Avengers : Endgame
It’s been just over a decade since Marvel Studios launched its flagship franchise of interconnected comics-inspired movies with 2008’s Iron Man, and even now it’s difficult to begin to evaluate how much that franchise has changed the face of filmmaking. After 10 years, 21 films, nearly a dozen television shows, countless tie-in comics and games and merchandising options and viral videos, and billions upon billions of dollars in earnings, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the Holy Grail that every major studio is questing after, usually with little success.
But nothing so far has broken the Marvel formula quite like Avengers: Endgame, which follows Infinity War by diving deep into the previous film’s feeling of emotional loss and helplessness, exploring it at length, and then expanding into something that isn’t so much a Marvel story as a series of calculated payoffs for a decade of Marvel stories.
Directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely make it clear that they’re all thinking about individual people who died in Infinity War, and how to navigate a future without them.
All of which leaves Endgame feeling like an odd mess of a movie. If a film with this exact structure and pacing (and 181-minute run time) was made with original characters, critics would eviscerate it as self-indulgent, sloppy, and incoherent.
But when endlessly striving Captain America (Chris Evans) or smart-mouthing Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) or swaggering god of thunder Thor (Chris Hemsworth) are reduced to that state, it feels like the world really has shifted in a meaningful way.And Endgame’s filmmakers pack their story with payoffs for the longest-term fans, reminding them how well they know these characters’ existing emotional arcs and deep-seated insecurities, and drawing those ideas out at length. Tony Stark’s constant war between arrogance and his heavy sense of responsibility, Thor’s buried insecurities, Steve Rogers’ deep-down ache for everything he lost when he was jolted out of his own time — they all get some screen time, ramped up to new heights by the latest crisis.
Endgame was never designed to stand on its own as a single well-crafted movie, and it was never designed to follow the MCU formula. It was designed to cap a decade of buildup around a single gigantic story.
