everything you'd expect from a film 11 years in the making

Rating: 9/10 (29 April 2019)

Avengers endgame is the culmination of over 10 years of film making, dozens of heroes, hundreds of characters supporting characters and a huge huge story that will likely continue for decades to come. this conclusion had a monumental amount of pressure to deliver a satisfying end to the first 22 films in marvel's cinematic universe. and it did.
the film continues almost exactly where infinity war left off but opens from the point of view of hawkeye as he's chilling with his family at the moment thanos snaps his fingers. and as you can imagine, things dont go very well from his point of view.
the first half of endgame maintains the slow steady pace of the opening scene, with a few brief moments of action as our heroes try to figure out a way to correct what thanos has done to the universe. eventually, with the help of scott lang aka ant man (who finds himself 5 years in the future having been expelled from the quantum realm with a little help from a passing rat), bruce banner and tony stark's minds, they come up with a clever plan to snatch the infinity stones from the past, use them to bring everyone back in the present, and then return them as if they were never gone. rounding up all the heroes is paced very nicely and every scene featuring thor is comedy gold. once everyone is together they are assigned their points and locations in time and we get some very clever scenes with some characters running into their former selves or relatives at points we saw in previous movies. the storytelling here really is top notch.
the final act is nothing short of spectacular as virtually every hero from all the films so far is on the battlefield at the same time, with one character cleverly stating "is that everyone?" before they charge thanos and his army.
i have very few complaints with the film. one of which is that with a film this huge it was impossible to really make the final battle as satisfying as it needed to be. there was just SO much going on that the camera had to shift focus every second from one hero fighting to another and you'll find yourself wanting to see more of whats going on in one place. everyone viewing this film will want to see a little more of their favourite hero fighting their own battle. for me it was spider-man and although i was happy to see him get some screentime fighting with the iron spider suit, i wanted more of that.
my other minor issue was that i felt the female heroes scene was super forced and cringeworthy. another example of the desperate need and clear pressure on filmmakers lately to satisfy the needs of the politically correct crowd. we get it, there are female heroes too. yes they are valued just as much as the male ones. but did we really need a shot of them all coming together around captain marvel as if they all finished fighting whatever they were at the exact same moment for a glory shot of female empowerment? it was bad enough in the captain marvel trailer with the play on words around "her" and "hero" .. i just felt like this shot was completely forced and unnecassary.
my final little nitpick (and this is really a personal one) was with the passing of the cap shield. i know that in the comic, steve does at some point pass the shield to falcon, but i was really expecting him to pass it on to bucky. it didnt make sense to me him passing it on to sam as sam is already recognised as falcon. bucky would have made more sense as the next cap in my eyes. but i loved the way they wrote chris evans out of the mcu by him simply staying in the past and growing old with peggy. that was fitting, beautiful and perfect.
all in all the film satisfies virtually everything you would expect it to. if you're invested in these characters in any way over the years you'll love the conclusion to phase 4 of the mcu.
9/10