Avengers: Endgame is the Ultimate Ensemble Epic

Like the namesake of the company who created the Avengers, Avengers: Endgame (2019) is something of a marvel. At nearly three hours long the film can’t help but become bloated and still it winds up being immensely satisfying. The latter half of a two-part series and so following 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame not only ties up what began in the former but ties up threads throughout the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe MCU going all the way back to Iron Man (2008). This awesome endeavor is breathtaking in scope. The “cinematic” part of MCU just might be more earned than some people claim (I’m looking at you, Mr. Scorsese).

No doubt, Endgame is very much the theme park roller coaster rides that Scorsese claims, just as all the Avengers that came before it were. This is not a bug, it is a feature. These story’s and characters are, after all, based on comic books. They’re intended audience has always been, regardless of our age, for the kid in us all, no matter how adult the themes might get. That Endgame does deal with several mature themes can really only work in the context of thrilling and glorious battles between heroes and villains.

Directed by the same Russo Brothers (Anthony and Joseph) who directed Infinity Wars, as well as Captain America: Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, and working with a script written by the same screenwriting team that wrote Infinity War as well as the three Captain America films and Thor: The Dark World (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely), Endgame is obviously a culmination of labor of love. These series haven’t just been cash grabs with little to no regard for the audiences they take that cash from. The MCU has lovingly retold tales they’ve told in comics and more importantly mythological tales.

Mythology is still an important part of the human desire to better understand who we are, where we come from, why we’re here and what is the right thing to do while here. There’s a proclivity in this modern world to presume that we’ve moved beyond mythology, which is seen as primitive. Certainly it is primal preexists both religion and philosophy. There’s an argument to made that mythology is the fountainhead by which all human narratives flow. Even stories that bare little to no resemblance to mythology are just offshoots of it.

Comic book creators have long known they dabble in the mythological cauldron. Indeed, the mythic Norse god Thor is a central player of the Avengers and the MCU as a whole. The Avengers series, besides being the anchor of a tapestry woven with seemingly stand alone solo adventures of most of the heroes, is also a rich mythology in how we strive to function together as a community. It is not just about who we are and what the world means to us as individuals, it’s about a world we all share and how each individual’s conception of that world varies from the others.

The Avenger films have always been about diverse and strong willed individuals pulling together to accomplish the greater good. It is this greater good that becomes murky between the Avengers and becomes a full on crisis when another player such as Thanos comes along making arguments that all he wants to accomplish is the greater good. Thanos had long been teased as an arriving villain throughout the MCU’s oeuvre and with Infinity War he has arrived and by the end imposed his dark vision of a greater good upon that universe.

Endgame picks up where Infinity War left off, with half the universe zapped into oblivion by the single snap of a finger. Granted, a snap of a finger wearing the Infinity Gauntlet with it’s precious gemstones that have functioned as McGuffin’s throughout the MCU’s films, but a snap of the finger that erases key players of the MCU, including the newly acquired Spiderman, as well as the Falcon, the Black Panther, the Winter Soldier, Wanda Maximoff and most of the Guardian’s of the Galaxy to name just a few heroes caught up in this culling in the name of the greater good.

With the remaining Avengers (essentially the core group of the first Avengers) coping and doin their best to deal with the aftermath of Thanos genocide, Endgame begins. The film actually begins roughly three weeks later with Tony Stark and Nebula marooned on a spaceship in deep space. Carol Danvers, known as Captain Marvel rescues the two, reuniting Stark with the Avengers back on earth, as well as Rocket the Raccoon of the Guardian’s of the Galaxy. Doing what the Avengers do, they find Thanos in an attempt to take back the Infinity stones to reverse Thanos’ villainy, but the mad Titan wearily informs them he destroyed the gems to prevent such a thing.

In an act of horrifying rage, Thor takes off the head of Thanos and that is that. Any hopes of undoing Thanos merciless genocide seems impossible. So, five years after this Scott Lang/Ant Man returns from the quantum realm he found himself stuck in at the end of The Antman and the Wasp. Hank Pym, Hope and Janet van Dyne were all victims of Thanos treachery and could not return Scott from his mission within the quantum realm, but he manages to escape and immediately begins to discover the effects of the genocides tragedy. He finds the Avengers and he has a plan.

Antman’s plan is to use the quantum realm to travel back in time and retrieve the Infinity gemstones and prevent the tragedy that was from ever happening. To pull such a thing off, Captain America and the Black Widow agree they’re better off with the help of Tony Stark on this matter and so go to his home to ask for his help. Stark has spent the past five years being happily married to his longtime love Pepper Potts and raising their daughter. He’s hung up his Iron Man gear and settled into fatherhood and married life. Because of this he wants nothing to do with Lang’s scheme.

Perhaps Tony Stark has accepted Thanos vision. The biggest rift between the Avengers was always the one between Stark and Captain America’s Steve Rogers. Stark was always more about the collective where Rogers about the individual. Somewhat alarmingly, Thanos managed to find sympathizers from the Avengers audience. And maybe even Tony Stark is one of those sympathizers but it is ultimately the loss of Peter Parker and continued urging from his teammates that he relents and agrees to join them on their mission.

Mythologically, they are all on the same adventure they were called upon in Infinity Wars and answered. They gathered their allies, determined their enemies and charged into battle and were ultimately defeated, just as mythological heroes across the world from all different cultures do. Endgame picks up while these heroes are in their inmost cave, recuperating from that defeat before they find the strength and courage to seize the sword and find the elixir of life. The hero myth is always intended to inspire us to fight for what is right and to persevere against all odds to do so.

Sure, myths can be silly with ordinary men struggling among gods, demigods and titans to do what must be done. What is not silly is the lesson that in order to be a hero ordinary men and even gods must learn to accept responsibility for far more than just their own actions. The would be hero Thanos (who certainly sees himself as the hero) believes he has accepted responsibility beyond himself by eliminating half of the universe’s population, but what marks the tragic hero is the degree of their own hubris.

Tony Stark’s journey throughout this MCU tapestry has long been an inner conflict between recognizing that responsibility and dealing with the consequences of his own hubris. The thread that has been Steve Rogers has long been the polar opposite. For Captain America there has never been any struggle to recognize what is right and what is the right thing to do, and where Iron Man often falls prey to his own hubris, whenever the Captain stumbles it is never really because of hubris. These two heroes have been the heart and brain of the MCU and they’re once again that in Endgame.

Yet they are only two within a community of heroes who each have their own individual conflicts and resolutions. It is nothing less than remarkable that this ensemble myth works as well as it does. The actors who’ve long inhabited these characters do much to sell it and to make all the silliness just look cool. Scarlett Johanson as Natashal Romanoff has been one of the best things about the Avengers and here she shines all the way to her glorious end. Chris Hemsworth as Thor is also, and surprisingly so, terrific near perfectly balancing the dark and mournful reality with just plain old fun silliness.

Mark Ruffalo, given much more of a chance to realize Bruce Banner rather than trapped in his Hulk personae, is as affably game in dealing with this rage. This time however, instead of struggling with reigning that rage in, he struggles to ingite it and transform into the Hulk. Jeremy Renner’s dark and dour Hawkeye, reeling from the loss of his family struggles to simply heal as he continues to plunge headlong into self-destructive behavior. These core actors are all actors of note and the gravitas they bring to what can so easily be dismissed as silliness is hard to ignore.

Robert Downey Jr. is a wonder and while Chris Evans has always been the more pedestrian of the group of actors has also grown into a pretty fine actor himself and his quiet restraint really helps to sell the undeniable sentimentality of Captain America, in Endgame and to begin with. Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson, on the otherhand is barely given any opportunity at all to demonstrate her skills as she only appears long enough to explain why she doesn’t appear more often. That is until the end but that’s the big battle where nuanced character work takes a backseat to special effects and CGI.

There are other missteps in this gigantic movie but the successes far outweigh the failures and why it may not be the best of the MCU, it is certainly one of the best.