I Loved it 3000

Rating: 9/10 (27 April 2019)

The film opens with Clint Barton on his family farm about to have a picnic just before the Snap of Infinity War, and he's left alone as his family mysterious disappears into dust. Yes, it's as heartbreaking as it sounds. We cut to Stark and Nebula aboard the Milano after twenty-odd days in the void of space, hopeless and running out of essentials. Stark has practically given up when Captain Marvel appears and carries them back to Earth. The post-credits scene of Captain Marvel never actually features in Endgame, and I feel like it was ultimately something too important to leave to another movie (oh look, my first criticism). Chronologically Barton's family gets dusted, jump forward a couple of weeks when the Avengers have Fury's pager trying to work out who it's calling when Carol Danvers appears. Presumably they persuade her to back into space to try and find Tony. It's a crucial piece of the early puzzle to make sure everything flows, and it was left out. Redundant after Captain Marvel? Maybe, but it would've been nice anyway, just to keep Endgame complete.
From here the Avengers fix up the Milano and fly off to confront Thanos, a now broken and frail man living peacefully off the land. In the first real subversion of expectations, he offers them no fight and he's promptly dealt with, less than half an hour into the movie's runtime. So where does Endgame go now that it's villain is dead with two and a half hours left to go?! The Quantum Realm of course! Don't worry I'm not going to give a running commentary of the whole film (because hopefully if you're reading this you've seen it already anyway), but with the infinity stones destroyed, they hatch a plan to go back in time, steal the stones before Thanos ever has them, and snap half the universe back into existence. Of course things go wrong along the way, people die, others are dragged into the mess, the plan has to be improvised, and it all culminates in a monumental battle comparative in scale to Return of the King.
Now I'm going to get this off my chest now as it's what I'm most keen to talk about, and that's all the callbacks, references, and cameos. Oh my god the movie is full of them, and each one surprised me for a number of reasons. Once the Time Heist begins, we are of course thrust back to the events of a number of previous MCU films. We go back to the Battle of New York in Avengers, we go back to the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy on Morag, and yes, we also revisit Thor 2. To avoid referencing these movies in these scenes would've been impossible, the but the opportunity is also used to drop in some other movies and events. The Ancient One from Doctor Strange appears, Jasper Sitwell, a SHIELD agent all the way up to Winter Soldier appears alongside Crossbones (as well as Cap standing in a crowded elevator with them all to boot), we see Starlord singing and dancing to himself on Morag, Thor has a tender reconnection with Frigga, Edwin Jarvis from the Agent Carter TV show marks the first crossover from TV to film, but the one that really surprised me was Alexander Pierce. Freaking Robert Redford came back for a cameo! Then there's all the additional cameos elsewhere, and alternate aliases too (like Hawkeye being Ronin, Banner and Hulk living together as Professor Hulk, and Pepper Potts finally taking up the mantle of Rescue)
Seriously, this movie has possibly the craziest castlist ever assembled for a single film, and every single one of them slays it. The vast majority of them get stylised credits as well making for a special moment in lieu of an actual post-credits scene, with the original six Avengers literally signing off from the franchise. I admit, I choked up a bit at this point. Nothing made Endgame feel more final than those credits. So here's a little game, I'm going to list every actor I remember seeing, and you've got to pin them to a character. But also, this will display just how crazy this castlist is. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L Jackson, Brie Larson, Jon Favreau, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ty Simpkins, Cobie Smulders, Josh Brolin, Zoe Saldana, Karen Gillan, Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, Evangeline Lilly, Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Wong, Tilda Swinton, Don Cheadle, Danai Gurira, Chadwick Boseman, Angela Bassett, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Tom Hiddleston, Rene Russo, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Tom Holland, Marisa Tomei, William Hurt, Robert Redford, Frank Grillo, Hayley Atwell, James D'Arcy, John Slattery, Natalie Portman, Linda Cardellini, Ross Marquand, Callan Mulvey, Yvette Nicole Brown, Hiroyuki Sanada, and of course Stan Lee himself. For anyone counting, that's nearly twenty academy award nominees.
All right, I think that's enough raving for a minute. Let's kick back for some ranting, because Endgame still wasn't perfect, not in my opinion. The biggest one for me (which is still comparatively a niggle) is how it contradicts itself on time travel. Time travel is a huge part of Endgame, and they explain it away nice and neatly, without risk of confusing things or retconning previous film entries. Going back and changing things doesn't affect the current timeline, the timeline of our characters, the timeline we've been following all along. Instead every change creates a new, separate timeline. There will be a timeline where Thor loses his hammer for a brief moment during the dark elves assault on Asgard, there will be a timeline where Loki escapes after the Battle of New York with the Tesseract, there will be a timeline where Thanos and his armies just up and disappeared around the events of Guardians of the Galaxy, there will be a timeline where Starlord doesn't find the Orb, there will be a timeline where Howard Stark got advice on how to be a father from a "stranger". But most crucially there will be a timeline where Cap and Peggy grow old together. A completely separate timeline. This is where Endgame breaks its own rules, as an old Cap appears just sitting on a bench nearby. For starters why did they decide to set up the time travel device in order to close the loops near some random old guy on a bench? But more importantly how is there an old Cap there when the timeline he went back to would have diverged from the current one? We didn't need a whole monologue about living his life and literally passing the torch over to Falcon. It was redundant, didn't make sense to the film's own logic, and in a way undercut the emotional punch of Cap's eventual fate right at the end of the film.
It also creates problems, moreso than anyone else, for Spider-Man. Half the people on the planet are five years older. In adults this isn't quite as noticeable and life goes on, but for Peter he's just a teenager. Five years at that age is huge. Cassie Lang is now a teenager as well when she was just a kid during the snap. Half of Peter's friends will have grown-up and left school, gone to college, maybe even moved out, have jobs, and started paying bills. If Far From Home doesn't address this, we're going to have some problems. But that aside what are the odds all the major characters of Spider-Man were all snapped and will come back exactly as we expect them? That just feels way to convenient!
Cap v Cap was amazing, as was the "I can do this all day" exchange between them. The constant references to Winter Soldier were amazing, what with Pierce and Crossbones back, as well recreating the elevator scene, Cap whispering hail Hydra (in reference to the comics), and of course Sam saying "On your left" to Cap as Doctor Strange opens a whole bunch of portals around him. Then there's Cap wielding Mjolnir after causing it to nudge in Age of Ultron. All things considered, Cap had an exceptional send-off in this movie. Tony had a lot of great things too. He got the family he wanted in Infinity War, he finally got Pepper to embrace the suits and become Rescue, he was sent off with his "heart", the mention of cheeseburgers made made me want to blubber like a baby, and even Harley from Iron Man 3 made a brief appearance! In fact Age of Ultron got a lot of nods as almost every single element of Tony's vision was met; the broken shield, the Chitauri worms, space, Black Widow's death.
Thanos was great too. Early on you can see the toll the stones had taken on him. He was a shadow of his former self, basically succumbing to his fate. When we go back and meet younger Thanos at the height of his ambitions, he's so much more menacing. In a way he sort of reverts back to being a generic superhero villain who just seeks the end of the universe, but he's in full Mad Titan mode before Gamora's betrayal in Guardians of the Galaxy, and we've seen how capable he can be even without the stones in Infinity War. Now he has a double-bladed sword-glaive thing and it's awesome!
Yeah, Endgame was pretty damn amazing. It was the perfect culmination of everything. It sent-off our original heroes with the most perfect endings, and gave each and every one of them a moment to shine, accommodated heaps of fan-service without getting schlocky, and gave the bittersweet conclusion we as fans needed. It took us in directions we never expected, no matter how rampant our theories and rumours became, no matter how hard the trolls of us tried to spoil it for everyone else. There's so much in this movie, but it never feels rushed, and it's three hour length never drags or feels too long. It's not a perfect movie for me, it never will be, and if I'm honest Infinity War is still my favourite film of the entire saga. But all-in-all I couldn't be happier. I give Avengers Endgame well-deserved and emotional 9/10. Godspeed!