Feature - Avengers: Endgame - Spoiler Talk

Five years ago we lost. All of us. We lost friends. We lost family. We lost a part of ourselves. Today we have a chance to take it all back.

A year has passed and the Thanos-dust has had time to settle. Avengers: Endgame concluded a super-drama that had been built brick by filmic brick over a decade and managed it with both fan-pleasing detail and a commendable degree of story-telling integrity. I gave it a belated anniversary rewatch on Blu-ray and am pleased to report that it really holds up. Granted the quantum plot-elements still have potential to knot my cerebrum should I give them enough space-time to do so, but I'm not going even going there. In terms of tying up the strands of this comic-book mega-tale, this production team has done a heroic job, one that's worth celebrating with some spoiler-heavy thoughts on their completed work.

Co-directing heroes Anthony and Joe Russo

Screenplay-penning heroes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

It's worth remembering the frame of mind in which most fans initially approached Endgame. One year on from Avengers: Infinity War that unapologetically downbeat ending (a counter-intuitive stroke of genius on the part of the writing-directing team) had sunk in to the bone. In the intervening months Ant-Man and the Wasp increased the situation's direness with its mid-credits shock and while Captain Marvel confirmed that while the impressive Ms Danvers had survived the snap, there was no indication that she could do much in the line of apocalyptic reversal. Even the Endgame marketing leaned into the bleakness of it all. These surviving supers - and the universe along with them - had been properly devastated. Whatever glint of hope the trailers provided, it seemed truly desperate in nature. And rightly so. No heroes should be able to shrug off that kind of defeat without the most demanding of efforts. Well in terms of Herculean struggle, Endgame delivered.

The first of the film's neatly structured hour-long acts (you can punctuate a home viewing with coffee breaks pretty much one and two hours in) is largely devoted to the experience of loss. The look is grainy and colour-drained, the opening sequence with Clint Barton and his family music-free and eerily wind-swept - not very comic-book at all. When Hawkeye's nearest-and-dearest get 'dusted', it plunges the audience back into the despair that closed Infinity War, reminding us of all the situation's gravity. The humour of the subsequent scene with Tony Stark teaching board games to Nebula is understated and mournful. It's touching to see this unlikely pair bonding over a checkers board (a callback to Infinity War's well-judged mix-and-match of characters). The one-liners with which Tony tempers his melancholic recording for a possibly-still-existent Pepper demonstrate the distance this character has run/flown since his 2008 Ironman debut. He's worthy of a nobly tragic fate... but that'll have to wait till later. First there's rescue by Captain Marvel (a cheer-worthy moment amid all the bleakness) and a bout of bitter recrimination directed at his friends, before he stumbles into motion again on the final stage of his ten-year redemptive arc.

Back on Earth Cap and co are in the 'anger' stage of grief. Fuelled by both of those emotions along with misplaced hope, they hunt out Thanos in a move that if executed effectively, might end the film before it's begun. The first of the film's major rug-pulls is killing off the antagonist in a totally non-cathartic manner (even if Thor's 'for the head' line does provide a bitter laugh); to squash the heroes' one clear chance at reversing their Infinity defeat in the movie's first fifteen minutes is a screen-writing masterstroke, one that nixes the possibility of a cheap solution and ushers in those crucial five years of nothing. (It also establishes a loneliness that feels strangely resonant in this 2020 summer of Covid 19 lockdown; the parallels feel a touch chilling if you watch the movie right now.) This is some of what marks out Endgame as special. It doesn't just acknowledge the characters' individual and group loss, it spends serious time with it. It hangs out with Steve Rogers as he councils his fellow-bereaved in a support group. It dwells on Natasha as she tries to put out minor fires, having failed to prevent the Thanos conflagration. One of the most telling scenes of all is the pair's chat over that peanut-butter sandwich that didn't quite get thrown at Steve's head; for all the MCU's famous levity, it delivers a moment here with a tangible sense of bereavement. We feel the distance we've travelled with these characters, fully appreciating why they can't move on. The acceptance stage of the grief process simply eludes them. 

Even Tony with his new family (yes, it's a heart-warmer to see Ironman as dad to little Morgan and her 'I love you three thousand' line is stupidly adorable) keeps a photo of himself with Peter Parker, like he - or we - could ever shake the memory of the kid disintegrating in his arms. It's the indicator that despite his protestations of getting on with a new life, he will lend his brilliance to the infinity stone 'time heist', finally reuniting the Avengers in the process. So comes about the commendably hard-earned healing of the Civil War rift; when Tony hands Steve his iconic shield, it feels quietly momentous. The rest of Act One is thus allowed more light to contrast the shade, a significant amount of it due to Paul Rudd's always endearing Scott Lang (that's once he's absorbed his own sense of trauma at being sprung via random rodent back into a world he scarcely recognises). Despite all the fun to be had with time-travel tropes, however, this story is still primarily about working through grief and failure. Or - as the old team gradually reunites - struggling to. 

Hawkeye has reverted to pure kill-mode and his inner desolation is written into Jeremy Renner's face. Thor has resorted to an appropriately Viking form of alcoholism among the remnants of his Asgardian brethren, Chris Hemsworth portraying it with a pitch-perfect marrying of humour and pathos. (I had reservations about the fat-suit comedy, but the big Aussie sells it by letting that deep-seated pain leak out of his eyes to mitigate the slapstick.) Bruce Banner meanwhile has fared better, investing all his energy in resolving his big green inner conflict, so finally we witness the giant rendered gentle. He, more than anyone, seems to have embraced a way of moving on in his endearing Professor Hulk persona. But he's only moved so far, despite high-fives with his young new fan-club. All these characters - our 2012 Avengers core along with a ragtag selection of the newer lot - are ultimately consumed by that super-impulse to make things right.

Which takes us, via a whole lot of sweat and striving, to Act Two and the Enacting of the Big Plan. Grief has had its day and now it's time for heroic action - less of the slam-bang variety and more the kind requiring ingenuity and subterfuge. I actually love that it's taken a virtually punch-free hour to get to this point. I also love that the writers provide just enough explanation - short of going all Basil Exposition on us - to make sense of time travel MCU-style. (It honestly does all hold up better than Back to the Future for the most part.) As for their moment of zipping off into the Quantum Realm ('See you in a minute' - oh Natasha, if we'd only known), it has proper dramatic weight to it, as opposed to some quick-fix cobbled together in a few minutes of screen time. There's hope now, but it's the desperate kind that could be derailed by any one of numerous potential slip-ups.

The number of time travel locations used here is perfect - and a great contrast of moods and movies-revisited. (Well done writers, for having pinpointed three infinity stones in New York 2012 - keeps things neat.) The action is easy to follow as well; New York, Asgard, Vormir, Morag and Shield H.Q. circa 1970 boast a varied array of production design and colour palettes, so mentally you make an easy switch between the locations. And in genre terms each has a different story to tell. 

New York is the caper movie, aptly so, since it can hark back to the sheer exhilaration of the Avengers denouement - the time we got to see this whole band smashing through an extra-terrestrial army, working for the first time in joyous union. Many of the film's best visual gags are here along with a fistful of air-punch moments and they come as a relief after the gloom that's gone before. 'Hail Hydra', 'America's ass' and Grumpy-Hulk's accidental scuppering of the tesseract heist all inject escapist fun back into the proceedings, while the vision of Captain America fighting himself with the well-choreographed heft that the Russos brought to his franchise is pure fan-service gold. (How does 2019 Cap gain an advantage? By using his future-knowledge of Bucky Barnes' survival to distract. Now that is clever writing. The use of the character's much-discussed costume evolution is masterful storytelling too.) 

Of course all this levity is leavened with cutaways to other mini-movies. It makes sense of course that the Ancient One provide all the time-travelly expo in scenes that draw visually on Doctor Strange. The temporal intricacies we can work out for ourselves post-credits (believe me I did); Tilda Swinton's discussion with Mark Ruffolo give us just enough to work with here. Meanwhile Thor and Rocket are off redeeming The Dark World; how fortuitous that writers Markus and McFeely get to revisit one of the MCU's least-loved films in what has become one of the shared universe's most highly praised. The Shakespearian vibe of old Asgard is lent some of the Ragnarok humour that Taika Waititi brough to Thor's character, with even Renee Russo getting in on the act as the Thunder God's mum. Plus the unlikely Thor/Rocket friendship has proved a deep source of humour and heartbreak, so it's a no-brainer to mine it for some more. (Plot point recap - I worried about Thor divesting that timeline of the hammer it needed to defeat the Ice Elves, but all that got sorted out when Cap returned the Reality Stone, right? Relax. Course it did.)

The mid-section tragedy is played out on Vormir, a planet from which no soul returns. True - Endgame gives us back Gamora as a character, providing Zoe Saldana with another bite of the MCU cherry, but it's not the version we followed through three other movies; the significance of the character's death in Infinity War therefore still holds. Likewise Natasha Romanoff isn't coming back aside from in the delayed Black Widow prequel, however much Bruce Banner willed it when he later wore the gauntlet. (It's further props to the writing team for limiting the Stones' power and not reversing the noble sacrifice that our core Avenger makes here.) The scene has a dark beauty to it and is played for all the humanity it's worth by Johansson and Renner; you thought along with me that Hawkeye was going to take it for the team over his high-kicking bestie, didn't you? But then he wouldn't have had that payoff moment with his family later on. Yes it sucks that as a single gal Natasha wore less plot armour, but then she had been set up years before as someone with debts to settle and here she pays them all off with interest. Plus her connection with various members of the team made for a weightier punch when not everyone returned safely from their Quantum adventure. RIP Nat - see you in the future when you team up with Florence Pugh and co in the past.

The mid-section teariness, it should be said, isn't limited to Black Widow's self-sacrificial sign-off. Tony and Steve are both allowed poignant moments when they visit 1970, plus older viewers get a callback to Michael Douglas in his The Streets of San Francisco days. Of course they've been setting up a Cap/Peggy Carter reunion from the film's early scenes - all those pocket-watch glimpses of Steve's late love-interest - and here they tease it some more, letting us think they're just massaging a bit more salt into Cap's wounds. The lingering encounter between Stark father and son is given more time, due to the fact that it provides an unexpected character resolution. In Civil War Tony only had the virtual version of his dad - here, courtesy of quantum, he gets the real thing. The scenes are some of the film's most heart-warming, not least due to the sensitive playing of Robert Downey Jnr and John Slattery. There's also a crucial life lesson passed on (unknowingly) from father to son - that ultimately the greater good must win out over self-interest. It's one that seems to stick, considering later events. Hey, who knew that we and Tony needed this encounter that much? That'd be the veteran writing team of four MCU greatest hits. If there's one thing they do well in this movie - and there are a few of those - it's closure.

But even as this Starkian ghost is laid to rest, there's a banger of a third act brewing elsewhere. In case the Infinity quest wasn't trial enough for our heroes, a younger, less philosophical Thanos has rumbled their plans and is counter-plotting. This is another temporal mind-bender, not least because it gives us pre-Guardians Gamora and the version of Nebula that's still to learn about empathy. It's the tricksiest part of the whole narrative and one that I only fully appreciated on a second (and third) viewing. This  bravura spanner-in-the-works twist is the stuff of writers who really have the measure of their story. It also gives Karen Gillan room to shine with which she simply hasn't been gifted before; which of us went in expecting that the metallic-blue gal would be be one of the stand-outs? She totally is, however, getting to deliver a nuanced double-portrait of the MCU character who has arguably evolved the furthest. And thank goodness there aren't any Marty McFly-style time reverberations when one version of herself offs the other down the line.

Enough of such multiverse conundrums. Thanks to a clutch of Pimm-particle quantum leaps, we progress into Act Three - the Ultimate Smackdown. The demands of comic-book movie narrative being what they are, this crowd-pleasing finale was as inevitable as Thanos. But let it be pointed out that the imminent roaring triumph has already come at a noteworthy cost. The original Avengers are down one in number, and one of their most loved at that. (I'm sure I wasn't the only Natasha/Bruce shipper to feel a pang at the crestfallen look on Prof Hulk's face.) Point is they're still reeling from this additional loss, as they conclude their attempt to bring back the missing. Thor's plea that he be the one, thereby redeeming himself, is a Hemsworth high-point, but it's Banner who gets nearly char-grilled in process of using the Infinity Gauntlet. Every step of this journey is a painful one and even the thrilling victory moment of Clint's buzzing cellphone - his newly undusted wife on the other end of the line - is undercut by the Thanos strike, one that properly obliterates Avengers HQ. (I can only assume those quantum suits are seriously blast-resistant.)

The heavy lifting continues as Clint and co try to retrieve the gauntlet from underground, while the alpha Dream Team - Cap, Ironman and Thor - take on the younger-but-ungloved Thanos. Even without mystical enhancement he's a big purple bruiser and does significant damage to them, each blow shot with the crunching authenticity that the Russos first brought to the MCU in The Winter Soldier. True there's everyone's favourite 'Hell yes' moment when Cap proves his surpassing worthiness and comes on strong with Mjolnir, but let's not forget that one spirit-denting contest later his vibranium shield is shattered and he's refastening his circa-1942 helmet with a last-stand kind of weariness. Meanwhile his two buds have been knocked clean out of the three-to-one equation and Thanos' armies are massing ominously behind their leader. And Cap looks properly knackered. Never in blockbuster cinema has a tougher hill been climbed than this, and I'm including Mount Doom in that.

Only at that 'game's up' moment to end them all, do we get a cavalry arrival to match, one heralded with Falcon's 'On your left' (another of the movie's neat Winter Soldier callbacks). It's delivered with flair courtesy of Doctor Strange. So layered has the world building been over the MCU's first decade that fans instantly know what's going on; the visual shorthand is sufficiently well-realised that they (make that 'we') just get to sit back and bask in it all. What follows owes a lot, let it be said, to The Lord of the Rings, both in terms of scope and ambition, and in how the action barrage is interspersed with neatly realised character moments. Pretty much all of the latter - be it Tony Stark's embracing of Peter Parker, Scarlet Witch's one-on-one with Thanos or Peter Quill's sort-of reunion with Gamora - succeed, because they've been set up with such care. All of the fan service on display here has been properly earned, therefore it lands terrifically well. Other moments underscore what the MCU is evolving into in terms of its diversity; it's appropriate, following the rapturous welcome of 2018's Black Panther, that T'Challa and co were the first to appear out of Stephen Strange's 'yellow sparkly things', while the miraculous appearance of all the super-gals to help out Spidey is an audacious gender-balancing celebration. (True it'll piss off a more reactionary element of the fan base, but - well - that's part of what makes it so great.)

As for Ironman's finger-snap finale, it's the perfect coup de grace. How exactly does his Stark tech extract the Infinity Stones from Thanos' gauntlet, let alone contain them long enough to let him milk the moment before carrying out the snap? Not sure, don't care. It's a precision-tooled character moment and the ultimate MCU callback. With Black Widow already having made that ultimate sacrifice, it's fitting - however many hearts it breaks along with Peter's and Pepper's - that our favourite flawed egotist do the same. By then Thanos is dust in the wind and we've already forgotten him. We're there standing around Tony in his final moments, assuring him that all will be well. And for those who voiced concern that the momentous events of Infinity War would be undone like they didn't matter, their fears are laid to rest along with him. The stakes never lessened, the sense of drama remained satisfyingly intact throughout and ultimately a hefty price was paid. Thank you writers, thank you Tony. 

It's commendable too how much gets wrapped up in the final ten minutes or so of the film. No disrespect intended to my beloved Lord of the Rings (requirements of the source material and all), but this is textbook how-to-do-an-ending. Think of all that happens in this brief amount of screen time. Tony is celebrated, properly, and we're assured that little Morgan will be okay. ('Cheeseburgers' are a metaphor for love here.) Natasha and poor old Vision are both mourned. Hawkeye's PTSD is soothed by the loving embraces of his family. Peter P has a warm reunion with Ned, who conveniently hasn't aged five years. Thor passes his Asgardian mantle to Valkyrie and zooms off into Space where he'll no doubt regain his original Hemsworthy physique doing competitive reps with Peter Quill. (Starlord update - he's now got the younger model of Gamora on his mind.) And Bucky Barnes' Wakandan rehab has him looking much better. As for Cap, he tidies up all the timelines (or does he?), passes on a restored shield to ultimate wingman Sam and settles back to enjoy the sweet memories of a life finally lived out with Peggy C. 

Look, I'm aware that final revelation throws up enough questions to make a fan's head spin. Having given Endgame that First Anniversary re-watch, however, I've decided that the whole thing dovetails so sweetly in terms of pure drama that all head-scratchers are best set aside to be answered (or not) down the line. There's a time and a place for exposition and the team at the heart of the Infinity Saga knew better than to swamp us with it here. Implications of the five-year snap gap? The Spider-Man: Far From Home guys can deal with all that (and they do). In which reality has Steve Rogers been hanging out with his main '40s squeeze? Don't worry about it - just enjoy that they finally got to slow-dance to a swing classic. It's poetic and it's beautiful - the last in an impressive list of great writer/directorial choices.

Well almost the last. This is the first time I've willed it that there be no mid or end-credit scenes in an MCU movie and thankfully there aren't. We all knew while watching that Spider-Man, Black Panther and others would be back on screens big or small, along with a slew of new untested supers. Kevin Feige and his fellow-creatives have plans we already know to be huge, but that's for another time. The original gang, the one that coalesced in NYC 2012, needed a swansong, and that they were most definitively given. Roll those credits, sign off, fade to black. These old-guard Avengers assembled for one final pushback against evil - and gave us the blockbuster event of a generation. We love them for it - and we all know exactly how much.