Avengers End Game **SPOILERS DISCUSSION** - The Bear and Badger

Matt_82

Figured I'd make a new thread to avoid filling the movie one with a million spoiler tags.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW. YE HAVE BEEN WARNED***

I thought it was great. I haven't been a huge fan of Marvel movies for a while as they're becoming very alike but I really loved this. Funny, sad and a great send off for Captain America and Iron Man.

I got a bit worried when the CGI armies showed up as that's usually when things go a bit awry and become a mess but it was pretty brief. Some characters were pretty pointless (Dr Strange for example) but they focused on the characters that they needed to so that kept things together.

ShabbyMcCrabby

Yeah by the end of it I really did love it. It's a movie that's stretched to the absolute limits in terms of pulling off what they were trying to do and it certainly didn't land in all areas and I think it lost me a smidge in the middle just before the timey wimey stuff kicked off but dang if they didn't hit the heights with the fan moments.

Almost a little too much fan service but I think ultimately quite well balanced and a very good end point for Cap and Iron Man with their stories being satisfactorily told. I'm sure there'll be a lot of fan fic written about that Cap Cap fight. Revisiting the old films was fun too, some really nice moments in there.

The thing I liked about it (and is generally why Marvel wins over DC at the moment) is because the movies feel like real movies a lot of the time. There's breathing space, there's character moments that aren't for anything but just to fill everything out just a little bit more. I can't believe it managed to not feel rushed or cut together too much at any point. They could have easily cut out 10/15 minutes or so of the downtime but they chose not to.

I think the start feels a little vignette-y (Thanos garden party being the main one) but once the story moved on it had a pretty good flow. I can't imagine how much work must have gone into the edit of this thing.

I'm also very thankful they cut out what I imagine would have been a "comedy" moment with Ken Jeong and Ant-Man. I'm sorry Ken but I don't like your shtick and it wouldn't have worked in this film.

The main negatives for me were....... dabbing.......... and....... fortnite.......... UGH!!!
It's supposed to have been 5 years! Kids will not still be doing either in 5 years. There was a chance to come up with something new and funny. Both jokes would have worked with anything else, even a fake new "kid thing".

But anyway. I think it has to be the only time a whole cinema has cheered when all the characters came back. That whole fight sequence at the end was fantastic really. Almost entirely character focussed (another Marvel over DC thing) and just had some amazing beats. Cap with the hammer, Spidey and Tony, etc etc. Really well done. The female heroes bit was maybe a smidge heavy handed but it was still cool.

And now. Where do we go from here......

Black Cap standalone movies? Thor in Guardians 3?

I also want to know the full story behind Sony not letting Marvel hold back the trailer for Spiderman Homecoming until after the release for this. Can't help but feel Sony were the douchebags in this scenario.

ShabbyMcCrabby

I've been doing some thinking and the only thing i cant really wrap my head around is Cap's journey at the end. It was what I was thinking was going to happen before the movie came out but I'm not sure I follow how it worked.

They say you can't alter the current timeline but he didn't warp back so are they suggesting there has been an old Cap hanging about all this time? But then it kinda fucks up Winter Soldier and the stuff with Carter's family and life after Cap. Or did he just go and live in an alternate timeline until he was old and then travel back and we just didn't see it?

Brainy hurty.

Was a nice end point though.

monkey

Falcons beard is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

monkey

I very much enjoyed that despite the travesty of that facial adornment. If they do make a new Cap movie that simply has to change. It's like a thong made of hair.

Broadly the film worked. I feel it's probably the ROTJ to the Infinity War's ESB, emotionally satisfying but a bit less of a good movie in its own right. A lot of the jokes didn't land for me. The time stuff I don't think is going to stand up to the close scrutiny that the internet will put on it, but it held together well enough for the three hours. All the stuff they interfered with now branch into new timelines(maybe?). Wouldn't they be better served not putting the bloody stones back there so they can now get fucked by Thanos? Not sure if Tilda Swinton's explanation made sense or was just a giant plot device. Who knows?

The way they resolved the snap was pretty good I think. Stopping it from ever happening might have felt cheap. So leaving the time gap at least left some of the consequences. But that's going to create some weird stuff - all Spider-man's friends are the same age, so all got dusted then brought back. Are they going to reference that half the world vanished then came back in future stuff or try and ignore it? Because New York looked pretty fucked up. I can't help but think that they made the time gap so long just to make Iron Man's kid old enough to have some touching scenes with Downey Jr. Anyway it ended up matching my daughters current age and, ridiculously, I cried when he said "I love you three thousand" at the end so job done you fucks.

monkey

Captain Marvel was awful here. If their get out for not having an omnipotent being around is always "She's busy doing other stuff" that's going to be a bit weak. Cap turning up on Vormir to return the soul stone to the Red Skull was the end credits scene that should have been. Nebula was great. Professor Hulk was mostly weird. Cap and Iron Man both also great and both stories ended well. Fat Thor wasn't as funny as they wanted it to be considering how much they tried to wring out of it. All the women lining up to protect Captain Marvel who could presumably just barrel through all the baddies anyway was cringe. It takes a lot of films and groundwork to have Spider-man holding a magic glove getting a ride on a winged horse over an alien invasion army not be a shark jump. Falcon beard a catastrophe.

Matt_82

I agree with the points there. 'Dabbing' will really age the film. I'm out of the loop with Fortnight so I didn't recognise it but that seems like a silly choice for the same reasons. The 'women scene' felt a bit out of place in that it was a bit too deliberate but didn't last long enough to distract too much.

They tried to redefine time travel but I couldn't really follow the explanation but presumably he just sacked off the return journey to marry Peggy and then just showed up on the day he was meant to come back to pass on the shield. I have no idea how that fits with the explanation that Hulk was giving. Prob best to just accept and move on haha!

And Falcon's beard was weird as fuck. It's on his cheeks but not his jawline. Maybe it became a fashion after 5 years of devastation.

monkey

I don’t understand how time travel is supposed to work in this. You can’t alter your own timeline but you seem to be able to create new ones all over the place. The Cap stuff makes that confusing because he seems to have grown into an old man in the main timeline. But if he’d lived in the past, as implied, that’s millions of new timelines he’s created. It’s intentionally left vague, I think, just so dweebs like me can’t go on places like this and start overthinking it and poking holes in it. He got his send off anyway. He was excellent in this and the Cap Thanos fight was probably the standout bit for me. I loved that Thor’s decapitation of Thanos was done in the first 10 minutes.

There seemed to be an introductory scene with Captain Marvel missing in this. She turns up on Earth to respond to the distress thing and they say “Hello lets all introduce ourselves. By the way can you go find our mate, last seen on Titan.”

Alright I’m hot taked out.

stellavista

I’ve not seen it but isn’t the time travel thing basically not time travel but actually parallel universes, and the old man Cap thing is basically Cap living in one universe for a lifetime with Peggy and then jumping back at the end of his life to the original universe to close the loop?

EvilRedEye

There's no indication that he jumped back, the fact he just appears on a bench at the end kinda implies he's been living in the past of the real MCU. Could definitely be the explaination but it's not made explicit in the film.

tin_robot

Just back from this. I thought it was an enjoyable bit of fan service, and a hell of an achievement in terms of providing a finale to the 53 hours of moves that preceded it. I feel incredibly sorry for anyone dragged along to see it who hasn’t already seen the previous movies though, and there was a whole heap of stuff that I felt didn’t really work.

Fat Thor was an amusing joke, but it’s a single laugh at the expense of undermining him for the rest of the movie. Similarly, making the Hulk into a perfect fusion of his two halves kind of misses the point of the character entirely, and makes him just another super strong genius - something the MCU is hardly short of.

For all the stabs at tear jerking in the finale, it was really only the opening few minutes with Hawkeye that got to me at all. I had sort of feared that poor Tony was going to find himself forced to erase his daughter from existence which would have been a truly tragic ending, and so simply dying knowing he’d done what he came to do elicited little more than a shrug. (It doesn’t help that I’m not a massive fan of Stark anyway.)

Cap’s ending ought to have been a beautiful thing - but it doesn’t really work with respect to everything they’ve said previously about time travel. In fact the time travel in the film doesn’t work at all, mainly because time travel in movies never works. I thought they’d cunningly got out of the usual time-travel confusion by seemingly stating that they’d just fix it with the glove afterwards, which works and kind of made sense, but they didn’t actually do that at all. Even ignoring all that though, the only way for Steve to go back and have a relationship with Peggy, without buggering up the timeline, is for them to be having a secret affair the whole damn time. Which I guess works, but doesn’t seem very much like Steve (or Peggy) given that it’s previously established that she got married. (My daughter was a big fan of the Agent Carter TV show and spent the walk home complaining at length about this development...)

Despite all my moaning above, I certainly enjoyed it, and like I say, I’m impressed with the sheer skill involved in making such a behemoth. Oh, and when Cap started wielding Mjolnir, the guy sat in front of me went absolutely insane with happiness - I have never seen anyone so utterly filled with joy in my whole life, so who cares what I think?

The Daddy

Just back too. Was good fun. My thoughts pretty much echo the posts above. Don't think I'll be watching it again in a hurry, at least not in one sitting. Disappointed the kiwi rock guy from Ragnarok didn't get a bigger part.

ShabbyMcCrabby

I have a feeling there's a lot of longer versions of most scenes.

I think the time travel works apart from Cap's ending and also trying to think about how he was going to return the stones because I imagine it would have had to be him returning them just after they were taken as ultimately it's meant to be one main timeline of events and not returning the stones would result in split timelines.

Buuuuuuuut past Thanos coming to the future to get killed would mean the original story thread of Infinity War wouldn't happen right?

Uh oh. I've melted my brain. Again.
The fact that it kinda works in some ways is good enough for me.

I do agree that a lot of the comedy didn't work though. Some real clunkers of one liners. Which is a shame because it's generally been a strong suit. They also delved into the black hole of "improv comedy" style with the Ant Man photo bit. It was Ghostbusters 2016 all over again.

Fat Thor worked for me though. It seemed a natural progression for his character after his failure to save everyone at the end of IW. Was a nice moment with his mum too.

ChopperByrne

Just back.

Cap had already told Bucky what he was going to do, which is why Bucky said he'd miss him, and then started looking for him, and sent Falcon over, as that was their plan all along.

Loved Robert Thoratheon.

For about twenty seconds all I had going through my head was "He's going to lift Mjolnir, he's going to lift Mjolnir, he's going to lift Mjolnir, YESSSSS HE LIFTED MJOLNIR!!!!!!"

Thanos is still the best villain, and they've now left it open for Loki to return.

poprock

Was there anything post-credits? I didn’t stick around to find out.

EvilRedEye

poprock wrote:

Was there anything post-credits? I didn’t stick around to find out.

Nope!

poprock

Phew.

Armitage_Shankburn

I won't go to these movies. They need subtitles

poprock

I think they found a really smart way of doing the fan service/nostalgia stuff. If you’re going to take they ‘hey, remember this thing?’ route, then it’s fucking smart to do it with a time-travel story that lets you actually revisit scenes from past movies and replay them from a new angle. Really beautiful move from Marvel there.

ShabbyMcCrabby

With some really fun and clever ideas of what was happening in the background or just after the events in the other movies

poprock

“I think it’s gratuitous, but okay.”

pantyfire

The thing for me was, after the snap half of all life on earth has disappeared.
That leaves about 3-4 billion people left.
That's roughly the same amount of people who existed on earth when was I born.
New York looked quite desolate 5 years from the snap, it shouldn't be, I'm sure it was still a very busy place in the mid 1970s when there was also half the amount of people alive as there is post snap.

The people left would still be drawn towards the infrastructure of big cities etc...

And after the first movie and Thanos' drastic eco terrorism solution I had some sympathy for his cause.
His start again, totally 'new' universe sounded an alright place actually.
I'd give it 4 stars on TripAdvisor.

Maybe the Avengers are the actual bad guys.

mistercrayon

Why did I click this

pantyfire

Self harm?

monkey

Unless you're limiting people's ability to reproduce you'll get the same problem over and over again. He should have just done that with the first snap. All birth rates should be set and float continually to keep populations within a notional equilibrium point. So they'd fall at first then even out to keep the population static. If he'd done that, the Avengers wouldn't have lost anyone so probably wouldn't go through all the bother of reversing the process. It would have taken a few decades to get to where Thanos wanted the population to be, but it would have lasted forever. Could have been done in one movie. A real oversight if you ask me. I think we've essentially been defrauded the ticket price of a second movie and I for one will be taking action.