Avengers: Fin de partie
May. 1st, 2019 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishAnthony and Joe Russo (dirs.), Avengers: Endgame
My favourite line in Endgame is "I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
*checks notes*
Ahem.
I watched the first two Iron Men when the second one came out. I thought the first one was mediocre and the second terrible, and didn't bother to get invested in the MCU. I saw the Guardians movies with friends who were a lot more into it than me: I enjoyed the Gamora / Nebula backstory, but was sufficiently annoyed by Star-lord that I didn't really regret my choices to not dig deeper. On the other hand, Black Panther blew me away last year.
And over the last month or two Erin and I watched about half the MCU movies, which was an enjoyable way to spend a bunch of evenings. For the most part I found them ... much less dire than I'd been afraid. Even Age of Ultron and Civil War. And I quite enjoyed Captain Marvel, a few weekends ago. So I was reasonably psyched up for Endgame.
The neat thing is, this is about as close to a universal pop-culture phenomenon as we've had in the last ... decade, at least, probably much longer. Even the new Star Wars movies haven't brought out this much excitement and anticipation and shared "brb rewatching twenty movies before endgame". It's nice to feel like I'm engaging in something that tons of other folks are as well, and to get that little bit of joy when I see someone else noting that they're off to see Endgame.
It was a remarkably quiet movie for the endcap to a decade of special-effects-laden superhero extravaganzas. I appreciated that. I enjoyed that they took a bit of time to actually show the effects of the Snapture on various characters, and on the world.
The whole time-travel thing made no sense, and makes me angrier every time I think about it. Saying "no, it doesn't work like that" is a lazy excuse to have whatever cool scenes they wanted, like Cap vs Cap, or Thanos and his army charging through time for the Big Fight Scene... without having to do any narrative work justifying it. Like... did Loki only escape with the Tesseract because Tony and Cap showed up from the future? But Thor stealing his hammer didn't have any effect on the timeline? Bah. Bah, I say.
Captain Marvel was painfully underused and underdeveloped, and I hope her next standalone movie treats her better. Ditto Shuri (not even any speaking lines!). On the other hand: Pepper gets a suit! Valkyrie gets a kingdom! Sam gets to be Captain America!
As I said in a comment elsewhere, The Soulstone retrieval was awful in Infinity War when it was a stupid excuse to give Thanos some manpain at the cost of one of the most interesting characters in the Guardians movies, and that threw me out of the movie so much that I didn't even much care about the Snapture. And then THEY DID IT AGAIN DAMMIT. I would have paid good money to watch Natasha have to deal with the aftermath of Clint's death. Hawkeye's not a bad character, but he's one we've all seen a zillion times in a zillion movies. Black Widow growing an emotional core and opening up a bit... that's something worth exploring.
Though I'll grant that the fight scene between Hawkeye and Widow at the cliff was pretty great.
The only thing I knew going in was "there are scenes where a character gains a lot of weight due to PTSD, and it's treated as a joke." The movie didn't necessarily treat Thor's physique entirely as a joke (mostly, yes). The audience... laughed loudly and consistently, every time. :(
The Big Huge Fight worked well, but they've had twenty-some movies to figure out how to do those so it would have been awkward if it hadn't. The "here are all the MCU chicks kicking ass" sequence felt a little awkward but what the hell, it was gratifying.
Thor going off with the Guardians is ... a bold narrative choice. As is reviving Gamora while cancelling out her relationship with Star-lord.
A solid ending to a decade's worth of franchise. I'm curious to see where the MCU goes next.
They really should have had Luis from Ant-Man do a recap of the movies, though.
Also, the best superhero movie remains Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.
My favourite line in Endgame is "I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
*checks notes*
Ahem.
I watched the first two Iron Men when the second one came out. I thought the first one was mediocre and the second terrible, and didn't bother to get invested in the MCU. I saw the Guardians movies with friends who were a lot more into it than me: I enjoyed the Gamora / Nebula backstory, but was sufficiently annoyed by Star-lord that I didn't really regret my choices to not dig deeper. On the other hand, Black Panther blew me away last year.
And over the last month or two Erin and I watched about half the MCU movies, which was an enjoyable way to spend a bunch of evenings. For the most part I found them ... much less dire than I'd been afraid. Even Age of Ultron and Civil War. And I quite enjoyed Captain Marvel, a few weekends ago. So I was reasonably psyched up for Endgame.
The neat thing is, this is about as close to a universal pop-culture phenomenon as we've had in the last ... decade, at least, probably much longer. Even the new Star Wars movies haven't brought out this much excitement and anticipation and shared "brb rewatching twenty movies before endgame". It's nice to feel like I'm engaging in something that tons of other folks are as well, and to get that little bit of joy when I see someone else noting that they're off to see Endgame.
It was a remarkably quiet movie for the endcap to a decade of special-effects-laden superhero extravaganzas. I appreciated that. I enjoyed that they took a bit of time to actually show the effects of the Snapture on various characters, and on the world.
The whole time-travel thing made no sense, and makes me angrier every time I think about it. Saying "no, it doesn't work like that" is a lazy excuse to have whatever cool scenes they wanted, like Cap vs Cap, or Thanos and his army charging through time for the Big Fight Scene... without having to do any narrative work justifying it. Like... did Loki only escape with the Tesseract because Tony and Cap showed up from the future? But Thor stealing his hammer didn't have any effect on the timeline? Bah. Bah, I say.
Captain Marvel was painfully underused and underdeveloped, and I hope her next standalone movie treats her better. Ditto Shuri (not even any speaking lines!). On the other hand: Pepper gets a suit! Valkyrie gets a kingdom! Sam gets to be Captain America!
As I said in a comment elsewhere, The Soulstone retrieval was awful in Infinity War when it was a stupid excuse to give Thanos some manpain at the cost of one of the most interesting characters in the Guardians movies, and that threw me out of the movie so much that I didn't even much care about the Snapture. And then THEY DID IT AGAIN DAMMIT. I would have paid good money to watch Natasha have to deal with the aftermath of Clint's death. Hawkeye's not a bad character, but he's one we've all seen a zillion times in a zillion movies. Black Widow growing an emotional core and opening up a bit... that's something worth exploring.
Though I'll grant that the fight scene between Hawkeye and Widow at the cliff was pretty great.
The only thing I knew going in was "there are scenes where a character gains a lot of weight due to PTSD, and it's treated as a joke." The movie didn't necessarily treat Thor's physique entirely as a joke (mostly, yes). The audience... laughed loudly and consistently, every time. :(
The Big Huge Fight worked well, but they've had twenty-some movies to figure out how to do those so it would have been awkward if it hadn't. The "here are all the MCU chicks kicking ass" sequence felt a little awkward but what the hell, it was gratifying.
Thor going off with the Guardians is ... a bold narrative choice. As is reviving Gamora while cancelling out her relationship with Star-lord.
A solid ending to a decade's worth of franchise. I'm curious to see where the MCU goes next.
They really should have had Luis from Ant-Man do a recap of the movies, though.
Also, the best superhero movie remains Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-02 02:23 am (UTC)Assuming you're already accepting the "we put the stones back" handwave, this seems no more ridiculous.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-02 05:31 am (UTC)