Catharsis

Rating: 1/10 (3 May 2019)

I will write this review as a way to unload how frustrated I feel after watching this movie.
First and foremost, Tony Stark's plan to bring everyone back after a 5 year gap is absurd and selfish. After 5 years you should be able to balance the choice of leaving everything as it is OR going back and changing everything back to how it was. Keep in mind 5 years is a very long time to have been pronounced dead. The paperwork to bring these people back into the system and the burden they will now be on the economy and Social Security, at least for a while, would be enough to bankrupt a nation. Conveniently, all MCU's family and friends were either fine or they had all vanished together so having them come back unharmed, albeit 5 years later, is a relief. That is not likely the case for the rest of the world though. Most of the people coming back are coming back to a drastically changed world. Most will be homeless, they have no jobs, no way of getting a job, not soon enough, anyway. Some will have lost family members and beloved pets during that time, to old age, suicide, accidents and all sorts of natural causes. And some, if not most, will be coming back to a world that moved on without them. Their loved ones may have already found others or have been changed so drastically that they're strangers now. If you watched Tom Hank's "Cast Away" and recall his hopelessness after coming back to life to find his house sold, his insurance cashed, his job taken, his industry changed, his wife remarried... Now multiply that by half of the Universe's life forms and you have an unmitigated tragedy of cosmic proportions. All so that Tony gets to keep his 4-year-old?
No. Tony Stark's toughest choice should have been that. Am I willing to sacrifice my daughter to save half the life in the Universe? After that, snapping your fingers knowing you will die should be a piece of cake.
And then the time travel ordeal... If the operating theory is that you cannot change the past then you should be unable to change the past, PERIOD. The only things that can happen are the things that have already happened. In that scenario, it is plausible to assume you'll be able to go back in time, steal the Infinity Stones unnoticed and then but them back... But all of this is only possible IF they have already happened. Complicated yet theoretically possible. You can even justify Thor's conversation with his mom or the Ancient One's chat with Banner because we were unaware that these things had already happened then, even if it is our first time seeing it. But then you have the Cap fighting with himself and telling other's he's with Hydra, Loki's escape and the cap moving back to the past to grow old together with his long lost love. You could argue that the Cap made himself forget the fight with the scepter and lived secretly in a basement for the rest of his life, but REALLY? And what about all the undercover Hydra operatives that will soon find that the Cap is not really on their side and hence must know of their own involvement and what about Loki? How was he still a prisoner for the end scene in Avengers when Thor escorts him back to Assgard and where he is later seen in prison? And how are we reconstructing the Tesarract and putting the Ether back into Natalie Portman? Or CAN you change the past after all? So why not do the unthinkable and kill one baby (Thanos) to save half the Universe? Send Hawkeye and Black Widow to do it. Why not travel in time to beat Thanos at Wakanda, now with the help of the entire team, including all of the dispersed heroes and Captain Marvel? Or did we just create 6 different alternate realities and timelines but somehow feel good about our victory in just this one? And is the Cap comfortable going back to 1945, hanging his shield and watching history unfold without altering a single thing, knowing full well all the lives he could've saved (think Vietnam, Kennedy, 9/11, etc.)?
And how does every single main character survive the final battle? They blew the Avengers headquarters to smithereens yet they're all somehow unscathed sub-level 20, just brushing off the dust. Or when Thanos made it rain fire? I get some are meta-humans but others have latex suits and some body armor, nothing more. How are there not more casualties?
I could've lived with Thor's beer-belly, the new Hulk and the rest of the idiotic jokes if the movie itself weren't a joke already. The logic seems off and I am just thinking about this now. These people had 10 years to write a better story. The movie was made painfully long because of gaping plot holes rather than by great writing.