Don't worry, this is a spoiler-free review. I'm only going to directly talk about things that have either been announced before the film's release or were seen in trailers. When I don't, it will be in vague terms, and I'll try to not even allude to anything spoiler-y. Due to the (blissful) vagueness of this film's marketing, it may be hard to write about, but I'll give it a go. Honestly, you still might be able to infer things from how I write about them, so maybe don't read it at all if you haven't seen it. Continue at your own risk. I'm undecided if I want to do a longer, spoiler-heavy breakdown in the style of my 'Road to Endgame' posts for this. There's certainly scenes I'd like to speak about in more depth, but I also don't want to risk spoiling this film for anybody that hasn't seen it and scrolls down my page. Maybe I'll do it after the Blu-Ray comes out, so that I can rewatch it and have access to high quality stills from the movie. Anyway, let's get on with the review.
In 1985, riding high off the critical and commercial success of Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the two men who conceived of that film, began work on a sequel. As Zemeckis (colloquially referred to as Bob Z to Gale's Bob G) was deep in the production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Gale was left to craft the screenplay. With a working title of Paradox, it was over two hundred pages long and therefore would have clocked in at over three hours. It told a sprawling story of Marty McFly and Doc Brown, one that transitioned from the present to the future, back again, to the Fifties, to the Wild West and then back to the present. Confronted with the commercial unreliability of a three hour movie, the Bobs cut the screenplay into two halves, to become Back to the Future Part II and Part III as we know them today.
In some ways, Avengers: Endgame feels like a rebirth of that original Paradox script. Three hours long, it is a sprawling epic. Making the film three hours long was perhaps the biggest risk that the Russo Brothers took in the creation of this final chapter in the Infinity Saga. Three hour movies are no more commercially viable than they were in the Eighties, especially for PG-13 blockbusters with a lot of families making up the audience. Even removing the commercial factor, Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are often paced at breakneck speeds, which might have been a bit exhausting over three hours. But you couldn't slow it down too much, or you'll risk alienating your casual audiences. Like Thanos, the screenplay had to strike a balance for it to be even close to good.
Something I really appreciated with this film was the first act. Marvel movies never slow down, but this one took its time at the start, dealing with the fallout of the ending of last year's Infinity War, packing in a lot of character stuff, rather than frontloading the film with action as most Marvel scripts would. There are only a couple of action scenes in the first hour or so, and they're all brief and brutal, packing much more of a punch than your usual bloated, CG-heavy action sequence. A chilling opening scene gives the film momentum, as does the character's desperation to reverse the ending of the previous film despite the odds being monumentally stacked against them. Rather than stopping and starting like a lot of the other movies in this series, Endgame chooses one slow (but escalating) pace for its first act, and it works really well.
The second act is where most of the plot happens, but it is also home to fan service. Lots of it. This bit is about 70% fan service. Nine films out of ten, that'd bother me. It certainly bothered me in movies like Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. But it doesn't here, because a) the plot takes turns that allow this sort of thing, and b) after eleven years and over twenty films, they've earned some self-indulgence. There were a couple of bits that felt a bit much, but overall it didn't distract from my viewing experience, though I imagine it would be confusing for someone who hasn't seen all the movies. I've seen all of them, most more than once, and have written thousands of words about the series for this blog, and I was struggling to keep up at times.
The third act is home to what is probably the most epic battle put to the silver screen in about fifteen years. The visual effects are pretty amazing and it's much easier to follow than the poorly edited, chaotic Battle of Wakanda from Infinity War. This final setpiece is undoubtedly the highlight of the film, and is a worthy marking for the end of this Saga. I wrote at length recently about how the best thing these movies ever did was replacing the realistic melee of the first few films with the over-the-top, comic book battles of Thor: Ragnarok, and the fruits of that transition are never more on show than here. I can't stress this enough: see this film on the biggest screen possible, just for this battle.
Thanks to having less characters to juggle, Endgame performs the balancing act much better than Infinity War, giving each one something to do. Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) probably gets the best deal as he gets to portray a much rawer, darker Hawkeye. His motivations are sound and the reinvention of his character makes him much more interesting than the Clint Barton of the previous films. Robert Downey Jr. is also a highlight, and Iron Man is very much the emotional crux of the movie. Captain America fans will not leave the cinema disappointed, as Chris Evans gets some of the most emotionally resonant scenes in the film.
If there's one character that does get the short end of the stick in this equation, its Chris Hemsworth's Thor. Without spoiling anything, his character has taken a dramatic turn off-screen. In theory, this is a great, realistic idea, but the film plays it as a comedic element, ruining a character that definitely should have been taken seriously in this film.
The other major problem with the film is that tonally it's a bit all over the place. The first act is very sombre, but the film suddenly takes a comedic turn that feels very jarring. It helps that, unlike Shazam!, the bits that are meant to be funny actually are, but the tonal whiplash still hampers the film, and it's an irritating imperfection in an otherwise fairly consistent film.
There's a lot of things that could be nitpicked with this movie, all of which are spoiler-heavy. Many scenes kick holes in the side of the plot, and a major worldbuilding element is explained in an overly convoluted way that honestly defies logic. I don't really like to nitpick comic book movies, because at their core, most of them don't make as much sense as you might remember, but there were a couple of things that felt like they were done without thinking. I could excuse some of this sort of stuff in Infinity War, because the two movies were shot back-to-back and they had less time to spend on the post-production of that film, but Endgame has been wrapped for about two years. Come on, Russos, you can do better than that. Also, the actors still can't decide on how to pronounce Thanos's name.
This was a hard spoiler-free review to write, because most of the stuff I liked are spoilers. I'm about to reveal my rating for the film, and you might think that it seems high compared to the review you just read, but that's because a lot of the stuff I legitimately loved about this movie I can't talk about here. All I can say is that Avengers: Endgame is a well-made and structured victory lap for Marvel Studios, with thrilling action setpieces and good character work. The movie falls down a bit in tone and the treatment of a major character, and you could nitpick the hell out of it's plot, but at the end of the day, from the final battle to the ending to the credits, this is the perfect note to end on the MCU as we know it.
Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2
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