Great "ending" to a saga

Rating: 8/10 (17 August 2019)

Endgame is a great popcorn action movie to "finish" a saga of popcorn action movies. This isn't serious entertainment and shouldn't be considered as such, and it reminds me of how George Lucas made Star Wars as an homage to the cheap serials like Flash Gordon. Especially as comic-sourced material, this is what the MCU is. Some part of me is actually a bit pained to like it as much as I do, given that it is just playing on base emotions to make money for a massive conglomerate like Disney.
BUT... what a great way to end several major storylines that they invested in over the past 11 years. For people who have watched the saga, I feel like this is just the cherry on the top. My only complaint is something that you can't really get away from in superhero stories: the character "powers" are totally inconsistent from scene to scene, and movie to movie. This is a trope that there's no getting away from, because if characters like Captain Marvel, Thor, Scarlet Witch, and Hulk were always as powerful as they show flashes of, then the story wouldn't even be a thing. Any one of them could destroy Thanos in the blink of an eye, and have done similar feats in other stories (and even in other scenes within a given story). That they sometimes "reduce" their power to a lower level, without an explained mechanism, is pretty laughable, and makes some parts of the story a bit nonsensical. Yes, this constant Ex Machina is needed to maintain the drama and keep the plot going, but it's still something that takes me out of the story.
What I really love about this movie, and the saga as a whole, is how good it is at developing the actual characters and their relationships. There are some similarities, but nobody is the same, and most of the arcs are believable. Thor's story, and apparent PTSD, is to me the best-done, but all of the majors (and some of the minors) are almost as good. I believed them. And for a popcorn action movie saga based on a comic series, I think that's a pretty high compliment.