A disappointing conclusion

Rating: 3/10 (29 April 2019)

I saw Endgame Friday night. I might be a minority of one, but I hated it (and I am a big Marvel fan). The rules of time travel made absolutely no sense and were completely ad hoc, the tugs on the heart strings were gratuitous - a ritualistic bow to the currently fashionable trope that "the stakes must be raised and there must be consequences" - it's a comic book movie, for crying out loud! If I want to be depressed I can just read the newspaper! Modern filmmakers and script writers are embarrassed by straightforward happy endings and good triumphing over evil, even in superhero movies - witness the abomination that was "Batman v. Superman" or the way the recent Star Wars movies have completely undone the happy ending of "Return of the Jedi" (Han and Leia are divorced, Han's son kills his father, Luke is a bitter old hermit, etc.). The Russo brothers even said that they wanted their Avengers movies to be "mature storytelling" with "real stakes" and "real consequences" - i.e., "we are going to kill off some beloved characters." Part of it is simply vanity ("I don't make kids' movies - I engage in mature storytelling"), but part of it is also a form of nihilistic cultural pessimism. It 's the same pessimism that makes it impossible for the heroes of any show to have a stable, solid romantic relationship like Jonathan and Jennifer in the old "Hart to Hart" TV show. Now it's all about the unresolved sexual tension stringing along the viewers for years, from "Moonlighting" to "Lois and Clark" to "Castle" to "Lucifer." I also thought that the treatment of Thor as a caricature and a figure of comic relief verged on the obscene considering the aloof nobility of the character as he was initially conceived by Stan Lee. As for the time travel plot holes, I think the writers needed to use time travel to undo Thanos' "snap", but they also wanted real consequences and real deaths that couldn't be undone (at least for the time being - you never know with superhero fiction!) So they decided that the heroes would go back in time to retrieve the Stones in order to undo the "snap", but they also told us that going back in time would not change their present in the universe in which the action is taking place, except that it might create new timelines every time somebody interacts with the past,as the Ancient One tells Banner. If events other than the snap can't be undone (as they kept telling us), then the heroes created all sorts of new timelines even if they put the stones back at the time they first stole them: Howard Stark got a pep talk about parenting he wouldn't have gotten otherwise, Cap found out that Bucky was alive, etc. Most confusingly, was there a Steve Rogers married to Peggy Carter and a Steve Rogers frozen in ice at the same time in whatever timeline Cap created when he chose to stay in the past? And if so, what happened when Cap #1 was thawed out?The movie will probably make a ton of money, but it is a disappointing end to what had been a great run of movies