going to Asgard, and appearing in front of Jane and saying, “I know the giant raccoon just pulled the ether out of you a moment ago buuut I need to put it back.*Pulls out the giant triple syringe*”So…turn around?”
Time travel rules state that he probably did to all of that stuff you said Cap should do, most likely out in the open about it too… In an alternate timeline. Then, after living a long a full life, traveled back to his OG time to return the shield and say goodbye.
But how? He showed up on a bench! Not arguing it would be a better idea, just they didn’t have him travel back…
Steve has the super soldier serum, he doesn’t age normally. to be that old when he came back means he lived in that other timeline several hundred years. then traveled BACK in time to that moment using likely a completely different and perfected method
Well, let’s consider the following: According to the MCU, cap was born in 1918, underwent the super soldier experiment in 1940, and got frozen in 1945. He’s roughly 27 at the time.
He thaws in 2011 the same physical age he was frozen. He goes back in time from 2023, making him about 39.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake (because I can’t recall or find the official year the onscreen ‘dance’ happens), that he shows up on Peggy’s doorstep in 1950 and lives to 2023 the long way. That would make him 112 when he’s on that bench at the end. And let me say, for a guy of 112, he looks in *really* good shape.
Personal theory: He returned the Time Stone last and requested that The Ancient One use the Time Stone to help him return to his own timeline earlier than he left it. Then he just lived out his life with his own Peggy and made sure to show up on the bench that day.
That’s a good thought.
Given the ‘old Cap’ scene, I suspect there were some Star Spangled shenanigans that went on in the intervening years.
When old Cap showed up on the bench, Bucky didn’t go to his old buddy, he sent Sam over.
Without conversation, Bucky knew who the old guy on the bench with his back to the heroes was and that he wanted to talk with Sam.
So, yeah, Time Travelling Steve didn’t leave Bucky out in the cold, alternate timelines be damned.
About the “alternate universes” problem, I (personally) understood their time travel theory to be a little bit closer to the Feng Shui RPG: small changes in the timeline would be corrected, meaning that, if the stones are returned more or less at the time they were taken, things will find their way back to the original timeline. Steve could have brought back Loki’s scepter to SHIELD, knowing that Hydra’s agents would then co-opt it.
However, I agree this does not solve Loki’s disappearance (a huge thing).
I agree also that it seems weird that Captain America could live around sixty years without causing any disturbance. However, he may have feared the consequences of any meddling. At the end, he says they have to hurry to avoid any “alternate timeline” problem. This may indeed have lead him to ignore everything around him and live a peaceful and quiet life, sure that the future would still be bright with the new generation of Avengers to pick up the flag. It would be bitter, true, but, on the other hand, there would be huge risks in acting and creating an alternate timeline, not knowing where it would end (theirs is not perfect, but it’s not that bad either, since they have prevailed over Thanos).
>However, I agree this does not solve Loki’s disappearance (a huge thing).
This is specifically to open the possibility of Loki’s new series (along with Wandavision series)
It doesnt erase the thanos problem either. The universe that has a dead thanos doesnt automatically recover if you put the stones away the moment you took them away. It doesnt erase what was done. There is a universe without thanos collecting the stones. All returning the stones did was erase the futures that would have happened if the stones were still missing. It didnt erase the extra gamora from their universe infact that universe has to live without a gamora. All im saying is returning the stones didnt wrap everything in a pretty pink bow and say everthing is finished.
I felt the movie explained it quite well.
They done fucked up. :p
They’re going to put stuff back where they can, but the second Loki got away with the one stone, they were never going to be able to put that one back in the box.
Steve deciding to stay in the past with Peggy, then returning back to his normal one when she died (assumption here, but seems likely) created a different timeline/alternate reality.
Since Loki got away in the same timeline that they took the Time Stone from, that reality is going to be slightly different than the main MCU.
Same with them killing Thanos. Since they can’t put him back, there’s now a universe without a Thanos.
Movie made all that pretty clear and really it only makes sense that they’d mess some up and or change some. It shows how they aren’t perfect.
And to make things even better.
By letting Loki escape with the tesseract they have set up the overarching problem for the next 20 movies…
With the tesseract missing from its timeline according to the bald lady this means that alternate realities are leaking in, or out, which includes all kinds of evils like the giant giant GIANT demon from dr Strange’s movie.
They aren’t putting the stones back to protect the timeline.
They are putting the stones back so they can serve their purpose of defending the universe from threats beyond the universe.
I got he impression that the problem wasn’t so much that they were changing history as they were removing the stones from those universes. All the screw ups they cause from releasing Loki or removing Thanos from a universe are minor next to a universe missing a stone.
Which really doesn’t bode well for the main universe which has no stones at all anymore.
Alternate universes are just alternate, you put the stones back, and the the timeline gets adjusted to, more or less, parallel the main continuity, that’s it. Those are still other timelines, anything you do over there was gonna happen, and did happen, but that also means that there were always other timelines that weren’t anything like the main timeline too.
For a film that had the characters actively deride Back To The Future, I thought it was funny that they basically lifted Doc’s entire explanation of how it worked straight out of Back To The Future part II. xD
Personally, I think the “Return them to where they got them” was more a “Return them to WHEN they got them”- but people aren’t used to thinking 4-dimensionally.
The Ancient One said that the stones were, more or less, linchpins of reality- which means that to have a universe where one of the stones is MISSING (I.e., it’s traveled to the future and not come back) screws things up royally. BUT, it doesn’t matter WHERE the stone is returned to, as long as it’s returned. So while Cap probably gave the Time stone back to the Sorcerer Supreme, the Mind, Space and Soul stones were probably just stuck somewhere they’d not do too much damage- the Reality stone might have just been given back to the Asgardians, NOT in Jane, and the Power stone was probably handed over to the NOVA Corps.
Remember, this IS NOT a setting where BTtF time-loops are a thing. This is continuous-time “Everything that happens happens even if it happened differently” Time Travel. Changing the past doesn’t actually change the future in this one, nor does it split off an alternate timeline, because all timelines are co-existing already. Which, while confusing as hell, is actually a rather elegant solution for the situation.
Cap, in light of this, probably was able to just live a quiet life with Peggy in one of the branches, maybe fixing everything that happened there. Note that the shield is NOT the one from the main universe, but has a different design- and isn’t shattered, suggesting that the whole Thanos thing didn’t happen over there. But Cap does know about time slipping quantum shenans, and probably was able to get Bruce and Tony and Hank working together for his little side-universe jaunt. Heck, the shield might even have been a new one he had made just for Falcon- it’s not like he doesn’t know about Wakanda and their crazy vibranium resources.
The Soul Stone thing- I feel like that’s because the Soul Stone is one of the Infinity Stones. It’s something of a Node in reality, a fixed point in the vibration of the Strings or Brane or whatever. Anything that happens with it can’t be un-happened, even with another Stone. Or possibly, since it’s a trade, the stone can’t be used to undo what the stone has done, because that would cause the stone to un-be-usable thus not be used etc. etc…
Yeah, that’s my take on it. The Stones had to be returned to the same point in time to keep that timeline anchored. ‘Time’ travel causes branches, and the ‘GPS’ has to find a way to return the traveller to the branch that they started from (that branch, by definition, was not visited by the time traveller). Recalculating.
They introduced ‘breaking’ changes in the pasts they travelled to (Loki escaping, ‘hail hydra’, tesseract not encubed, etc). So those pasts are therefore necessarily separate timelines from the one(s) that the main battle occurs in.
There is also at least one alternate timeline spawned/branched where/when younger-Thanos simply disappears (travels to ‘our’ branch after Hulk-snap)
Those other branches play out in different ways. The one where Thanos disappears will not even see the first Snap. The ones spawning off other ‘breaking’ changes…well who knows. Presumably in some, the Snap is never undone, or is prevented, or whatever.
I don’t know how sensitive the branching is. Does the traveller cause a branch just by being there, do only some ripples cause a branch, can branches re-merge if the outcome is the same? Did old-Captain live his life in the ‘main’ branch, by avoiding breaking changes? Or did his branch invent inter-branch travel, and he’s just visiting? Is it even possible to travel outside the events of ‘your’ branch without a beacon brought in from the target branch, like what happened with Nebula(s)/Thanos?
(Yes, it’s hard to imagine Cap resisting changing a timeline where he marries Peggy. OTOH, those changes might help Bucky, stop Hydra etc. But who knows how Infinity Wars/Endgame plays out in that timeline. Maybe dusting half the universe vs preventing some amount of earth death/pain? Not sure how he’d make that call.)
I’d like to think that that discussion about how the stones removal alters the universes timeline might just be a good reference to a little document like this one: https://fanlore.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Universes
But yeah, I actually thought it was fitting that they did at least attempt to address some of the glaring plot-holes, and as far as the tesseract & Loki- I’d imagine it would certainly change some of the story line, but Loki would not pass up a chance to impersonate Odin, and I’m sure bringing the tesseract back as Odin might be rather convincing…
But that just means that OUR universe is hosed because we don’t have the stones anymore, since Thanos destroyed them.
Unless the stones weren’t removed from existence, so much as scattered across the whole of existence. You can’t gather the individual stones to use them because it’s like recapturing the exact air that was in Julius Ceasar’s lungs when he was assassinated. They’re all still around, but they’ve diffused into the rest of the atmos/biosphere.
It works this way, both actions happened just in a different Universe. Under the Multiverse Theory, there are an infinite number of universes, everything that can happen, did Happen albeit in a different universe.
The real question about Steve’s branch timeline with Peggy is if he left his altself trapped in the ice. He probably wouldn’t do that. He’d probably have that on his list of fixing things. Which brings up problem two, one Peggy, two Steve’s. Now we just have to work out if we think his sense of propriety will out his sense of compassion for his other self on making it an ott.
Not sure Peggy would see that as a problem…. ;)
You’re basically only screwing up other timelines, from your point of view, you won’t know where things will end up after. So that’s why they tried not to mess with the timeline too much, but it really doesn’t matter if you return the stones to their previous containers, or devices. So they don’t have to inject Jane with the Aether. I imagine Cap just showed up in front of Thor’s mom “Ma’am I believe these will be safe with you,” and just hand over the Reality stone and Mjolnir.
You wanna argue that Gamora was “fridged” for plot purposes, I guess I can sorta grant that.
Natasha was not “fridged.” In any context. Her death was not used to motivate any of the male characters. No action they took was an action they would not have taken, or would have taken in a different way, if it’d been Hawkeye dead instead. Natasha died because she was cleverer and a better fighter than Hawkeye. That’s all.
Someone had to die for the Soul Stone, that’s an established plot element. Clint and Nat fought each other to see who’d be the one to die. Nat “won.”
You can’t change something that had to happen in order for you to be able to do it in the first place.
Undoing Nat’s death would undo getting the Soul Stone, and undo the option to undo Thanos’ snap.
It’s like H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine: “her death was your motivation to build the time machine, so you can not use it to save her life, as you would lose the drive to build it and thus not be able to save her”
Other than that, I don’t consider there to be any big plot holes. Steve Rogers thought about ‘getting a life’, and he did. He couldn’t do that with Peggy, as she married someone else, if so: that’s the biggest plot hole.
There’s a theory that he gave back the soul stone in return for Nat’s life, and that they spend their times secluded, just like Hawkeye did in between Infinity Wars and Endgame.
Everyone seems to forget that Captain America saw a picture of himself on Peggy Carter’s desk when he went back in time. It is possible that seeing this picture allowed him to deduce that he could/did go back and reunite with her without altering the time line. As for Carter “marrying someone else”, who is to say Steve Rogers did not marry her using another name?
My says one of the other pictures on the desk was a cameo of Stan Lee. Did anyone else see that? It might be a way for him to continue to have cameos in future movies.
My wife says…
Ignoring the whole “I macked on your niece” bit…
“I was a little disappointed that they resorted to time travel as a solution, as I think it’s a bit of an overused trope in sci-fi, but they way they implemented it in this movie was really good.”
Yeah, using time travel – especially one that is so save and easy – is really a bad idea.
HISHE keeps bringing up that superman could just rewind time for a do-over. Even for Age of Ultron.
“There’s going to be a shitload of people who have met in the 5 years after, […] who decided to move on and start new families with one another.”
My friends asked the same questions. I had no good answers. Schlock Mercenary delved into that thematic a bit, with the whole Gateclone Arc, but there is a ton of difference to this.
Actually I am wondering what the current Political State of Wakanda is. I mean the last Black Panther was absent – and asumed dead – for 5 years. And in particular what his queen did in that time.
We have to see what “Far From Home” tells on the mater.
“The powers of the gauntlet are enough to bring back every person Thanos killed, rend the universe to atoms, and create a new one from the ashes, but bringing back the two main female heroes who were both fridged for man pain is where they draw the line? That’s… That’s just stupid.”
It was pretty clear that the old Avengers would hand over the Torch. It was not a question if they would leave active service, only how. I also do not see them being “stuffed into a Fridge”.
And btb, Vision and everyone that died in the Wakanda battle is also still dead.
That one Stone is insanely hard to control, is something they established in Guardiands of the Galaxy vol 1. Even with the Gauntlet as support, it is hard to deadly. So I can accept it is easier to “undo what Thaos did to half the universes Population 5 years ago” or “dust Thanos and everyone that is loyal to him” then “bring back Natasha”.
If and only if gamora was in the soul stone. The soul stone she was in was destroyed. She couldnt be brought back. If we are talking about natasha the event that he was puting his mind to was to return everyone killed by thanos and to pull natasha back to life. If she was in the soul stone then im pretty sure bruce needed to be aware of it. If she wasnt then she was in another universe the infinity stones originally couldnt be used in universes that arent their own but if we are using the fast and loose versions that was in the movie then hulk couldnt bring natasha back unless he was in the universe that she died in. Or for all we know he could have succeeded but she would have no way back to her universe. Its not like any of the people brought back were put on earth. They were where they disappeared. So the bridge her gauntlet was calibrated to was completely destroyed. And if cap only put the stone back then he could have completely missed him while she is roaming the stars.
It never occured to me, that maybe he brought Natasha back in that other timeline? I always asumed her Solo Film would be a prequell, but it could also be her in that other timeline.
I do find it a bit more likely that he simply had too much issue controling the stones. And getting back exactly the people affected by the dusting was all he could do.
I think in the movie they stayed within the same universe, while visiting different threads in the timeline (different timeline, but slightly), in the comics they go to completely different universes.
Christopher: Bruce Banner/Hulk undid everything Thanos did 5 years ago.
Tony Stark had just enough lifeforce to dust Thanos and his army.
But even if he had a second snap in him, the existence of the Soul Stone would prevent Natasha from returning.
Things I loved:
– the subversion of the “cap says hail hydra” incident, which was dumb and terrible in the comics, but great and effective in this movie.
– Freya’s conversation with Thor, and Howard & Tony’s conversation, really well played humor juxtaposed with intense emotion.
– Smart Hulk, a great end to the banner/hulk arc throughout the movies.
– Clint “The Ninja Punisher” Barton. I would like an entire movie of this please.
Major problems:
– Steve literally buried Peggy already in Civil War. Why’s he moping about her instead of Bucky in the therapy session? Bucky’s the one he lost in the snappening, and the one he lost TWICE.
– If this is supposed to launch the MCU Multiverse like the Spider Man: Far From Home trailer suggests, then how the hell is Steve back in the timeline he came from after living with Agent Carter for a lifetime? The framing clearly implies he got there just by living through the time and remembering when and where to show up. Which is not how a multiverse works.
– So many characters are sold short in this film. What happened to Natasha’s relationship with Bruce/Hulk? Why was she not involved with his 5 year journey to Smart Hulk at all? Why is Pepper given barely any speaking lines? Captain Marvel’s appearance in the final battle was way less exciting because they’d already used the big reveal impact at the very start of the film having her show up and help “kill thanos.” Should’ve had a reveal only in that fight that she was arriving and had her more potent in comparison to no-infinity-stones past-thanos. It should’ve taken him getting the power stone like he did to overpower her, she’s powered by the tesseract. Finally, how am I supposed to believe that Steve “the good man” Rogers would go live a quiet life in a time period when he not only knows that his best friend is being torture-brainwashed, but knows where it’s happening and how to get there? Somehow I think not. What’s with the one-dimensional portrayal of fat thor? Could’ve done without the lazy fat guy portrayal and jokes, even though there was also some really good humor and expectation subversion there with marshmallow thor. Scarlet witch doesn’t have telepathy powers anymore apparently, only TK, ever since Civil War. Etc…
The only ensemble movies this franchise has had that did justice to all the characters in the ensemble were The Avengers (2012) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1. Most of the time, things have massively fallen through the cracks to one extent or another, and the Russo Brothers did honestly the worst job in a lot of ways. Mainly because they checked all the boxes rather than trying for anything exceptional. I enjoyed myself at the time, but the fridge logic “wait a minute” problems that became apparent after the film here are the densest of any MCU film. This film uses spectacle and witty one-liners to cover up a basic disrespect for the intelligence of the viewer; seriously, WHY does preventing Thanos from closing his fist stop him from using the infinity stones? And WHY does using all the stones together ONLY WORK if you perform the physical action of snapping? This pisses me off because it makes a magic gesture of something which should simply be a demonstration of contempt, as in, “it’s this easy.”
tl;dr of this rant: I had fun with the movies, but Infinity War and Endgame opened giant plot holes and wasted their characters and cinematic opportunities left and right, in ways that really insulted the intelligence of viewers.
– Melted icecream Thor was not just about subverting expectations, he was the sad “reality” of what five years dwelling on his failure would look like. It’s just another part of his arc, in IW his hatred for Thanos is what was keeping him going, he said as much to Rocket, only thing he hated more than his failure was Thanos. and then you see it end right at the start of Endgame, by killing Thanos.
– It wasn’t Peggy herself that Cap was dwelling on, it was the life he left behind, the life he could have had with her. He was always a man out of time in the MCU.
Bruce and Natasha ended, when she sacrificed her relationship, to get Hulk’s help in Sokovia. She made that clear with the kiss.
You only think you would prefer Captain Marvel to be a “big” reveal, if she had actually remained as a secret until destroying that ship, you would be even more disappointed that she didn’t arrive sooner, and have some kind of development.
As for the snap, it seems to me, that each person using the gauntlet needed to be aware of the stones they were using at the time. Thanos made a fist for most of the stones, maybe flexing a little harder for each individual power, but you see him concentrating on his thumb to use the Time stone to bring back Vision. So maybe the snap was just a mental crutch for Thanos, and it influenced the Avengers to adopt the same habit.
My interpretation was that the gauntlet was an unimaginably complex device – necessary to harness the power of all six Stones without the device shredding itself or making the stones go haywire every time you twitch- and that it therefore had very specific actions required to use it in specific ways. Requiring the user to make a fist before putting in the “control sequence” (whatever form that takes) helps ensure that they don’t accidentally go back five minutes while using the bathroom or something, and a snap is a very simple yet extremely deliberate gesture that could easily be tied into the gauntlet’s ultimate purpose of activating all six Stones at once.
As for the Avengers snapping to activate the Gauntlet, they likely directly copied the design of the Infinity Gauntlet to the best of their ability. Their COMPARATIVELY sub-par materials explain why the gauntlet was far less durable – becoming almost unusable after a single use rather than needing the stones exploding on it to render it useless – while their copying the design explains why it still needed a snap to activate it.
Melted Ice Cream Thor was not the Thor we wanted, but it was the Thor we needed.
The other thing that I wondered about, and wonder if we’ll see anything about in Spiderman Far From Home (assuming it takes place after Endgame) is high school kids who come back and half their classmates have grown into adults, and now a bunch of the little kids are their contemporaries. Heck, families where the older sibling vanished and the 2-years-younger sibling stayed, now have a complete reversal of which one’s the oldest/youngest.
It wan’t a perfect movie, but I found it thoroughly satisfying as a conclusion to the 21 movies that came before it. I bawled when Black Widow and Ironman died, like I was supposed to, but I was left feeling satisfied rather than bereft. It was a victory lap, visiting previous movies, and well-deserved. I can’t think of any other franchise that’s done anything like this (interconnected universe across so many films created by different teams) in the past, and I’m glad they didn’t screw it up at the finish line.
16 Year old at a bar.
Dude, I’m totally 21! I just have a youthful look.
Check my birthday!
Are you sure you weren’t one of the ones dusted that then came back?
No man. But my mom was. That’s crazy how that happened right?
They’re going to ignore it as much as they can — which is to say, completely except for the odd joke — just like they would in the comic books. Because ZOMG MYSTERIO.
I’m fine with this.
First 6-Stone Infinity Gauntlet use: “make myself and the Infinity Gauntlet completely invulnerable.” – prevents the power overflow from the stones injuring and/or killing you and ensures that the device channeling their power remains intact.
Seriously, the biggest drawback to using all six stones was how much they damaged whatever used them, and if they can literally destroy and recreate the universe than they can make the above modifications. Once the above condition was performed, you could literally do anything you wanted whenever you wanted with a snap of your fingers, including creating copies of the gauntlet that you can tinker with the control systems of, possibly eventually making one that makes whatever you want happen with a simple thought.
That is most likely a feature not a bug. Without the heavy cost associated with the use of the infinity Gauntlet, it would be far too easy to use. If i was some god designing that setup, you’d get one wish, it would kill you, and then it would spread the stones through the cosmos entirely at random.
You’re overthinking it. He doesn’t need to return it to the place/object it was taken from. Only the time it was taken from so the stone can continue to serve its purpose in holding together the cosmos.
It doesn’t need to be in the tesseract, the scepter, or Jane Foster.
He could arrive in Asgard, meet past Thor. Hand him the hammer and be all like, Sorry I needed to borrow your hammer to beat up Thanos. Oh, and here’s that Reality Infinity Stone we took out of Jane Foster. It really helped in undoing the damage Thanos did with all six stones. Oh! By the way, some Dark Elves are coming to steal that stone. Thor says your dad will know all about them. Peace out!
For that matter he could have dropped them off with the sorcerer Supreme in every timeline they were taken from for safe keeping.
Hard to say what Stark could have done with the gauntlet. I think the prevailing theory is that anything could have been done. But early in the movie, he specifically said that he couldn’t lose his daughter and presumably the time spent married to Pepper. Therefore, he was not willing to go back and do a full reset. His relationship with his daughter may have been the reason that he brought everyone back at the 5 year mark despite all the likely strife that happened as you (dave) lined out.
Agree with most of the above. A society completely breaks down with ~10% population loss is what I remember from the sociology of epidemics. I have two major issues, why not send your time travel expert (Dr Strange) to return everything. Two, how about teaching Thanos basic math. Your problem is exponential growth, which quickly goes to zero or infinity. Killing half the population of the universe doesn’t change anything but time it takes to get there.
Strange wouldn’t have been able to return Mjolnir, though, right?
Strange had his own duties to attend to. He probably heard the Avengers say they had returning the stones handled and just left it at that.
As for Thanos’s insane troll logic regarding his universal murder plan, well he *is* called the Mad Titan for a reason. He has this bizarre desperate need to be right, and it is clouding his mind to not only any alternatives but also to the consequences of his plan.
It’d be an interesting comparison between what you learned from the epidemics and what happen with an incident. An epidemic implies loss over time. Thanos’s snap was an instant. There should be different reactions to both and if there isn’t, that’d be more curious to me.
As for sending Strange instead of Cap, plot. :/
And yeah, Thanos’s lack of understanding of exponential growth does seem rather odd. Speaking of odd, what happens if there’s an odd number of people in the universe? The stones seem a bit too powerful to just disregard a remainder of one.
Strange had his own duties to attend to. He probably heard the Avengers say they had returning the stones handled and just left it at that.
As for Thanos’s insane troll logic regarding his universal murder plan, well he *is* called the Mad Titan for a reason. He has this bizarre desperate need to be right, and it is clouding his mind to not only any alternatives but also to the consequences of his plan.
I would have appreciated it if Thanos didn’t just kill people, but imposed a cap on population, too. Like, part of the problem people were having wasn’t just that half the people died, but only a few were getting pregnant, and no one had yet put together that someone was getting a kid only after someone else had died. Would have made Thanos’ plan…still crazy, but with twisted logic.
See, if he had enough brain to do that, he’d also realize that just imposing the pop cap would do the same thing.
Honestly, I feel like the MCU actually has elements of reverse-entropy in it, allowing everything to remain in a chaotic zero-sum flux. Thanos just isn’t considering non-life energy distribution, or even breaking things down to their elemental energy/matter sums. He’s so focused on “Life” he’s not considering maximal solar energy usage or the energy siphons that Black Holes are… He’s really not thinking very long-term at all.
Depends on if asorcerer supreme can counter odin’s magic on the hammer. Which is possible. Or have thor drop it in a magic hole like what he dropped loki in, then open the hole again once in past asgard
It took under a minute but more than a second for the dusting to happen. That means the universe would fluctuate between an even and an odd number of sapients many different times before it was done.
Reading Thanos motiviation:
I never thought I would say that, but between the MCU self and him being in a Love Triangle with Death and Deadpool, the love Triangle sounds like the sensible motivation!
At least if you know that the whole theory of the “population Explosion” is so dead, even the Infinity Stones could not bring it back.
Thanos sort of did get there, didn’t he. “Rebuild everything” is a bit ALL and ZERO all at once.
I believe that 10% is where you would have major disruption, especially in the ability of the medical community to handle the plague. However the Black Death (https://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/index.html) apparently killed over half the population of Europe. So the disruption would be equivalent to the extent of the Black Death. However, the impact would be less because you wouldn’t be fighting a plague at the same time.
The military has determined that no unit ever maintained cohesion if it lost more than 30% of its men and that is with a well defined chain of command and a tight organization. Civilization as a whole could easily begin to break down at the 10% loss level. In either case, 50% is well over the line. Civilization should have collapsed completely rather than continue to function, more or less, as if nothing happened.
“Because Science”, a series that talks about super-hero physics, pointed out that decreasing the population of the world by half essentially set us back to 1972 levels.
First off, loved the movie. There are lots of things I could point out that bug me about internal consistency but that’s the case in all of the MCU movies. I didn’t like how so many of the characters kind of got shoe-horned in just to make an appearance without any ark or real need to be there, but then I saw Kevin Smith’s review where he talks about the movie feeling like a comic annual I realized that kind of fanservice really was appropriate. So yay.
The thing I really disliked was the contrived girl power moment in the final battle. They made it work in Infinity War by showing the leadup where the female characters were pre-positioned to fight togther, but in Endgame it was just wrong to force the scene in the middle of a huge battle. Fanservice again, but not in a good way. A little more time spent on setting up the encounter would have fixed it, and maybe that didn’t make the edit, but the scene really felt like ticking off a checkbox and pulled me right out of the movie.
I’m not sure what girl power moment you mean, unless you’re talking about Captain Marvel showing up, and that whole scene was the awesome IMO.
Proxima vs Scarlet Witch, Okoye and Black widow in IW, great scene. Great lines too, “You’ll die alone… – She’s not alone”. All the female Avengers just happening to line up for a photo op in Endgame with no setup and in the middle of a great big battle… not so much. I like the idea, but it was forced and clumsy. Really bothered me that they didn’t do a better setup for it.
There was that scene when an all female-squad took over the task to bring the gauntlet to the van (after spiderman got stopped). I thought the scene was pretty unnecessary, but still kinda cool. Well, until Wasp showed up among them (“Hey Wasp aren’t you supposed to protect the van? Why not take the gauntlet from here, if you can cross the distance unseen?”).
IIRC, after Captain Marvel meets Spider-Man, and takes the gauntlet from him, she (or somebody) says something like “Don’t worry, we’ve got it”, and every female hero shows up, gets into shot, and poses like a photoshoot for the poster for the next Avengers movie. As somebody (despite being a cishet white dude) fully onboard with more women characters, it still felt really cheesy and artificial to me.
It was only a few seconds, and I “got over it” quickly, but they could have made it happen a little more gracefully, I think.
Also- Mantis! What are you doing there! You make people sleepy, or happy or whatever, you’re not a fighter! Go be safe.
I looked at that scene, determined that it was fanservice not aimed at me, contemplated all the fanservice that WAS aimed at me (and was likely to be aimed to me later), and decided that I was well ahead of the game in that regard.
Thank you for realizing that, lol.
(We non-chaps do deserve our fanservice moments, too!)
And in this movie we already got cheated out of a shirtless Chris Hemsworth.
That girl power moment was only fair.
I was confused by that scene with all the girls saying ‘i’ll cover you’, too, not because girl power or anything, the whole movie is fan service, but because Captain Marvel was introduced to the battle via ramming through a giant battle ship that had almost wiped out the avangers army, casually. They all proceeded to fight like 2-4 goons a piece. When there was a 100 person army in the way, it didn’t really give the impression of helping. I was thinking ‘this is not fan servicey enough’.
More so when after a few seconds she recreated the battle ship impaling via stabbing her fist through a hundred faces as she flew through the army.
so, you’ve got the Avengers, their friends, their friends friends & anyone else they get hold of, fighting Thanos and his army (and getting their butts handed to them) when Captin “Oh look at how great I am” Marvel shows up, single handedly distroying both the giant spaceship and kicking Thanos’s butt until Stark got the gauntlet and clicked his fingers. talk about making umpteen people feel useless, just leave everything up to her next time.
Marvel kicked Thanos butt? What alternative cut have you been watching?
She held her own for 10 seconds. Then he powerstone punched her to Pluto.
And that she could kill spaceships was something we knew since her Solo Film.
That is such an obvious sexism about Captain Marvel having power and a level of compentence, you need to invent an alternate cut to make it work.
Scarlet Witch who depending on her writer is a reality Warper so powerfull she would probably just stand in front oh thanose after his finger snap and sarcastically ask “maybe you should try turning it off and on?
Carol was depowered twice and she could still take out a planet killer.
Jean Grey was suposedly the most powerfull telepath period, and depending on the author she merged or became or was duplicated by the Phoenix force.
And also Emma Frost….
Also She hulk, who is reportedly a more formidable lawyer than she is as She hulk.
Monica Rambeau. She literaly one shot, stoped and almost killed Jugernaught.
Generally, Marvel has always been a bit mixed on its female supers. But yah they have some top tier Ladies
Rouge, she’s Basicaly pre Binary captain marvel + Whoever she comes into contact with. Ever. Including ….
Storm. Do not piss her off. Anyone whose survived a cat 5 huricsne can tell you why doing so is a bad idea….
I’m really, REALLY starting to think you’re from one of the universes the Avengers accidentally created. One of the not so well off changes.
Maybe the one which led to the Fox Mutant universe? There’s enough hate in that one…
… or maybe the hate is inside me all along. Feels like I misread the entire thing now, and I can’t even delete the above.
Can someone delete the clones? It seems the internet glitched for a bit; first I don’t see the posts (and since it’s something very sensitive I tried again, and again)… and now I see ALL of them…
Or maybe the hate is inside me all along. I blame the illusion stone… and my reading comprehension; Steve’s post isn’t really as hateful as my first impression of it…
Or maybe the hate is inside me all along. I blame the reality stone… or rather, my reading comprehension; Steve’s post above isn’t as… biased… as my first impression of it.
No problem. That said….
One of the ongoing problems that comic creators have is how you show how powerful your character is, or how much of a threat someone is to your character, especially when compared to other characters, this is agro ate dinner (what the hey auto incorrect?) aggravated by having different creators using the character, and power in-continuity or increases sometimes created by the original creator and sometimes grated by a literal conga line of creators.. Never mind things like character growth. I mean ye gods Susan storm went from a cowering invisible girl to taking gown Celestials while monologuing a reason you suck speech.
So yo end up wit the writer who has the sticky issue of how do you de power Superman when you have to wright him do he doesn’t just wind back time and auto win. Again.
With male characters, no real problem. With Female charaters? Even leaving out the stuffed in the fridge issue, depowering women superheroes has so much emotional weight added that it’s often problematic.
Again I don’t think people should say sexism for something which might just be people annoyed at the massive difference from canon, and the shoehorning of Captain Marvel into the movie. The Russos actually didnt want her in Endgame in the first place, while some execs wanted her in both Infinity War and Endgame. The brief 15 minute Captain Marvel, and about 10 seconds of her being able to almost beat Thanos was the compromise.
But I do have a good reason why Captain Marvel was so capable of holding her own against Thanos until he used the power stone. Captain Marvel can absorb energy. She could have been literally absorbing energy from the Infinity Gauntlet with the stones. You see the enhanced glow around her as she’s grabbing the gauntlet. Because in the comics, Captain Marvel is nowhere even close to as powerful as Thor or Hulk or Thanos (she’s fought each of them in the comics and each time it was a decisive loss from one hit), although in this movie Thor was…. not in the best of shape and still held his own for quite a while as well.
Anyway, Thanos removed the power stone from the gauntlet, which meant Captain Marvel was no longer absorbing its energy, and he hit her with it, sending her into orbit. Captain Marvel is already a heavy hitter. Captain Marvel + absorbing infinity gauntlet energy (Which at the time included the power stone) would mean that power level was ramped up to 11 until Thanos removed the stone and punched her with it directly.
Again, do not attribute malice to someone when a simple criticism based on logic and canon probably suffices. It’s an ad hominem attack and it’s not a good way to argue.
You have to remember, for all practical purposes, Captain Marvel IS Superman. If you follow the history of the Captain Marvel character(S), you find out the character, in all its iterations, is a “rip off” of Superman. Oh, by the way, Shazam’s actual name is, wait for it, Captain Marvel. Shazam is just what he says to switch between his alter ego and himself. DC could not put Marvel on the cover of the comic because Marvel already had the trade mark so they titled the comic Shazam. Everyone ended up calling him Shazam instead of Captain Marvel.
Ha you forgot that storm can control solar winds. While in space but to do that on earth would fry the planet.
I agree with nando v. Movies more though i dont think it should have been captain marvel but instead nebula. This would have shown thanos that his daughter was the one who was being responsible for his downfall. Another problem with that scene is that captain marvel makes that scene largely unnecessary. Shes strong enough to take thanos ship but an army that has less power then the guns on the ship is supposed to hold it? Plus they kinda flipped her powerscaling of out of wack. Shes stronger then all of the gems reacting at once but gets punted by the powerstone solo. I was so confused at that moment. I was also confused why didnt any of them use the gems solo. The only dangerous ones were the power stone but they had the space stone that whole chase besides being rule of cool was unnecessary. I mean the rule of cool was nessary to build a movie around because if i cut the rule of cool then large portions of the plot become unnecessary. Like the time hiest was largely unnecessary all they needed was the time gem fix the stones and use them no thanos fight required. But it wouldnt be much of a movie then wouldnt it.
They don’t know how to use it, and by the time they get the Time Stone, they already have Mind, and Space, might as well collect them all.
Tony specifically does not want to undo the past 5 years, as he is the only Avenger who actually moved on.
So just going for the Time Stone was never an option.
And Strange was right: if he told Tony that the only version of them winning was that Tony snapped Thanos to oblivion and sacrificing himself in the process, he wouldn’t’ve done it.
“Plus they kinda flipped her powerscaling of out of wack. Shes stronger then all of the gems reacting at once but gets punted by the powerstone solo. I was so confused at that moment. ”
My read on that was Thanos was trying to close his hand for a snap and she was physically holding It open against his personal power, not the stones. He switched tactics from trying to use the glove to just thwacking her with a single stone.
I did also like the “everyone back, but don’t erase anything” solution. Given the emphasis on Tony’s family, there was some real gravitas to be lost if they’d (and by extension, every other new born) have gone “poof” and no one cared.
To your point, I thought that Lang’s revelation that he was thought to be one of the vanished, and his interaction with his daughter immediately after, would have made a great springboard for the after-movie credit scene, with him talking about his experience in that section, and how they ought to launch a major program for mental health – his experience is literally a micro-version of what millions of people are now experiencing, and would get the others thinking about your other points. Didn’t happen, though, which is a bit of a shame.
One of the things I sort of liked was how this established just how hard it is to use all six stones. In the first one, Thanos made it look easy, which, I guess for him, it was. This time, we got Banner getting maimed undoing the “easy” thing Thanos did, and Tony barely managing to vaporize an army. It put a lot more subtle emphasis on just how powerful (or, at least, vital/durable) Thanos was to have that comparison.
I am slightly disappointed with the way they did the “sisterhood” stand in the big battle – there were much better, more dynamic ways to have all the ladies do that break-through charge without lining them all up before hand and beating you over the head with it (I don’t mind that they did it – I actually think it was pretty cool – just the method was a bit cringey – very “look at us look at us we’re being diverse!” *eye roll* Especially given that most of them aren’t as mobile as Marvel. Having them in place on the route (or near enough to come in) gives you a much more believable way to put them all in and contributing than “yes, only three of us have range and only one can keep up, but somehow we’re all going to help from behind you! Somehow!”).
I also appreciated that Scarlet Witch got proper respect as someone who actually can stand up to Thanos for at least a while (which is to say, as well as anyone else did, more or less). Same for Captain Marvel being emphatically as strong as Thanos – so he had to pull the Power stone out to fight her – when he had proven no one else could match him directly. It made it clear in a short exchange what her relative power level was, without getting into any Dragon Ball goofiness (and taking 3 times as long). She makes her statement early on, and then she comes in and backs it up. simple, clean, and straightforward. Didn’t belabor the point, and I appreciated the show, don’t tell.
I’m going to appreciate how hard Disney and Marvel are going to struggle against their own instincts to bring back Steve, Tony, and Anastasia. I hope they win and don’t do the stupid comic book thing. The biggest knock so many people have with superhero comic books is how “status quo is god” – something a well done death/retirement set like this movie should help everyone get over in some small way.
Man I really don’t remember a big annoying bachelorette party in the middle of the end battle.
I kind of doubt they’ll have characters killed off in this movie back in new ones. In a comic book, someone just has to draw the character appearing. In a movie, Disney has to pay Robert Downy Jr. $70 million dollars to show up, so they’re not going to do it on a whim.
I do.
It isn’t that all the female characters got together, if it happened naturally, it would have been fine.
It was instead just shoved together with the artistry of a 5 year old who got their hands on Photoshop and wanted a scene of all their favourites and just cut and pasted them all on top of each other.
It was clumsy screenplay, from both the visual and story perspective.
The dialogue just seemed to make it even more janky.
There was a flow to the action up to that point, then out of nowhere there is this sudden screeching halt to the flow, some forced dialogue and suddenly every single females character is within a 3m×3m patch of ground (including Vakerie on her flying horse ffs) resulting in this really awkward photo shoot like positioning (seriously, it feels like one of those movie posters with all the faces) that just breaks the suspension if disbelief.
How hard would it have been to just have them all, in turn do their part smashing their way through the army?
It felt forced, and like a reaction to SJWs as much as I hate that term.
This is like, the least necessary thing to do. There are plenty of strong female characters in the MCU. Just show them being that and you’re done.
No need for this nonsense.
They’d done great on that up till then, even including CM’s Word Effect moment. (I was actually worried there that she was just going to wipe the floor but they did that well enough)
I know you have an issue with that, but there are Women in the MCU. A lot even.
They have been coddling you long enough by not putting them all in the same scene together. It was time to let go.
I think that you’re seeing sexism where there is none, or using the claim of sexism as an unfair attack on his post. He’s pointing out a legitimate critique which was not at all organic to the battle.
Look, it’s not about them being women. It would have been JUST AS BAD A SHOT if it had been all the male Avengers, or the ‘original comic Avengers’ or whatever. It’s about the “We got this” pause-and-pose, as opposed to just… having them all kick butt one after another without having to announce it.
Also? Positive Discrimination is still discrimination.
It was forty seconds of pandering that didn’t make sense but DID make for an awesome scene.
And the thing of it is? Even the fact that I think of it as pandering is a little fucked up.
Because if that scene had instead been Dr. Strange, War Machine, Black Panther, Bucky, and Drax backing her up, nobody would’ve blinked for even a second.
So whatever. It was probably pandering, and the writers even admit to that fact, but it was kickass pandering, so let’s just suck it up and not whine about something so incredibly stupid.
Because several of the people in the ‘girl power photo’ moment made very little sense to be there. Like Mantis, who is an empath. Or Shuri, who is an inventor. Or Hope van Dyne, who was SUPPOSED TO BE BY THE VAN ALREADY, but went through the warzone apparently so she could be in the girl group photo scene. And your scene comparison isn’t a very good comparison, since if Dr. Strange suddenly appeared there, it would also be messed up since he’s supposed to be preoccupied on the other side of the warzone as well.
It was horribly forced, and one of the few poorly thought out scenes in the movie, although the time travel plotholes were pretty big ones too, but at least they weren’t feeling like pandering to the women in the audience. If it was Okoye, Pepper (in her RESCUE armor), Valkyrie, Gamora, and Nebula (ie, 2 fliers, 3 ground, plus Captain Marvel as a third flier), then it would not have seemed as forced, while still being a girl power moment. But every single female Avenger or Avenger-adjacent character there? That was pandering and just … odd. And distracting to the impracticality of them all going to that same spot from a massive warzone.
It’s not whining to point out that it was dumb that they’d all be in that one spot when several of them had been in various other parts of the battle just moments prior. Saying ‘suck it up’ feels like you’re trying to shame anyone who realizes a legitimate critique of the scene.
Also it’s not like there were not other awesome girl power moments that they didn’t need to do something that forced. Like Nebula killing her alternate self. Or Iron Man and Rescue’s fighting together shot. Or Captain Marvel trying to siphon the energy from the Infinity Gauntlet to the point that the headbutt from Thanos doesn’t even make her flinch, causing him to use the power stone to take her out instead. Or Scarlet Witch nearly killing Thanos on her own after he says ‘I don’t even know who you are.’ Or Natasha sacrificing herself rather than letting Hawkeye do so. There were many other great ‘girl power’ scenes that felt very natural in the movie, where we didn’t need a big neon sign to say ‘HEY LOOK, WOMENFOLK ARE HEROES TOO.’ Yes. We already knew that there are female heroes.
Think of it like in Grrlpower’s restaurant Vehemence fight…. it was very organic feeling when, during the reveal of Vehemence’s power set, it was Vehemence on one side, and Dabbler, Halo, Maxima, Anvil, and one of the Harems on the other side. There was no ‘wow that was forced’ feeling there. It made sense why other ARCHON members were not at that confrontation (some were unconscious, others were fighting elsewhere, Achilles was buried, not every single woman in Archon was there together – you didn’t see Gwen or Sandy or Arianna standing down Vehemence with everyone else, since it would make no sense for them given their skill sets being different. You didn’t see every single Harem, or Peggy, or Heatwave, or Jiggawatt all there so it could be drilled in our heads that it was ‘Girl/Grrl power,’ since many of them were either occupied in other parts of the fight, or unconscious, or injured.
I agree with you. A pinup shot of a bunch of male heroes wouldn’t even go noticed, but since males are the default, and women are the exception, a surprising percentage of people took exception to it? I didn’t notice, honestly. I think I was just too busy grinning like an idiot.
If I find the ~4 hours to see it again, I’ll have to keep an eye out for it. I suspect it won’t bother me, honestly.
I don’t think there’s ever been a pinup shot of all of the male heroes together in the first place though. There have been shots of a few male heroes together, namely the big three – Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, but if they had done the female shot like that, like ‘Captain Marvel, Valkyrie, and Gamora’ or something like that, it wouldnt have seemed as cringy and forced. But instead, they had to shove every single female character in one shot. They have never put every single male character in one shot. :) Even the most iconic Avengers scene, with the moving around all of them in a circle from the first Avengers movie, was not all male – Black Widow was in it (as she obviously should have been).
My “beef” with the shot in question was just how silly it was.
Spidey asks Captain Marvel “can you do it alone?” and the response is all the women show up and one says “she’s not alone”.
Followed Immediately by Captain Marvel leaving all of them in her dust and plowing through the army like it isn’t there.
Spidey’s set up question is stupid (CM at that point had demonstrably plowed threw way more dangerous things than Thanos’s army). The Response is stupid and contrived (the girls show up where they generally couldn’t be based on where they were in the battle, and how hard everyone else worked to even get spidey as far in as they did). And Captain Marvel deciding to go for the van, rather than say putting the gauntlet out of reach on mars while they finished the battle was stupid.
That Thanos somehow got ahead of her and knocked the gauntlet out of her hands just makes it worse.
> Followed Immediately by Captain Marvel leaving all of them in her dust and plowing through the army like it isn’t there.
Entirely in character, of course… she’s not stupid, but she has a direct approach to problem solving that makes Hulk look subtle…
He didn’t get ahead of her, he somehow threw his sword faster than her into the van and the resulting explosion was what knocked her flying and the gauntlet from her hand. Still somewhat ludicrous given how fast she can fly!
I did find that scene jarred me slightly and I’ve been watching the whole nerd angst over Captain marvel etc with bemusement. I’ve never really liked cheesy group shots in general but this was more contrived than most. Was some bad fridge logic there also with Wanda’s involvement. This is someone who from her perspective has only just seen vision killed, was only interrupted from killing thanos by the ship fire. When cm dealt with that problem you’d think she’d be straight back on the killing thanos task but suddenly she’s calmed down and content to kill a space worm or two? The power of plot armour!
Enjoyable movie though. Better than infinity war I think and much of that was because it was far less predictable.
I think at least part of the complaining is that there were so few things wrong with the movie that one awkward shot stands out. But yeah it’s, at wost, such a minor thing that it’s not worth bringing up so often.
I really think we should stop coddling those “owg, they have women in the MCU” sexists.
They just feel imboldened. And they are the ones that complain most about consideration.
I don’t think everyone who thought that ONE scene was contrived are saying so because of sexism.
I’m not sexist, obviously. Nor do I suffer from internalized misogyny. I’m a woman, I’m in a profession and speciality that’s largely male-dominated, and I love superheroines in stories and media. And I liked most of the girl power moments, as did a lot of people who thought that ONE scene was pretty forced. Screen Rant on Youtube even made a joke about it.
By just dismissing reasonable critiques as sexism, you don’t do future movies any favors.
Even if they had done something like, in that group, ‘Black Panther and Okoye,’ ‘Rescue and War Machine,’ and ‘Gamora and Nebula and Drax,’ with Okoye or Rescue giving the ‘she’s not alone’ line, it would have worked better and felt less forced, while still sending a message about female empowerment. That they are a part of this team, not some different female version. Because as it stood, it instead made them feel ‘separate’ from the male Avengers, rather than part of the team.
It’s all the people who think one scene in a 4 hour movie is worth arguing for hours over that is sexist.
The scene was overdone, and not to everyone’s taste. Got it. My sister loved it, that as good a reason for it as any. Move on. Go back to arguing about The Cap appearing on the bench at the end and the nature of time travel. Stop dwelling on 10 seconds of action sequence that doesnt appeal to you.
No, it’s not sexist to point out that one scene in a movie was stupid. Because the scene was stupid. And I’m not sexist for saying it unless you’re going to try to tell me I have ‘internalized misogyny.’ I don’t. I just recognize when a scene is stupid.
There was no reason to have every single female character all in one spot. Including people who are not fighters (Shuri and Mantis), people who were seconds before across the ENTIRE battlefield alongside Iron Man and War Machine and Thor (Pepper, Gamora, Nebula, and Valkyrie), and a person who was supposed to be AT THE VAN WHERE THE GAUNTLET WAS BEING BROUGHT (Wasp) – which was the entire point of them all playing ‘Keepaway’ with the Gauntlet.
It was dumb, and it was cringy, and if you defend it, you’re just encouraging more of the same cringy moments in future movies, instead of the cool parts of the movie. We can also argue about how Cap on the bench was stupid (which it was) but guess what – people are capable of critiquing more than one thing without the thought police coming to break up the talking.
As for people who say ‘there would be no complaints about every male avenger in a pinup shot…. there has never been every male avenger in a pinup shot. Ever. I dare you to point out anywhere that every single male avenger got together for a pinup shot of ‘male power.’ Even in the most iconic ‘circle view’ in the first Avengers movie, it was the core avengers, which includes Black Widow. Because they were not basing it on identity politics, they were basing it on the core Avengers who came together to fight a threat to the world.
Endgame was great (although Infinity War was much better, because there were not as many plot holes – mainly because of time travel and Thanos’s varying power level even without any infinity gems).
But that particular scene was dumb, and identity politics are dumb.
Btw, even if it was just the people who could fly (Valkyrie and Pepper) and the people who were expert soldiers/fighters (Nebula and Gamora), being in the pinup shot, it would have worked better. It doesnt work when it’s every freaking single female character so that the movie could tell us that Thanos can only be beaten by the mystical power of the Y chromosome.
It could at least make sense for Nebula and Gamora to be there to run cover. Or Okoye, since we had no idea where she was immediately prior. Or even Pepper and Valkyrie, since they can fly OVER the battlefield with more ease than someone on the ground, even though there were airborne enemies as well in the way. It could even have been all women without it being EVERY SINGLE WOMAN IN THE MOVIE. Or, better yet, it could have been men and women, to show that the worth of women are not any different than the worth of men. It’s a poor argumentative strategy to keep saying that anyone who critiques the scene is sexist and try to shut down the dialogue just because there is no good argument to support that scene. Those 10 seconds could have been removed or extremely slightly changed, it would have not made the movie worse, and would have actually made more sense
Has anyone here watched Phineas and Ferb, specifically “Into the 2nd Dimension” where there’s a big fight scene and most of the creations they made over the course of the show come in to fight in the giant battle? Both the time travel and the final fight felt like that, which is a good thing. The movie was not an MCU classic, to be compared to the other movies, it is a love letter to the best moments and the most important segments that has been a ten year journey. This movie gave no context, anybody who hasn’t watched anything else will understand nothing, and that is the point. This one was for the fans, and I think it delivered that beautifully.
“Of course with the Infinity Gauntlet, really someone could have fixed everything, but no one in the movie ever seemed to grasp its actual power.”
For your consideration, the Infinity Stones are a MacGuffin and a Deus ex Machina rolled into one (or six, still crunching the numbers). Nobody truly grasped their power because it never existed or was perceived before. Thanos at least learned that what he did the first time wasn’t enough, like you said, but the limits of what the stones can do have yet to be explored. Like any DeM, they could literally do anything, fix any problem, cause any problem, and so on.
But that’s not important. They never were important.
Like any MacGuffin, they were never that important anyway. It was the journey (or rather journeys at 22 films surrounding them) that was important. A billionaire-genius-playboy learning to actually care about people other than himself. A Soviet spy who’s tired of all the blood on her hands. A kid learning what patriotism actually means and how it can be abused. And so on. What they could have done was always irrelevant. It was everything leading up to what they did.
Iron Man knew he had little time to use the stones and make his choice. In that moment, he understood what Strange had said. There was only one way to win. He knew the price he’d have to pay. He was ready to pay it. And nobody else was willing to make that choice. The Hulk did it to reverse Thanos’s snap and it left his arm crippled. Thanos was left weakened after using it twice. Anyone else would have hesitated and been destroyed by the stones. Who really would have been willing, let alone able, to take Stark’s place?
Pretty much any of them would have been willing to. After going through the double-snap, most of the population of the universe would have been willing to. Tony’s only defining perk in that moment was his ability to have his nano-tech armour recreate the abilities of a god-level artifact forged by an almost extinct (now) race of space dwarves in a planet sized foundry built around a neutron star, and to do it in 4 seconds in mid-battle. The fact that Tony managed to overcome the selfishness that is one of his defining character traits to do it made it more heroic for him, but I doubt there was anyone on the Good Guy side of that battle who wouldn’t have done it, had they they ability to pull an infinity gauntlet our or their butts.
What bothered me was that they didn’t have Starlord do it, despite weilding the infinity stones slightly better than a normal human being his only remaining superpower. What was even the point in having him?
On the time travel front, Kyle from Because Science has a very thorough analysis up on YouTube now.
I absolutely loved the movie, but what I loved the most about it was Bruce Banner. A guy who saw this affliction he had as a curse, and because of it pushed away everyone he loved, or could have loved, to protect them. His story was one of the best arcs in the entirety of the MCU in my opinion. Not because he ‘overcame’ this thing that he had been fighting against all this time, but because he realized that it could be a strength, not a weakness, and that by fighting it, he had actually made his issues worse. He’s the only one who really had any forward motion during the intervening years, and that made me really happy. Mildly disgusted to see a bowl of scrambled eggs that large though.
My only real complaint is that Scarlet Witch, who was absolutely integral to the start of this phase, and seemed intrinsically linked with the Stones, felt largely shoved aside. Hopefully there’s a bunch of cut scenes of her being an absolute badass in that final battle, as I really like her character, and also think that she has some of the most visually impressive powers in the MCU.
Yeah, Scarlet’s power really looks like the Reality stone at work, especially in it’s Aether form. I’d be sort of interested in seeing the end of the 4th/5th arc being an “oh shoot, we don’t have the stones, and as the previous sorcerer supreme mentioned, the universe goes to hell if that happens, so we need to reconstitute them somehow, at least to the extent that the universe doesn’t end” deal.
I feel like they really missed the boat with Professor Hulk. Because during the big fight, it would have been nice for Hulk to have gotten in a turn against Thanos as well, given how thoroughly Thanos beat Hulk in Infinity War. Plus the death of Natasha should have affected him FAR more than it did. His only angry outburst was to throw a bench. If ever there was a chance to rage out, that would have been it.
But I loved how badass Scarlet Witch was. She had a good redemption from what happened in Infinity War with her. It really showed off how powerful she can be when she focuses that rage, and how she is one of the biggest heavy hitters on the team. Which is impressive for me, because I’ve never been a fan of Scarlet Witch in the comics, or even in the previous movies (other than partially in Age of Ultron during her scene with Hawkeye).
Heh. Kung-fu Hulk.
I don’t know if we’ll see more of Hulk in future installments, but I’d like to see Dr Banner the way he was protrayed in Peter David’s run in the late 80’s and early 90’s when he was a genius bruiser who thought his way through problems and smashed them when he couldn’t. And throwing the bench being the extent of Bruce’s rage out makes sense. He’s had half a decade to realize how strong he is in comparison to other people and his environment. He lives in a world of cardboard and has to be careful not to break anything, or anyone. (My apologies to Superman.) I love the look of guilty pleasure he has when he lightly taps a car roof at the Battle of New York and dents it. He’s in control of his massive strength. Throwing the bench is a huge display of frustration for him with his current personality.
Don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there was a discussion with the writers about a scene they decided not to do that I think was a MASSIVE missed opportunity:
They wanted to do a scene, similar to the metaphysical waystation that Thanos saw with kid Gamora (the “What did it cost?” “Everything” scene, remember?), but with Iron Man.
The person who showed up? His daughter, grown up.
I thought that would have been perfect and fucking heartwrenching as all hell.
A scene where a teenage kid or young adult we’ve never seen shows up next to Tony.
“Hey Dad.”
Tony looks up, confused. “Wha-”
“Shhh, it’s ok.”
“… Morgan…? You got big.”
“Heh… So, you did it?”
“… I’m sorry kiddo. I saved them, but…”
“You did what you had to. You can rest now.”
*silent scene where you see Tony’s lips mouth “I love you 3000”, but you can’t hear it, to keep the impact for later*
“I know.”
“…”
Something like that (I’m obviously not a screenwriter, sorry, pretend it’s better writing). I really would have lost my shit if there’d been a scene like that. Like, full on ugly crying in the theater.
I expected a scene like that, and it was a missed opportunity to have left it out.
Too many people pulled out of the moment by having Harley show up at the funeral, and he was just an older version of someone from the movies, naturally older. A suddenly older Morgan would have been too much of a head scratcher.
I dunno. I thought the scene hit a lot, lot harder, because it took everything away from Tony. Tony, the guy who always has a snappy comeback or something to say, was barely able to get out “Hey, Pep.” It showed how much the snap took, how much he gave.
Yea, it’s a pity stuff like that gets removed just because the test audiences were dim.
You aren’t aware they actually hired Katheryn Langford to play the part of the older Morgan? I know the scene isn’t in the movie, and she’s not in the credits, but…
They went so far as to film more than one ending for the movie, strictly for the sake of protecting the actual ending’s secrecy. What makes you so sure the Tony / Morgan scene was never filmed?
Ok, so The Dude Thor seeing his mom again was great but when he had to leave and called for Mjolnir. When it arrived, His face lit up. “I’m still worthy!” That look on his face. After sitting around for 5 years hating himself and his life for a perceived failure, that happy look on his face,that was great.
Also, Loki is still out there. I’m thinking Spidey:Far From Home has Loki in the final credits scene. The S:FFA trailer confirms the Marvel Multiverse, so Loki left our reality for another until things settled. Maybe 2 Loki come back?;)
Should we trust anything Mysterio says?
probably not. all the things he’s fighting in the trailer look like elemental monsters, he’s probably the one making them appear so he can fight them and be the hero. It’s likely all lies… Loki.
We never actually get to see the Soul Stone used… independently, at any rate; this makes it difficult to say with certainty what it does and how. Given the situation on Vormir, I’d speculate that a previous holder of the Stone had set up the sacrifice requirement (all the others simply require you to be able to survive using them).
In the comics, aside from the ability to manipulate souls (and how you’d show that on screen, I have no idea; and it’s an enormous complication anyway), it also acts as a repository for the souls of those killed by it or any of the other Stones. And a couple of [spoilers] I’m not mentioning, too.
In the Cinematic Universe, since several bodies are visible at the bottom of the cliff, and the Red Skull was forced into being steward for it, apparently the Soul Stone returns if not returned. Given the nature of the exchange (kill your most loved one to gain the Stone) ensuring the negative nature of the Stone-wielders, I suspect it nearly never is voluntarily returned. Also given the nature of the exchange, it guide plainly is not just a soul repository.
Having said all this, knowing there’s a Black Widow movie coming, and given the events of Steve being the one returning all the Stones… To anyone at Marvel Studios: I’d definitely pay money to see the exchange between Steve and the Red Skull if returning the Stone results in Natasha’s resurrection.
I hate auto-correct… The sentence should read: Also, given the nature of the exchange, it quite plainly is NOT just a soul repository.
My big reaction was when Hawkeye’s cell phone rings with his wife’s number, and I went ‘wait, her account is still active?’
I think we have to assume that Banner fixed most of the little accounting details that go into restoring 3.5 billion people… updating grocery store supply chains, legal existence records, property deeds, making sure that people re-appeared in safe locations, things like that.
The emotional stuff will still have to be dealt with, though.
I agree with you about Banner fixing most of the little accounting details, including things like making sure all these people coming back don’t suddenly starve. I think that’s part of the reason he had so much trouble MAKING the snap, and Tony didn’t: what he was calling for was inherently harder and touched a lot more of reality than simply “wipe out the bad guys.”
I’m not certain how you can go about fixing property rights, especially when, after 5 years, houses have been knocked down, apartment tenancy changes, etc. Then there’s things like Mortgage payments in arrears, foreclosures, resale of houses. How do you tell a 4-year old he no longer lives in the house where he was born? How, conversely, do you tell someone who just got back that their mansion now belongs to the Joneses who used to live across the street?
Then there’s things like, how do you tell a CEO of a company that his assistant clerk took over while he was “gone” and bankrupted the company so it doesn’t exist now? Or that, the clerk was so good at the job, none of the stockholders want the previous CEO back again?
Additionally, you get the “Husband and two kids disappeared, wife remarried, has kids with new husband”, or the “wife disappeared, husband dead in car crash during event, kid living in orphanage without a name” scenarios?
No finger snap is going to resolve that to everyone’s liking. It’s best to simply lampshade all that, and come up with new stories.
Here’s one: The rest of the Universe had, for 5 years, half it’s life forms vanish. Rocket and company showed that the energy pulse that accompanied these events could be traced, which is how they found Thanos on his Garden. SOMEONE is going to come looking at Earth for an explanation and possibly some restitution.
Concerning your last point… the rest of the universe knew the Mad Titan with the obsession with killing half of everyone was hunting infinity stones. When half of everyone fell into dust, they arnt going to blame a random planet.
Personally I think they would have been better resetting back to the original snap, even maybe a few minutes after. It would have kept all who died alive, those who were born after would have been reset, and it wouldn’t stuff up any future movies coming out in the MCU that now have to be set in 2023 or whatever, instead of being set in present day times like has been established. I feel like this kind of ending is a cheap way out of having the MCU avengers we have had for the past number of years.
Then Morgan wasn’t born, so Tony uses his snap to put it all back, instead of removing Thanos.
Based on Morgan’s age, Pepper would have either been pregnant with Morgan during infinity war, or shortly after. So Morgan would still have happened. But I did some reading last night, turns out they don’t really have plans for anything more for mcu, this is the end.
If Morgan was conceived after the snap and they reset to that, then the only way they would get Morgan back would be to isolate the exact sperm and egg that combined to make her, ensure that the pregnancy went through exactly the same, and download the original Morgan into the new one. Even if Pepper was pregnant during the Snap (which seems unlikely since Tony only brought up the possibility of kids the day before), this Morgan wouldn’t be the same because she’d be living in a non-Snapped world.
As for the MCU’s future, they currently have release dates for movies planned out into 2022, so I’d say they will be fine….
Bringing up the possiblity, and the conception actually having happened aren’t intermingled. You could have a pregnant pepper even without Tony bringing up the possibility of kids ever. And I never said it would be the same, though the chances of it happening could be there if they moved to a private location like they had done and if they had never taught her about what happened outside their private little cabin.
As for the MCU future, I misread, its the Russo brothers that have no plans to do any future MCU movies.
One spoiler type joke that immediately popped into my head after seeing it. “Spoiler: In the avengers movie thanks gets all the infinity stones and snaps his fingers”
I’ve read through a few threads and one topic that kept coming up is the group pose of all of the female heroes during the end battle and how stilted and forced it felt. This criticism is very worrisome on one very basic level: It’s about the women. Now obviously you can make a counterpoint about the ridiculous posing all heroes do across all mediums. But that’s not the argument being made. The argument being made is this particular scene with female only heroes gathering and posing feels forced.
In a genre where poses are a literal trope, why is THIS one problematic?
Now could any pose scene be handled is such a way to not feel forced? Theoretically, in a perfect world, yes. But I doubt I need to go into detail about how we don’t live in such a world.
The reason this scene feels forced is because it IS forced. The narrative designers of the MCU didn’t accidentally put all of there female heroes together and pose them in a shot. That was on purpose, to send a message. And that message?
The female heroes are just as important as the male heroes.
If your reaction to that statement is anywhere in the ballpark of “duh” then good for you. But actions speak louder then words and I only have to point at the movie names to show a stark difference between saying “The women are just as important as the men” and having 22 MCU movies and only two of them with Female heroes on the title. That sends a very different message.
I took the female group pose in Endgame as Marvel’s admittance of their shortcoming, in this one aspect, and as a promise to do better. We’ll have to wait and see if that will be the case.
It’s interesting that diversity for diversity’s sake seems to be generally frowned upon as if the status quo is acceptable. The status quo is not acceptable. That needs to be remembered more often.
THIS. You have summed up my feelings in words I couldn’t find myself.
That scene says the exact opposite of what you think it says, because in that scene they were completely superfluous. The answer to Spiderman’s question was actually “well, I’m just going to kind of fly over there, because I’m a battleship and these are toy boats in front of me, seriously, didn’t you just see me blow up a giant space ship?”
And not “my bachelorette party is going to help me through.”
And, in fact, in the scene, that’s exactly what she did. Just flew straight to the van. It was twice as insulting (if not more) than if they just hadn’t shown up at all, both to the characters (treating them as nothing but vanity props) and to the audience (treating us like we’re stupid enough to buy it).
About 80% of responses I’ve seen to that scene have come across as feminists (as in people who believe in/desire female superiority) or masculists (same for males) talking out of their ideologies. Your response, however, is one of the few I’ve seen that takes the feminist side due to egalitarian (males and females largely equal) reasoning. While I personally believe that this was one of the more poorly-executed posing scenes in the MCU, you make a fair point that posing scenes are a staple for the genre and are generally not something to take as anything more than a cool poster shot. Another good point that you made was that the females have less attention in the MCU, making the posing scene a nod to their presence and importance; I agree with your idea here, and while I will note that this is largely due to a numerical difference between the important male and important female characters and that your stated statistic does not account for the six movies that don’t name a hero at all in the title, I will also concede that the numerical difference in important characters of each gender is not large enough to excuse the remaining 7-to-1 disparity.
Just one tiny correction.
Feminism is not about female superiority.
It is about getting women recognised in their own rights.
Throughout pretty much all of history (*) women have been treated as passive annexes to a man, at best. The major religions (even if they do not all enforce it anymore) have it as doctrine that women are on par with lifestock and chattel in the commandments department.
As a movement (and there is not really a movement per se as like with most humans you put three feminists in a room and you get a schism) the goal of feminism is to remove the religious, economical, cultural, social and judicial obstacles that result in women being treated as ‘lesser’ than men. With varing degrees of partial success among the different types of obstacles. Some, but not all, of the more blatant discriminatory laws have been stricken or were amended. Women actually have a recognised right to work and own property, but there is this nagging wage gap. Socially the burden of child care and care in general still falls almost exclusively on women, who are expected to put their lives on hold for it. I could go on but hopefully these few examples are sufficient to show that despite acceptance (in the west) of the fundamental equality of men and women there is still tons of lingering prejudices that date back thousands of years of human history.
At the end of the day feminism boils down to a simple question: Do you believe that people should be treated equally regardless of their gender? If you answer yes, then you are a feminist and all that remains is to determine the degree to which you believe men and women are treated unequally.
Regarding /that/ scene, I liked it. Sure, I recognised it as fan service but as others have also pointed out, it was three seconds of fan service in a three hour movie full of fan service moments aimed at the more traditional presumed audience. Anybody who did not care for the girl power moment, it was fan service for somebody else and they should just cheer for the moments that were there for them instead.
(* the last 60 years in a quarter of the world are a blip, not even a statistical anomaly, in the 12000+ years of recorded history)
When I was talking about ideologies, I was referring to them by denotation rather than connotation – by their literal meaning, not the meaning people associate with them – hence why I clarified what I was talking about with each ideology I brought up.
As far as the wage gap goes, the most recent studies I’ve seen suggest that the number was attained by simply averaging the wages of men and women, without accounting for things as simple as taking different career paths (i.e. a doctor earning more than a secretary), and that the small remaining difference is likely due to men being more likely to demand raises than women. Another factor that likely plays in is that corporations love people who expect to receive lower wages due to the fact that they’re likely to take the first pay number sent their way instead of negotiating for a good wage.
As far as the burden of childcare goes, I admit to having no “professional” knowledge on that subject, but am aware that courts are extremely likely to award custody of children to the mother, whether or not the father wants to have custody. Such behavior severely skews single parents towards women, explaining the gap in childcare expectations and more importantly setting a goal regarding the removal of said expectation.
Does no one actually read comics these days. It’s an A-Force homage; no more, no less.
And yes, it’s irrelevant with in comparison to Captain Marvel. But then, so is 99% of the rest of the things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; which is entirely NOT the point of the scene.
I don’t think it helps the agenda to include badly made forced scenes.
Whatever the motive, however noble the intentions, a bad scene is a bad scene.
It will not make people like the movie more. It will not support your case.
Unless you’re going for a “See, this is what happens, when you ___!”-kind of argument, it’s simply not helpful. So the scene could work as an argument against equality. “See, this is what happens, when you want us to make women seem important in the MCU! We make bad scenes.”
So from what I understand from having read nearly all the comic books that involve the Infinity Stones (and Cosmic Cubes – I’m a 46 year-old nerd):
Each stone is very powerful. So powerful that it usually makes their wielders single-minded enough that they have a glaring weakness in how they fight/operate. When Thanos in the comic puts all the gems together for the first time, it’s almost too much for him. Had he not been determined enough and strong enough, he might have ended all existence at the time he puts the Gauntlet on. Through out the comic version of the first Infinity War, every time the Gauntlet is put on (four times – Thanos, Nebula, Thanos again and then Adam Warlock), it takes time for the user to acclimate to the powers of the Gauntlet. One stone = quick access to power. All stones = a few minutes acclimation. So when he’s fighting Captain Marvel and he “cheats” by removing the Power Stone, it makes sense. He’s still acclimating to using all the stones at once, and needs something right now to stop her.
Adam Warlock points out in the comics that the Soul Stone might be the most powerful of them all, which is why its powers are so elusive (or hard to understand). There is a world inside the stone – the Soul Plane. To escape the Soul Plane (which is against the will of the Soul Stone), it takes a great deal of focus and spiritual enlightenment. Which is how Warlock escapes the Stone not once, but TWICE. Eventually, after understanding how to use the Soul Stone, he’s able to release souls inside it. But that takes a lot of time. The interesting thing is that in the current MCU, Gamora is alive and never was in the Soul Stone, so she’s free. However, Natasha is IN the Stone. So they could make an entire movie about her escaping the mind-clouding influence of the Soul Plane to re-appear in reality.
Changing time with the Time Stone … doesn’t really change time. It’s always localized. Which is why the Dr Strange movie was brilliant. He locks Dorammu and himself (and only them) into a loop. It infuriates Dorammu, who knows it cannot escape until it makes a deal with Strange. So using the Quantum Realm makes more sense, although doing it that way proves there is a multiverse. They go off on different “branches” of time. If it was linear, there would be no branches. The idea is to go into those branches to do something that won’t disrupt the current reality. Removing a Stone from reality (since it was explained they were the anchor of a reality’s timeline) causes disruptions.
And they are clearly in an alternate time line now, even if they state they aren’t. A few things happened that left the whole MCU open to whatever weird things they want to do (such as WandaVision):
1. Present Day Nebula meeting her younger self (Captain used the Mind stone, so he could have removed the fight from young Cap – Nebula doesn’t have that luxury).
2. Present Day Nebula killed younger Nebula.
3. Younger Gamora running off.
4. Destroying Thanos and his army.
So sending Captain America back to return them was kind of all for naught (save the Time Stone, see Dorammu). Especially the Soul Stone. That stone wasn’t doing anything, or being used to do anything (save waste the time of people trying to reach it). I liked how Steve just kinda did his own thing, growing older or discovering how to defeat the super soldier serum so he could grow older rather. It makes Tony’s sacrifice even MORE meaningful. It really got to Steve. Also, I knew who was going to die ahead of seeing the movie by accident due to winning a death pool. I was ready to accept Tony’s death without much tears UNTIL THEY PUT HIS DAUGHER IN THE MOVIE. My son and I always tease each other with “I love you” and “I love you infinity plus one” so I lost it during his funeral and his holovid last will and testament. I also felt so so so bad for Peter Parker. Natasha pulled on my heart strings, but not as much as Tony did. Marvel kicked me square in my feels.
I liked the movie. I’m glad they left holes in the movie about the time travel thing. If they should ever choose to have cameos or bring back characters, they can do make the whole excuse of alternative timelines and mutliverses.
∞+1
∞+1 war? :)
Oh, that was supposed to be a reply to EmCeeKhan.
LOL That’s alright.
I guess they’d also have to return the Space Stone/Tesserac because it gives Loki the convenient loophole of escaping his future death. That’s another time-altering thing that happened. But if it had to be anyone, I’d want it to be Loki creating the alternate future, tbh.
I really liked the movie. I liked the big set piece battle at the end, though Fridge Logic did kick in later. The biggest problem I had was Thanos’ apparent power level. In Infinity War, Thor with Storm Breaker was able to get through Thanos’ defenses and almost one shotted him, even with the Infinity Gauntlet and all six gems. In End Game, Thanos with no infinity stones was able to fend off Thor dual wielding Moljnir and Storm realer. I always assumed the reason Thanos could beat Thor and the Hulk at the beginning of Infinity War was because he already had the power stone from Zandar. Maybe it’s a minor quibble but it bugs me.
My guess? Thor was incredibly rusty and out-of-shape due to five years of drowning his sorrows in pizza and beer with no meaningful physical activity. He may still have been worthy of wielding Mjolnir, but his body was no longer up to par for the fight.
Well, in the comics, Thanos is a Titan who becomes incredibly fascinated with nihilism and death, and that’s what he specifically attunes himself to be – an avatar of Mistress Death. He fights the heroes of Earth many times with or without the Infinity stones, and every time he does, he usually almost wins. He is incredibly strong, nearly invincible and when he gets angry, he’s a lot like Hulk (he gets stronger and more determined to win).
So a young, determined Thanos who has been fighting galactic wars for some time didn’t seem invincible to me, but he was definitely more skilled in battle and prepared than Thor (who had been sitting on his butt drinking beer since he failed to stop Thanos the first time). It took a soldier like Steve to be able to go toe-to-toe with him without cosmic powers, and it took someone like Captain Marvel to fight him with his newly acquired (but see my post above – it disorients you and forces you to struggle for at least a few minutes) Infinity Gauntlet.
Thor’s attack on Thanos worked because it took Thanos by surprise. He didn’t anticipate not being able to knock Thor’s hammer aside with a little dose of power stone. It’s like shooting Superman with a kryptonite bullet. He’s easily fast enough to dodge a bullet. It just never occurs to him that he has to.
There’s around 10,000 airline flights in the air at any one time, with over 1mil people in them. So at least 500,000 of them were killed when Thanos snapped in Infinity War.
When Banner snapped and brought everyone back, what happened to those people? Where there suddenly half a million people flying through the air at 500 mph 6 miles up in the air? That would suck. One minute you are eating your peanuts, the next you die horribly as you reappear in mid-air.
What about the millions who were driving a car? Suddenly they reappear in the middle of I95 moving 70mph. Ouch.
How about beings who were on spaceships? One second you are relaxing on board, the next you are sucking vacuum.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Also – if eliminating half of all living creatures was enough to “save” the universe because of resource shortages, wouldn’t a better solution have been to snap your fingers and double the amount of resources available?
Another funny thing. When Thanos eliminated half the life in the universe, that was also half the non-sentient life, half the plants, half the single-celled organisms, half the everything, according to the Russo Brothers.
So… he basically halved the life, and also halved most of the resources as well.
If you actually watch Infinity War, you’ll noted that the trees are still there. You need not weep for the amoeba no matter what the Russo Brothers said. Only people were vanishing.
Yes because infinity war showed an exact accounting of all trees on the planet, or even just in the area, before and after, insteadof focusing on which characters were dusted on a mostly treeless field of battle, so we should ignore word of god on what Thanos did. Btw this is sarcasm :)
Also i can name one tree in particular that got dusted by name. Hint, it begins with a G and has a very limited set of lines in the movie.
Nope, way more died than that.
Half of all airline pilots disappeared.
Even ignoring flights over populated areas, figure 750,000 people died in plane crashes.
Now, what about people on life support?
Babies that can’t feed themselves?
Elderly people dependent on medication?
Effectively you would have a Malthusian event that would likely kill off 3/4 of the population, or roughly 550,000,000,000 people on earth alone.
We could actually examine this closer and explain why the pod of whales was likely BS because the ocean would be dying due to half of all life being gone.
Thantos had a lot of carry trough but a seriously shitty plan.
I think past Thanos realized that when he came to the future. He even made mention how he’d just remake the universe with no sentient life whatsoever, so there would be peace. Because apparently you can’t have nice things when sentient life (or Terrans) are around.
Actually he said he’d remake the universe WITH sentient life that had no knowledge that there used to be more sentient life, so they would not know what they had lost, and would therefore not fight to regain it.
I meant he meant creating the Earth with no sentient life (no Terrans) because damn those Terrans undoing his plots and foiling his efforts born of madness with their incredible leaps of logic and intelligence.
Pretty sure Rocket and Nebula are not from Earth (although who knows, maybe Rocket was originally from Earth as a normal raccoon, aka garbage panda, before he got turned into what he now is). Nor is Thor or Valkyrie.
The Ebony Maw mentions the Terrans, and Thanos acknowledges the Terrans have been a source of annoyance to him. Thor and Valkyrie are on Earth, with the Terrans who are assembled to avenge. Rocket and Nebula are members of the Guardians of the Galaxy, which were brought together and led by Starlord, who is a Terran. So technically, all the all powerful aliens are on Earth because the Terrans/Avengers welcomed them there to help defeat Thanos. He basically knows all this, because Ebony Maw taps into and downloads future Nebula’s memories (which probably includes everything the Avengers told her during their 5 years of working together after Infinity War).
550 billion is not 3/4th of the population of Earth. There’s roughly 7,346,235,000 people on Earth.
550 billion is almost 75 times the population of all people on Earth.
I think you might have meant 5.5 billion (5,500,000,000) which WOULD be 3/4th of all people on Earth.
My Bad
Commercial flights tend to have multiple pilots aboard, as well as a cabin crew that at least knows how to turn on the radio, and an autopilot that can keep the plane flying and even land it under reasonable conditions. So 1 in 4 flights will have no pilot post-snap, and even fewer will have no-one qualified to operate the radio, and fewer still will have no-one capable of figuring it out. It’s possible that there will be some planes where no-one can unlock the cockpit door before everyone who has access or the keycode is dusted, and where no-one can get a phone call through to get help that way, but it’ll be a very small fraction of flights.
“There’s around 10,000 airline flights in the air at any one time, with over 1mil people in them. So at least 500,000 of them were killed when Thanos snapped in Infinity War.”
Your math stinks.
Planes have copilots, so only one plane in four would pull the double short straw. Many of those planes with the double pilot loss would be in mid-flight on autopilot, and quite possibly someone on board was a pilot or played a lot of flight simulator… but in any case the numbers wouldn’t be half of all planes.
In your favor a crashing plane does a lot of damage to things on the ground, but I’m comfortable predicting something closer to 200000 dead in air crashes rather than the two pilots on them. I would assume the gauntlet would balance these these things in it’s actions, but others may disagree.
Not talking about plane crashes, I’m talking about the people on the planes who turned to dust.
If they reappear at 35,000 ft going 500 mph, well…
Would the 200,000+ that die in the ensuing crashes be restored? They weren’t directly killed by Thanos.
The ones indirectly killed probably wouldn’t be restored, crashes, people in surgery, people who committed suicide, etc. That said Hulk did say he tried to bring Nat back at the same time so he might have thought of them.
As for the ones who used to be in a plane we don’t know but it’s possible they’d reappear on the ground. They don’t explicitly show anyone coming back so who knows where they came back.
I suppose it would depend on whether or not the stones were “bringing back at an instant” or “bringing back at a safe point prior to Thanos disruption”.
As for resources, got no clue. I’ve often said that miracles require more miracles to balance them, which is why I don’t believe in miracles per se.
Noah, for example, would have required dozens of miracles to do his thing. There was the miracle of feeding the animals, there was the miracle of cleaning up the crap, there was the miracle of all those animals not killing each other, there was the miracle of the diseases that didn’t kill everything but managed to survive to make all LATER life miserable – and on and on.
A) Loved the movie. Much Marvel Fan Service, So Excelsior!
B) BUT- I really think the authors missed a bet on a GREAT moment that happened off screen. Steve Rogers had to return ALL the Stones to their proper point in time, right? Which means he had to give the Soul Stone back to it’s keeper. THINK about that for a moment.
Here you go, Red Skull, have an Infinity Stone?!?!?
More like, “Here you go, Red Skull! Have all six!” :WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!: “Your memory getting jogged yet about a convenient loophole for reversing a sacrifice? No? That’s a shame… what’s that, Mjolnir? You want to have a chat with him, too? Well, OK, I guess. Since you insist…”
Ok, what I want to know is this.
Captain Marvel kept saying that the rest of the universe was having their own problems, which is why she couldn’t stay on earth.
Bullshit.
You’re telling me that half of a set of objects that can rewrite everything are showing up on every inhabited planet all the damn time?
That universe ending crises are happening on every inhabited planet in the universe all the damned time?
That’s just lazy storytelling.
What is so special about earth in the Marvel Universe?
Actually, what she’s saying is that other worlds don’t have what Earth has – a group of altruistic individuals that are working together to help keep the peace and save lives. Which in the Marvel Universe, even in the comics, that’s basically true. It takes HUMANS going to other PLANETS to form TEAMS to fight crime or galactic threats. Even the Shi’ar Empire’s Guard can’t keep the peace like the Starjammers can (which is lead by a HUMAN). Because (SPOILERS) there’s a celestial growing in the Earth that creates super-powered or super-intelligent people to act as its immune system in protecting the Earth (or at least that’s what Earth X would have you believe).
So for some aliens, she’s all they have as far as a superhero goes. A lot of planets are prison planets, part of a terrible regime that likes to abuse its citizens, or fake utopias where everyone is a happy slave.
Also that celestial growing in the Earth is why Galactus wants to eat Earth rather than some place less defended.
R.I.P. Tony stark
While I found the swordfight with the shark in the final battle to be quite unexpected, I think the most touching moment was right there at the end where Thanos decided to move to Paris and become a mime, and ends up marrying Ant-Man. Totally didn’t see that coming.
I found it very obvious. Especially after Antman tried to kill Thanos by going up his butt and destroying the hemorrhoid which was altering Thanos’s mind to make him so genocidal. The love between those two was foreshadowed at that point.
I loved the fact that the hemorrhoid was foreshadowed by the fact Thanos spent so much time sitting in the hoverthrone.
Also, that line early on between Cap and Antman. “Have you ever done anything like this?” “Well, there was that one time in prison… don’t tell my daughter” had me spilling popcorn I was laughing so hard.
Yes. I cant believe that the movie turned out to be a rom com.
Bit late to the party here, I know, but my main issue is with what is presumably going to be the plot for Guardians 3; that is, searching for Gamora. I love that they found a way to bring the character back without undoing what happened in Infinity War, but here’s my problem: that isn’t the same Gamora. And it never will be. A major thematic element of the first two films was this crew coming together as friends and then as family. This Gamora does not and never will have the experiences of the first two films unless they deus ex machina Dead Gamora’s memories into her, which would feel creepy and wrong, and undermine sacrificing her in the first place?
So, I mean, where do they go? Does Quill just do his usual cutesy dumbass act, be all “Hey baby, we had an ‘unspoken thing’, lol”, at which point this Gamora beats him half to death and leaves again? I have to imagine the ‘endgame’ in this case is to restore the status quo at some point, but… how?
I think the point of Guardians 3 would be more to unite Gamora with her sister Nebula to give them the family that they never had. Not so much for Peter, but for a member of the crew. Which could lead Gamora to falling for Peter for very different reasons, but the primary goal is to unite two sisters who never had a chance thanks to Thanos being a terrible dad who made them fight each other constantly to survive.
All arguments aside, what I liked about the ending wast the conclusion of Tony and Steve’s character arcs-
Tony was the guy who wanted to make ‘a suit of armor around the world’, so that the world didn’t need heroes to protect them; so that everyone could have a happy life, and settle down. And even though that dream never came to be, he took his chance to have a family, to ensure that he got it. Then in the end, he made the sacrifice play to save everyone at the cost of his life.
Meanwhile Steve ‘jump on a grenade pre-serum’ Rogers was always willing to sacrifice himself for others, to give up everything to save just one person; he seemed like he’d never give up the good fight unless you killed him. But then when the biggest threat he’d ever faced had been defeated, he chose to settle down with the woman he loved, and live his days in peace.
I don’t know about you guys, but the reversal of roles felt very fitting to me; I only wished they had handled it better in regards to earlier B plots (CA:WS romance with Peggy’s daughter coughcough), but I understand they had a time crunch due to the actors’ contracts so whatcha gonna do?
One possibility I don’t see people mention is that Steve didn’t go to an alternate timeline to be with Peggy, and didn’t just retire quietly into obscurity and do nothing, but rather that he was actively engaged in a number of things that together led to the MCU turning out the way it did – maybe he couldn’t stop Operation Paperclip from recruiting Zola, but managed to stop HYDRA from taking over in the 1950s. Maybe he had a voice in Fury and Coulson being recruited by SHIELD.
If Steve lived his life in the MCU’s backstory, then we don’t know how it would have turned out if he hadn’t been there all along.
—
As for the A-Force moment, it hurt my suspension of disbelief, felt forced, and took me out of the movie. Not because it shows a bunch of powerful women coming together, but because it shows every major named female character coming together because someone wanted a shot of all the named female characters together because they’re all women…
After a sequence where the women have been shown to be at least as capable as the men because they’ve been fighting in the same melee as the men on completely equal terms (or in some cases even outshining the men – Scarlet Witch v Thanos and Captain Marvel taking out the mothership), having the battle suddenly gender-segregated feels like a step backwards.
It’s not too late for Netflix to greenlight Captain America: Husband of Shield”.
Visualize this: The new stay-at-home Cap sneaking out to thwart Hydra plots and Shield stupidity while keeping the home fires (and dinner) burning for Peggy. Imagine the hi jinks of Get Smart crossed with Mission Impossible, set in the 50s world of Leave it to Beaver and Patty Duke.
Especially when he knows about the Ancient One in New York, and Mar-Vell and the Skrulls in the 80s
I know that the writers have stated the alternate time-line scenario, but I’m still a fan of the somewhat elastic but single time-line scenario myself. In that scenario, Thanos essentially broke reality with the snap, not to mention the removal of the stones from reality. That meant it was existentially necessary for the Avengers to succeed in (essentially) reversing those effects. Then, placing the stones (at least temporally) back where they came from allows things to proceed roughly in the same way that it always had. In this scenario, Cap has always been living a dual life since he returned to marry Peggy. We just only realized it at the end of the movie.
While that caps (pun intended) some cans of worms, it still leaves some questions. (Like whether Cap would have done something about Bucky or Hydra.) We can hope that, unlike has happened all to often in the comic books these movies are based on, some writer won’t get his hands on the series and create another reality-breaking event. (I’m looking at you, J. Michael Straczynski and Joe Quesada, but you’re not alone.)
I think it’s a godsdamned mess, and I loathe it even more than Infinity War – and believe me, I’ve got bones to pick with IW.
But to stick with Endgame, for one, Erynn Brook was onto something when she pointed out the whole Girl Power Moment with Captain Marvel feels distinctly hollow when taken in the context of a film that wastes multiple women, but can make time for Tony to have a masturbatory chat with his dad, a background facet we already had closure for back in IM2. This is a film that drops Natasha off a cliff, rolls Gamora back to square one, has no idea (cannot have any idea, because it was filmed first) what to do with Carol, and has Okoye apparently in charge of Wakanda in flagrant disregard for any notion of Wakanda having its own way of doing things… but it wants props for having a big Girl Power moment that has no impact going forwards. Only Wanda really feels like she gets some decent respect, so at least the Russo’s can remember that they had her holding off a fully powered Thanos in Infinity War literally one-handed, but the vast majority of the ladies deserve better.
Cap’s ending isn’t great either. The film wants me to believe that Steve “I’m with you ’til the end of the line” Rogers totally dismissed the family he’d found in the 21st century, abandoned Bucky, and hared off back to the ‘ideal happy ending’ of… A conventional white picket fence nuclear family in the 50’s? STEVE ROGERS?
Look, I’m very sympathetic to Chris Evans’ desire to put down the role so he can stop having to maintain the frankly absurd physique it requires (dude probably like, scarfed down an entire loaf of bread with tears in his eyes once shooting wrapped up, the poor sod), and I can see Steve wanting a break in-universe as well, after all he’s done. But Steve “I can do this all day” Rogers, drifting quietly through the 20th century without making waves? That’s a crock of shit.
It’s… interesting who the Infinity War narrative is cruellest to; both Nat and Thor are people who either can’t or won’t buy into the reactionary obsession with the nuclear family. And poor Thor! After Ragnarok gave him an actually pretty neat arc and some of the most character growth since his first movie, Infinity War walked it all back, from “Asgard is a people, not a place, you are not the God of Hammers, and this wisdom you have paid for with the price of one of your eyes, as Odin did before you,” to “welp, let’s kill most of the Asgardians, give Thor a new hammer, and oh yeah, let’s make a poop gag out of giving him another eye, too,” and now Endgame doubles down on that by using the character as punching bag for frat boy abuse about PTSD victims being pathetic and fat and useless. Look at him scream at this child on Fortnite, what a loser! See him refuse to save the world until he’s promised beer, then drink in every scene. Look at him try to step up and bear the dangerous power of the Infinity Stones with the strength of what flows through his veins, only for Rhodes to dismiss that as cheese-whiz. Look at him break down in an actually pretty great and earnest portrayal of PTSD by Chris Hemsworth, only for Rocket to slap and insult him, because everyone’s lost things, you’re not special so your pain isn’t worth sympathy. “Look at the fat, drunk loser,” says the film’s framing, “laugh at him, he’s pathetic and he deserves it.”
(Minor note: I cannot IMAGINE how outraged Tessa Thompson must be, after trying so hard to put an explicitly bisexual Valkyrie on the big screen and having it shut down, that on top of walking back basically all of Ragnarok’s character work for the sake of gross fat jokes at the expense of a dude with PTSD, the Russo’s also got to claim credit for inserting themselves into the narrative as the first on screen LGBT character in the MCU, as a godsdamned bit character.)
There’s some great acting in this film. Scarlett Johansson’s performance with Jeremy Renner is heart-wrenching. Chris Hemsworth’s does frankly phenomenal work of making what he’s given (and oh boy what is he given…) shine. Gwyneth Paltrow makes full use of her brief time in the limelight to actually grab some character development while she can. The acclaim these actors have accrued is fully earned.
But no amount of good work by the actors can paper over how much of a howling trainwreck the script is.
You apparently haven’t read the comics in quite a long time.
War of the Realms right now is a convoluted, cross-series, insane plot that is supposed to un-break the last four years of breaking reality over and over. Including undoing a number of X-Men deaths and plot holes. Not that DC is any better – ever since they’ve been trying to veneer over stuff broken during 52, the characters – especially female ones – have been dying off left and right, and male characters are given more spotlight, especially when they do kill of a female one in a blaze of hot testosterone.
It’s nearly impossible to make a coherent comic book movie if you try to stick to the old or new storylines. Fans of old or new generations will freaking complain regardless. That’s why most of the Marvel fans love the new movies, and the rest don’t.
What in the actual hell does that have to do with anything I said?
They had to make a movie based on one of the most convoluted comic book meta-verses ever. And make it about a war over all-powerful stones while stripping out certain elements that would confuse a larger audience while appeasing the Marvel Fans.
BTW, Thor’s portrayal is the hardest thing to do as a movie, since the history of Thor is mostly that he’s not an actual singular entity, but a manifestation of the Asgardian Thor in another human’s body brought forth using a disguised Mjolnir. Thor himself is one of the most predictable comic book figures ever, since most of his story arcs start with him failing and having to pick himself back up. PTSD, overweight Thor is actually a story in the Marvel universe (albeit in one of their mini-series) where Loki helped a race basically destroy all of Asgard. Valkyrie had be be equally hard, because her stories are always one-offs, usually due to a Thor-based plot line. The most recent comics dropped Valkyrie to replace her with Angela – Thor’s busty sexy sister originally created by Todd McFarlane and Neil Gaiman in an entirely different comic company (she originally showed up in Spawn, as a hot sexy angel sent to kill Spawn).
The writers were required to try to incorporate as much of the current comics into the movies as they could. Yet get rid of Mistress Death. And Mephisto. And change Thanos’ reason for killing off half the universe. And step carefully around the most current story thread War of the Realms (which apparently is something they want to make another series about …?). Some stipulations were incredibly difficult to meet. Marvel (and DC) are pretty hard taskmasters when it comes to writing anything official in their universes.
I honestly think they did the best they could do without completely erasing all the previous things done in other movies to make two movies about the Infinity War. Now they can move on, and make other movies that will probably be as good as it gets.
“The writers were required to try to incorporate as much of the current comics into the movies as they could.” What? No they weren’t. The MCU hasn’t done straight adaptations of the comics since it began – for the better, in my opinion. It’s largely unconcerned with accuracy to the comics, and I know of no editorial mandate that Infinity War or Endgame was required to be an exception to that. Which means all the convoluted mess of retcons and alternate timelines and reboots that happens in the comics doesn’t matter a fig. The MCU is its own beast at this point – and, financially, a far more successful one. What does matter is how well Infinity War/Endgame tells a story in its own right, and my position is… Well, see above, good performances, howling trainwreck of a script.
“This is a film that drops Natasha off a cliff”
Hey, nice way to completely remove all of Natasha’s agency.
She fought for the opportunity to be the one to make the big sacrifice play to acquire the Soul Stone. She fought hard because she knew that she wasn’t the one with a family to potentially return to and to make sure that her ledger closed without any outstanding red in it.
No, the writers DECIDED she should fight hard to make the sacrifice play to balance out her ledger, while ignoring that Clint has plenty to make up for after going full anime vigilante (and how messed up is it that his grief for a family the audience has no connection to is validated and taken seriously, while Thor’s is mocked?). I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t a natural development of Natasha’s character arc, but equally let’s not pretend that the only possible place the writers could have taken her was to kill her off for a dude’s pain.
Actually, she’s not dead dead. She’s in the SOUL STONE dead.
This is where they could have done a better job of showing what the Soul Stone really is. You’re not “dead” – you just inhabit the Soul Stone now. There’s a Spirit World inside the stone where thousands of souls of people who were eliminated using the Soul Stone live. They aren’t “dead” they are just outside reality. People can escape the Soul Stone – Adam Warlock does it, Dr. Strange does it, etc. Just that it is incredibly hard to do so (and quite alarming when you return because everyone is like “OMG YOU WERE DEAD.!”)
If anything, if they want to make a Black Widow movie, this is a point where they can revisit all of her past in a way that would make it relevant to her current self. The Soul Stone doesn’t want you to leave (it’s sentient due to the sentience of all the souls inside it), so it makes you relive some of your past (not always the better parts of it) to either break your will or make you want to stay. It would be crazy cool if they could do all her past story and then have her show her strength to escape the Soul Stone – and pop into reality somewhere. And then have her like in the background pulling strings or something ala Nick Fury style.
My beef with Natasha is that she had five years to reconnect with Bruce, and it didn’t happen. I get why he might avoid her, but she seemed to not care. She did care about Hawkeye, though, and tried to save him. I think her one last sacrifice was to give Hawkeye a chance to redeem himself and go on with his family. To her, the Avengers are her family, and they were largely destroyed both physically and mentally due to Thanos. Sacrificing herself for the Soul Stone saved her family. I thought it was fitting.
Before I begin what can probably be justified as a rant. I want to begin this comment (first ever time I’ve made one here tbh) by saying that it’s super dope you put this thread here for us to discuss the movie on DaveB, and also that I love Grrl Power.
Okay, that being said I’ll begin by saying that I enjoyed the movie, especially what it meant as a whole for the MCU. A culmination of over a decade of work crunched down into a single moment in the hopes of an epicly gratifying payoff is something that’s hard to do. In any medium, let alone one where using up 3 hours of an audiences time is considered overkill like a movie. That being said the movie did leave me with some thoughts, raised eyebrows, and furrowed foreheads.
Time travel was not one of the major issues for me, but a minor one. I think that they handled it decently well to drive the plot and narrative of the movie. Of course I see some of the holes but have always left leeway for writers when it comes to using the premises of Time Travel as I’m imagining most writers don’t hold a degree of mastery in quantum mechanics or physics. All in all I think they used Time Travel as a narrative tool in a way that was clever, making it useful but not a tool for retconning. I guess that my point is that I enjoyed Back to the Future I, II and III. And those movies’ usage of Time Travel was a lot dumber than the one used in Endgame, so I have no complaints. That being said the whole Steve Rogers was hanging around in the past/possible alternate timelines was something that seemed like a purposeful loose end to be used as a starting point for the next phase of Marvel Movies. I considered it a bit too on the nose for my taste, but I let it slide because what ELSE would cause a series of avenger level catastrophes/movies than someone derping around in the timestream(s?).
As for the Grrl (sorry I had to) pose moment, I found it both pretty dope and ultra cheesy/cringy. But then again, so was the whole battle once everyone got in it. I mean there was a scene where black panther had a kinda stereotypical but also epic infinity guantlet nfl runningback dash that left me both rolling my eyes and wanting him in my fantasy draft. As well as a whole snippet away from the main action just for Gamora to contemplate why a version of her would fall in love with THAT GUY (too which I answer, pelvic sorcery). The funny thing about comic books and movies based off of them to me is, that if you took snippets of these scenes (like the Women pose or the two armies running/facing off against each other) and put them on a two spread page of a comic book, it works, and its awesome. But in movies they can come off as cheesy or jarring if you consider them as more than their source material (cheesy comic books), which in my opinion they aren’t. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
IF there was one thing I had to complain about, it would be that Cap’s dance with Agent Carter being the way they ended the film. It honestly just didn’t feel right to me, and I can admit that part of it is due to my bias against his character and for Tony’s character in the MCU. Something about the movie leaving the funeral to jump to a scene of Steve getting a happy ending in the end just doesn’t seem, proper. I’m not saying that Steve doesn’t deserve that happy ending, but setting his apart from all the other ones struck me as odd. If I were the screenwriter then I think I would have preferred the placing of those moments to go differently. Something along the lines of: Lake funeral for Tony, Pan across all the major characters at said funeral, Steve going back in time to place the stones back, Steve reappearing and passing on the torch, then all the shots of places in the MCU of people regrouping/being happy (Steve’s Dance)/re-embarking with Tony’s monologue about endings, back to hologram Tony with him saying “I love you 3000” to us/Megan at the end, roll credits. But that’s just something I feel would make more sense. Of course they probably would have had to cut the bit with Thor vs Star-Lord to get that right, but I’m okay with that since its not anything new.
Not being spoken about so,
I will bring it up, you are very lucky the timing of your comic got the Harem quantum entanglement minds from different points in time important plot element out BEFORE this movie came out, or various annoying *hey did you?* types probably would have flooded your comment sections.
As for the movie its self, I liked it, used a descent version of time travel for a change rather than well…the ones they pointed out being logical messes. I am disappointed they resorted to time travel, I was so on board the soul stone theory (in comics it can trap people inside it…so I thought THAT happened),
Captain Marvel makes sense,
1: real world, actress has to have down time, her movie came out a month earlier for crying out loud, amazed she was even in the movie as much as she was *think Black Panther in Infinity War* for same situation.
2: The rest of the galaxy experienced the same thing.
A nitpick…sure is convienent…for a story telling perspective that apparently Peter Parker’s whole friend group got snapped. That said, husbands and wives sure, but also think of kids. For adults 5 years is bothersome but can be worked around, but for children, especially elementary and highschool, this means things like…you just came back and your friends who were 15 are now 20, those 10 year olds are now your classmates, its like being at a new school, siblings could now have five year differences, like your twin got snapped but you didn’t so they are still only 5 while you are 10. ect… also I am told “word of God” everyone was returned to a safe spot…as opposed to materializing in mid-air if they got snapped from an airplane…of course secondary deaths (plane crashes, car crashes, ect…still happened; so hello pilot materializing at home or the airport who vanished five years ago…guess what happened.
On the other side, I wander what Stark’s criteria was, I mean were there individuals in Thanos army serving only out of fear and not really loyal to him? Were they spared? Which on that note…someone was missing, “The other” that guy Ronan killed who was in Avengers? Yeah, going by the sequence of events and timeline, it was Thanos from the start of Guardians of the Galaxy who ended up in the “future” so technically that guy should have been pre-neck broke by Ronan, as that happens After Gamora is sent to Ronan and betrays them.
Endgame was filmed at the same time as Infinity War, so they didn’t know what Carol would end up being like in Captain Marvel yet at the time they were setting up her role in Endgame. So they kept her out of the way as much as possible rather than trying to give her a significant interaction with history.
Black Panther in Infinity War was a different situation – they knew what his movie was doing, but didn’t know how well it would perform, so they hedged their bets a little.
I’m coming to this a little late in the game, but just thought I’d comment on the fun possibilities Endgame opened up.
The fun and games comes from the MCU concept of time travel. They weren’t all that great at the explanation in the movie, but it works like this.
1.) When you travel back in time, you aren’t stepping into your own timeline at a point in the past; you’re visiting an alternate reality with a history identical to your own up to your moment of arrival. Either that or you’re splitting your own timeline at your moment of arrival, instantly creating a 1.1 iteration of your own 1.0 reality. There’s no way to know which of these is the case, since the observed result is the same: two now-diverging timelines.
2.) There’s no such thing as destiny. When the Ancient One talks about minimal disturbances to the timeline that iron out without changing the direction of the timeline, she’s talking about a hope, not a law of temporal physics. Obviously the goal is to not change things more than you have to, since you have no idea whether the new future created by your actions will be better or worse. Call it a cautionary principle.
So with this model of time travel in mind, what did Endgame do? It didn’t change the past of our MCU character’s original timeline (call it MCU Prime), but it did create 5 alternate timelines. Call them Alternate NYC (from the New York visit), Alternate Asgard, Alternate Guardians, Alternate SHIELD, and Alternate Cap. There are tons of fun to be had here.
Alternate NYC: where Loki escaped, Cap “outed” his knowledge of Hydra, and Cap fought himself and let his past-self know about Bucky. This alternate’s future-history is totally fractured. I expect to see LOTS of fanfics about this one, probably launching from a preemptive strike by Hydra. Also, Loki’s escape means he likely wasn’t in a cell in Asgard at the beginning of the events of Thor 2. Speaking of Asgard. . .
Alternate Asgard: Rocket extracted the Aether/Reality Stone from Dr. Foster, Thor pretty much told Freya she was going to die very soon, and Thor borrowed his hammer. There’s no way Cap would re-inject the stone back into Jane (assuming they could even return it to it’s Aether-form). This means a different outcome to the Dark Elves’ attack on Asgard, no desperate gambit to save Jane, etc. And this is assuming that Cap doesn’t just hang around a bit to help out there (and tell Odin and Thor what’s coming with Ragnarok, since this seems to be a future fairly easily rewritten for the better).
Alternate SHIELD: Cap is returning the Space Stone in its “pure form” instead of in the tesseract cube. Not sure how that in itself might change things, but at the least Cap is going to let this 1970s SHIELD know about it’s Hydra-infiltration problem. He might also have a talk with Howard.
Alternate Space: This timeline now lacks its Thanos and Gamorah! Probably no changes at all on Earth, but enormous changes right from the beginning of Guardians 1.
Alternate Cap: In this timeline Cap goes back to 1945 to appear after his younger self went into the ice. He takes his younger self’s place in the timeline. Cap, THE ultimate Good Guy, isn’t just going to leave his younger self in the ice to awaken decades later, and anyone writing a fanfic about the AC reality has to take that into account. One option is that the tech needed to successfully revive Young Cap, even with the supersoldier serum in his blood helping out, is decades in the future as well so Young Cap can’t be woken right away even if he’s found. Another option is that Cap found an alternate timeline where his younger self didn’t fly the Red Skull’s jet into the ice–he destroyed the jet in flight, finished the fight sooner and flew it into the sea (drowning instead of freezing), or otherwise won but died doing it.
Whatever happened, I see Cap as hugely changing the history of this timeline; there’s no way he’s going to just lie low and let history unfold. Fanfic writers with an interest in political history can have a field day here; at the very least I imagine several post-WWII events, like the Korean and Vietnam wars, happening very differently or not at all.
So there we go! Fun times ahead for anyone who wants to play in the MCU’s now hugely expanded sandbox. Let the good times roll.
Addendum on Alternate NYC: since Cap obviously didn’t hand the Mind Stone back to Hydra, Avengers 2: Age of Ultron plays out very differently if it happens at all (no Scarlet Witch, no paranoid vision that triggered Tony’s creation of Ultron even if he got his hands on the Mind Stone some other way). Really, Alternate NYC changes/erases all of the major plot lines following the Chittari Invasion with the possible exception of Iron Man 3.
Jeez folks… it’s a friggin’ movie. They make crap up and tell a fictional story. Who gives a frack if it doesn’t make perfect sense? Quit overthinking it and just enjoy the ride.
Sure and once the ‘ride’ is over the next part of the enjoyment is the over-thinking it part.
I am just really glad that they didn’t go the lazy comic route of “And then Thanos got INCREDIBLY stupid and we beat him and took the glove back and fixed everything, the end.” Thanks MCU!
I liked the movie. It was solid, and well crafted. Unfortunately that just made some of the scenes I really didn’t like stand out as way worse in my mind than what they probably were.
The absurdely contrived and pointless girl-power lineup in the middle of the movie. Those female heroes deserved better. That was just eugh.
The absurdly lousy state of the world five years after the incident. Truth is, probably not much would’ve changed that much. Lots of new babies and a booming economy if the last world wars have taught us anything.
The iron man ending. His sacrifice is pretty much rendered moot by the presence of Captain Marvel. Also, didn’t Thanos need to go through ridiculous hoops to create that gauntlet?
The Captain America ending. I felt belittled, and also it made no sense. Shouldn’t he be in some alternate divirgent timeline and not be able to talk to them at all? All they had to do was show him give his shield to The Falcon before he leaves, hug Bucky and have his last words be “Good bye.” Then he doesn’t show up at the correct second, they have the same conversation that they did in the movie. The Falcon looks at the shield and Bucky looks at the sky with a smile. Fade to black.
While I enjoyed the movie, some things broke the immersion. My biggest problem with the movie is one that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere here. Maybe someone has an explanation for it:
Thanos and his whole army travelling to the future/and to an alternate reality I guess. How did they do it? They didn’t use the same method as The Avengers did. They didn’t have the Pym particles for that kind of travel. Alternate younger Nebula used the last particle to “travel back”, and somehow helped Thanos and the rest of his crew follow her.
I assume that the method of travel was unknown to older Nebula. She didn’t mention anything about knowing similar methods, before their whole endeavor began.
I forget, did Thanos have even one Infinity Stone at that point? If he did, then he can do pretty much anything simply by framing the question in terms of that stone’s ability. There’s really no need to have more than one Stone on hand unless he wants to affect an area larger than a solar system, and his flagship with all his endless troops is definitely small enough to fit through a portal created by the Space Stone.
If not, then we can assume he happened to have some BS alien magitech designed for exactly this purpose in his back pocket. This happens a lot in the MCU.
Sorry for the late reply: I don’t believe he had any stones at the time. I may remember it incorrectly though.
I feel like Nebula should’ve known about it and maybe even had access to it, if it had just been some “BS alien magitech”.
I’m sure everyone noticed, but I will make the obvious observation. I especially enjoyed that almost all the main characters turned their archetypes on their heads. Mr. Rage became Mr. Mellow. The playboy technologist became a family man, leading the simple life. The family man becomes a Punisher-style vigilante. The god of heroes becomes a slob. The Russian spy, an American super patriot. And finally, the eternally-young Captain America becomes an old man.
My big gripe on time travel: they established that what they did in the past would not affect their own present. So, I cannot see Thor cutting out when he knows that timeline’s Freja is about to be killed. Stick around a few minutes, clean some dark-elven clocks, then come home. Don’t just abandon the nice lady who’s been like a mother to you (even if technically only for the past few minutes.)
Well, not that it wouldn’t affect their own present. They were told not to disrupt the timeline too much or their current present (which Tony was so trying oh-so-hard to preserve) would fracture and they may not be able to return to it. As Tony says, “It’s all theory.” No one knows what might happen. The only time they realize it doesn’t make a difference is after past Thanos jumps into the present timeline. The only reason they have to return any of the stones to the time they were “stolen” is because – as the Ancient One tells Bruce – removing the Infinity Stones from the timeline causes bad things to happen. Captain takes them all back to their proper timelines to make sure that doesn’t happen. Even if the timeline is now changed due to the death of past Thanos and Nebula, and past Gamora now running around Soul Stone free in the present day.
As for Thor … if I remember correctly, Freya told him to go, and not worry about her. He realized she already knew her own fate, and then she told him (to his delight) that she may have set up a surprise for him in the future (she is a great sorceress, as she tells him and he admits that’s true). When he calls Mjolnir and it arrives – which reinforces what she said about being worthy – he is even more emboldened to listen to his mother.
Gamorra was not really ‘fridged’. Her life was not treated by the writers as disposable in an otherwise male centric story and arc.
It was on the other hand problematic because it was essentially a ‘kick the dog’ moment. The writers created the whole ‘a soul for a soul stone’ requirement not because it was necessary but because they wanted to show that Thanos was willing to sacrifice anything for his chance to wipe out half of all life in the universe. In doing so they established that Thanos actually cared for his daughters, despite his twisted way of treating them, and the scene was intended to also show him as truly evil (not in the stereotypical cackling madmen style that so many scripts resort to, but in showing him having no limits in what he will do to achieve his goal). Given the vast disparity in power between them she was little more than a puppy he kicked off the mountain.
Natasha’s (self) sacrifice is problematic for a different reason. Having established in Infinity War that a life had to be sacrificed for the soul stone the writers were stuck with it in Endgame. The reasons Natasha and Clint gave for them being the logical reason to sacrifice themselves were: Clint has a family that might return if they are successfull. And Clint believing he has done too much evil as Ronin to be redeemed.
The problematic part is in the assumptions underlying the first argument, and it is problematic indirectly because of a scene from Age of Ultron where Natasha tries to shock Banner out of his ‘I am a monster’ self pity by stating that she is a greater monster than he is because she was raised to be an assassin who would kill without thought or possibility of remorse. To that end the organisation that trained her also sterilised her and the implicit message from that statement, regardless of if the authors of that script intended it or not, is that being unable to have children made Natasha a remorseless killer. (The argument that it is Natasha herself who believes this is a Thermian argument. One where an out of fiction decision to structure a plot or element of that work of fiction, is attempted to be justified with ‘in fiction’ reasoning. Natasha Romanov does not believe anything because she is a fictional character who is incapable of believing or even thinking anything. It is the writers who make all the decisions)
This undertone of ‘I can not be a mother so my life is worthless’ is carried over into the reasoning given for Natasha to sacrifice herself. And this makes her self sacrifice problematic. Clint’s sacrifice would have been paid by his family who on their return would have learned he died. Natasha’s sacrifice on the other hand was portrayed as being born out of lacking something. Not something valuable that she would give up. Instead her existence was portrayed as less valuable than Clint’s because she could never have a family.
I have to disagree with your reading of what went down in the Quest for The Soulstone.
First, in Age of Ultron I didn’t see Natasha as believing that the Red Room’s procedure of sterilizing its trainees/victims was intended to make Natasha a remorseless killer.” I thought her flashback was simply an expression of regret over something she couldn’t have, a choice taken from her; a regret shared by millions of adults who find they can’t have children for whatever reason. You can argue that that was the wrong regret to highlight for Natasha, and I’d agree; after all she’d previously expressed regret over the “red in her ledger.” Maybe the writers were trying to add some nuance and add another level of regret as a mirror of Cap’s regret (which can be viewed as another loss-of-family possibility). Just guessing, but I’d assume this was a regret she might develop as she got to know Clint and his family, to whom she became Aunt Natasha. If that’s the case it wasn’t spelled out in the movie. So, bad choice but hardly problematic.
Regarding your second observation: “her existence was portrayed as less valuable than Clint’s because she could never have a family.” Natasha and Clint don’t sit down on the cliff’s edge and discuss their motivations logically. Instead, both engage in what is known as motivated reasoning. What really goes down is both Natasha and Clint would die for each other, without a thought. Both take one shot at trying to convince the other of why they themselves should do it, but neither buys the other’s argument for a second. More, both of them know that the other won’t buy it, which is why their fight starts with a funny little sure-go-ahead feint to catch the other off balance so they can do it themselves.
Your Mileage May Vary, of course, but that seemed utterly clear to me; two friends who will follow each other to the end and then lay down their lives to make sure the other one survives it. Each considers the other’s life more valuable than their own and worth the final sacrifice, the audience feels the same.
Final note: we know there’s a Black Widow movie in the works, and I don’t think it’s going to be a prequel. Just a guess, but the whole “a soul for a soul stone” thing will turn out to mean that when Cap returns the Soulstone then Natasha comes back. Of course she’s not going to come back the easy way, there’s no drama in that. It’ll be interesting to see how Marvel works it out.
Hold up –
Remember what Natasha told Steve. The Avengers were her family. She sacrificed herself for the possibility to not only save Clint, but to save her entire Avenger family from Thanos’ actions. They were either decimated physically and mentally from the Snap. She wanted to save them all, including Clint – her best bud. It really didn’t have anything to do with her ability to have children – it had everything to do with the Avengers.
EmCeeKhan wrote:
Remember what Natasha told Steve. The Avengers were her family. She sacrificed herself for the possibility to not only save Clint, but to save her entire Avenger family from Thanos’ actions.
—
Note that, being a fictional character, Natasha didn’t have any opinion to voice nor intent to act. The writers created both and ms Johanson acted out those words and brought them to life for us.
I called the wrting from Endgame /problematic/ not sexist for a reason. The writers chose to juxtapose the specific reasons they are giving the viewers why Natasha and Clint believe they are the one who should sacrifice her- or himself. They gave Natasha the argument that Clint had a family to return to, and by that contrasted it with her lack of a family. (Same as they gave Clint the argument that he had become amoral and contrasted that to Natasha’s continueing morality and heroism).
If the writers, at that point, remembered the earlier ‘the avengers are my family’ they ignored it. Had to because acknowledging it would have made the ‘you have a family’ argument fall flat on its face and robbed the scene from its emotional impact.
(also, the writers had set up the scene so that they had to pick one argument over another (again, not the characters made this choice, the writers did). They went with the ‘family matters most’ choice over ‘I have done things that I can not atone for’ (note that the other Avengers did not want to have to deal with Ciint as Ronin anymore so he must have been pretty inhumanely brutal). They portrayed Natasha as making a noble sacrifice and for the scene, and most of the movie, that was the only thing that could work. Even if it worked against the them portrayed by the other noble sacrifice in the movie. Tony sacrificing himself to end Thanos when he too had a family to return to. In his case somehow the sacrifice was necessary but in the case of Clint it was shown, by the writers, as a bad thing to make such a sacrifice.
The scene from Age of Ultron is only tangentially related and comes from a different writing team so it is not entirely fair to tar the writers of Endgame with that, but there the implications are pretty clear. Banner rebuts an approach by Natasha with a ‘I am a monster’ outburst, to which she replies she is a monster too, a greater one even. From there the writers jump straight into that flashback and specifically bring up the sterilisation as the argument underpinning her exclamation. Why did they bring up that particular aspect of a brutal training regime and a consciousless murderous career after that? They could have made her remind Banner that she had firebombed an entire hospital to get at her target or made up any other atrocity she had committed during her years as an assassion. Instead they focussed on the sterilisation and through that left the distinct impression that being unable to mother children is what made Natasha a monster on par with one that ‘broke New York’.
This same assumption of motherhood swirls around the sacrifice scene of Natasha, and that is what in my opinion makes that particular scene problematic.
And no, I do not think that the writers /meant/ to say this, but it is still an easy conclusion to draw from what they did write. It also is a fairly common opinion that people rarely think about nor question, that women who can not or will not have children are lesser and somehow broken. Women and having children go together so implicity in all of humanity’s cultures that there is not real thought applied to it and it will crop up in writing without conscious thought or condemnation.
The real problem lies with the previous movie where the writers chose to literally sacrifice Gamorra to give Thanos his ‘kick the puppy’ moment. This one scene out of an entire fantastic story that can be interpreted as problematic came from that dramatic choice.
“…the writers had set up the scene so that they had to pick one argument over another (again, not the characters made this choice, the writers did). They went with the ‘family matters most’ choice over ‘I have done things that I can not atone for.’”
And right here is, in my opinion, where you get it wrong. The writers didn’t pick one argument over the other. Both Natasha and Clint made their own arguments knowing damn well the other wouldn’t accept it. Both arguments were immediately discarded in favor of fighting it out and so “family matters most,” didn’t win except in the most general sense that the Avenger who made the argument achieved her goal. The “winner” didn’t win the argument in either a meta or textual sense.
More, as you yourself have said, that very ‘family matters most’ argument, if continued at all, was subverted in the end by Tony’s sacrifice. I’d go further and argue that there was no subversion at all. Regarding Tony’s sacrifice, Natasha’s sacrifice, and Clint’s attempted sacrifice, all three of them sacrificed FOR FAMILY. Clint for his family, Natasha for her family, which included Clint and his family, Tony for his family, which included “the kid,” and everyone else for each other and half the human race. If anything, the message here is that family is far more than biological. Family is relationships of obligation, belonging, and even sacrificial love that go far beyond that.
Movies tent to end in grand, epic battles. It has lost it’s punch, I have become jaded. Endgame managed to bring back epic and actually feel epic. I tip my hat to that. However, if you look at the rest of the movie and strip away the special effects it is bluntly, poorly written. Conversation is stilted and there are giant plot holes through out. Thanos the mad Titan with the idiotic plan (kill half the universe and population growth will replace them in two or three generations) got even madder and shallower. I am surprised he didn’t have an evil laugh at one point. Still, that final battle was awesome.
I dont like the assumption that Steve can keep his hands to himself, this is a guy who went to war with his own government on principle. you think for even a second that he is gonna let Hydra infiltrate SHEILD knowing what he knows? nah, this basically makes all the movies and the tv shows a “dream episode” and a total waste of my time.
Two questions:
A) Do you think Steve Rogers would be able to stop the US government from recruiting Dr Zola under Operation Paperclip?
B) Do you think HYDRA really would have taken more than 60 years to still not yet be in a position to control SHIELD (though they were pretty close) if no-one was working to counter their infiltration?
My version of the theory is that Steve did try to keep HYDRA from infiltrating, and, while he didn’t completely succeed, he delayed the infiltration and made it less effective. Basically, it’s not that his actions didn’t affect history; it’s that they effected history – his attempts to change the past are part of what created the past he knew.
You’ve both forgetting something. It’s official that travel to the past automatically creates a new reality/timeline; it’s impossible to go back to and change your own history in any way ala Terminator or Back to The Future. I’m sure the timeline that Cap “retired” to when he went back to 1945 to be with Agent Carter is now hugely different. Not just no Hydra infiltration of SHIELD, but tremendous divergence of US history since Cap knew pretty much every political mistep America had made from 1946 to present.
And none of those changes affect the Main Marvel Timeline of the movies in the slightest.
The problem with any time travel creating a new timeline is what happens when Cap goes to take the Stones back – rather than fixing the doomed timelines, like Bruce and the Ancient One said, he’ll create yet another set of timelines where the Stones were returned.
What was said wasn’t that any time travel creates a new timeline, but that changes to the timeline create a new timeline instead – that you can’t change your personal past. But that doesn’t stop you from going back to the past and helping to create your former present – good old Novikov self-consistency (aka predestination paradox).
“The problem with any time travel creating a new timeline…” But it’s not the travel that creates a new timeline, it’s the ADDITION OF AN EVENT. What does that even mean?
Well, let’s call an original, unaltered timeline TX, where X equals all events in that timeline. A timeline branching off of TX would be TX+A, where A stands for whatever new element got introduced to the timeline. But ANY new element is an A, however small. For example, when the Avengers went back to the Battle of New York, Hulk pushed a wrecked car. That changed the physical position of the car. That’s a change in the timeline. Going even smaller, even if the three of them had stayed for only a moment, then returned to the present, they would have created a TX+A where the A was their physical presence in New York for that moment. That’s a change in the timeline, and it’s been established that a change in the timeline, no matter how small, creates a new timeline. Of course if they’d stayed in that timeline for just one moment, then the NEW timeline would be virtually identical and the new timeline’s history would probably play out the same in the sort term. In the long term, their brief presence might have created a butterfly effect.
To reiterate, simple arrival in the past is an event which creates a new timeline (TX+A). So how was Cap able to revisit those newly created timelines without simply creating more? Easy. You only create a new timeline by stepping back into the past of YOUR OWN timeline. It’s a result of the Observer Effect, and it’s the only way models of time travel allowing the creation of new timelines can work at all.
As a result of this, if we decide that seeing Old Cap on the park bench at the end means he went back to his own TX past one last time and “retired” there, carefully not doing anything that would alter history in big ways so the big events happened as they originally did, then he still created a TX+A: just one where the new timeline had the addition of him living in the background without doing anything to change the history we’ve seen.
Which means that, from the moment Cap goes back to return the stones, the rest of the movie unfolds in TX+A, not TX. In the original TX timeline Cap never showed up on the park bench to pass on the shield.
Yeah, I know. Confusing as hell.
But what is the unaltered timeline?
Is there any reason why the original timeline couldn’t have always had a Steve Rogers appear out of nowhere in ~1950 and live the next 75 years without appearing in headlines, but, by his efforts behind the scenes, causing key events to play out the way they did?
The whole point of the “predestination paradox” is that you’re not adding anything to the timeline – rather you’re filling in gaps in your knowledge of the timeline – or creating parts of the timeline that you hadn’t previously observed, in a similar way that you can revisit a new timeline and make further changes to it without spawning a third timeline because you haven’t observed that timeline’s future.
You can get a consistent model of time travel out of assuming that a) so long as nothing contradicts what the time traveler previously experienced, the loop closes and you stay in the original universe; b) if something does create what would be a paradox, then the traveler was in a new universe all along; c) until an observation is made that resolves the uncertainty, you could be in either case.
Mia Culpa. Sometimes I take these things too seriously. Mostly this is because, as a writer, I have to wrestle whatever timie-wimie logic of time and time-travel I work with into a consistent framework. Marvel really did a crappy job of explaining it “in cannon” in the movie, leaving room for interpretation and disagreement. Which leads to two observations:
1) We’re taking this much too seriously. After all, since we’re talking about interpretations and there is no official and consistent Word of God statement about what happened, we can live with whatever we want in our own head-cannon.
2) We’re probably never going to get an official Word of God ruling on what happened anyway. To quote one news article: “The Russos (Endgame’s directors) explained Steve’s choice lead to a branched reality, separate from the main MCU timeline and that Steve only jumped back into the main timeline at the very end as an old man.” BUT “Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely declared they did not think STeve had created a new timeline at all.”
A movie is always a collaboration between writers and directors, but here, ironically enough, we have ALTERNATE REALITIES expressed by alternate sources “explaining” what we saw on screen. Soooo…
See Observation #1: in a weird meta quantum-superposition thingie, we’re both right. Steve Rogers did/did not live out his life in his own past timeline. Tadaaa!
I love how Iron Man’s last words were basically a dad joke. ‘Cuz he’s a dad at that point.
“I am…inevitable.”
“Hi, inevitable, I’m Iron Man.”