j* movie reviews 2020

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

A sausagefest with too much fat and some super dubious universal ethics.

Look if you're someone who cares about spoilers, it's probably best you don't read this, because who knows what you might consider a spoiler. I really admired the bravery of the teen boy running past the cinema foyer yelling at the top of his lungs "XXX dies at the end and XXX is XXX." It made me laugh.
Particularly because it was basically midnight and the only people on the street had just come from his session, and the only other people still in the cinema were probably already watching the dying bit by then. And the dying bit is pretty loud so they couldn't hear him in there anyway. It was like he was so brave, and yet so scared of committing this generation's cardinal sin of "spoilers."

First let us talk structure of this film, which I feel is important for a three hour movie. Basically this movie flows like this:
>Pre-beginning - which is just the ending of Infinity War
>1st beginning -basically unnecessary?
>2nd beginning - this bit is okay
>Super long montagey-homagey-revisity middle bit - this bit was pretty fun and if I were scoring just this section on its own I'd give it 4 stars. I laughed a fair bit here.
>Dark & brooding bit - cry me a river, man-babies!
> The hour long mega-fight - all the everybodies fighting all the other everybodies with shiteloads of blurry action you're supposed to find impressive but I didn't.
>1st Sad ending
>2nd Sad ending which is really just a follow up to 1st sad ending
>1st Boring ending
>2nd Boring ending
>3rd Boring ending
>Funny alt ending
>4th Boring ending
>Another boring ending
They certainly did bring the "Endgame."
NB: Many endings, but NO End Credits.

So the last Avengers saw Sustainability Guru PinkChin complete the halfination where half of the universal population is sacrificed to help rebalance the vast ecosystem. This film kicks off with him hanging out in his off-grid cabin picking prickly-cucumbers. Then the other douches, upset about the balancing, show up and kill him. This is basically exactly how the movie ends anyway, so we could have been out of there in thirty minutes. But it's a three hour movie so a lot of other stuff has to happen before we complete the circle of Back To The Future.

So then our heroes all get depressed because the others are still dead, and the surviving half decide the best way to solve everything is time-travel, and thus for a large chunk of the movie, rather than suffering the actual losses of the Halfination, we exist in the 150%-ination or 50%-more of the past, where the dead are still alive, and the living are living twice; as past and present selves. And just like the last movie everyone is looking for the magic stones and this is pretty much all of the plot.

To be fair this bit is very funny. Partly it's funny because of all the jokes, but partly it's funny because they just go back in time to scenes that belong in all the previous movies, just in case you never watched them. I'm not sure if this counts as "meta" or "uber" or "derivative" or "up-yourself" in terms of cinematic sensibilities. But this bit is the best bit with lots of gags.

At the start of this movie Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel) is there and she is, as always, super-hot. And then Thor says unto her "I like this one" and there is so much super-sexual tension and it seems like it could be a super-hot film. But then glorious Carol gets exiled for the vast majority of the movie AND they make Thor fat. I cannot explain how completely this pissed off my sensibilities. Even the collective, vocal shock and awe in the moments of the fat-Thor reveal do not explain the sadness. But it was hilarious that *that* was the most collective the cinema audience got... a fat Hemsworth... oh the humanity!

So there's been the halfination, sure, so there's less female characters than there normally are anyway. But then this film sidelines and kills "both" its remaining female main characters pretty damn quickly. One has to make a huge and noble sacrifice to save a dude most of us barely care about (although in the absence of hot-Thor, Jeremy Renner did start to look surprisingly good).

The other one is sent to deal with a range of Daddy and sister family drama. We get the green chick back briefly, then she mysteriously vanishes and no-one knows where or why, other than being a convenient start point to an additionally male search party. You know that (real) joke about "more Johns than women CEOs?" That ending literally has "more Chris's than chicks." Most of the film is an absolute sausagefest. There's this one scene where they're literally all man-standing on a sort of pier and I groan at all their moody man-standing.

"But wait" I hear you cry, "what about that scene in the hour-long-mega-fight with ALL the girl-ones." Oh yeah. That tiny, tiny, token scene where they put all the women onscreen at once just so everyone can pause it and count them all and feel like there's a lot of chicks. Too little, way too late. The definition of tokenistic. There are more of those flying giant worms zooming around than women. The only way this moment can be construed as good is if this is a true statement about the role of women in films to come. And based on track records here, I won't be holding my breath. This film has seven dudes and two chicks as "main" characters. And they offload one chick from the story and kill the other. And they make the hot-dude not-hot. I'm not feeling it.

Let us also discuss the thematic approach to death here. We start from a point of grief where everyone is learning to grieve all the lost ones. But they cannot and they will not. There will come a time where real-world humanity faces a new and vast pandemic. The experts talk about this in terms of WHEN not if. Real-talk... potentially in our lifetimes we will face the next "Spanish Flu" or "plague" situation and we will witness our own halfination or thirdination. But this film decides even superheroes can't cope with death and must instead reanimate the fallen. So then instead of modelling getting-on-with-life, they basically return to the magical standpoint of "death doesn't exist" and grieve instead for just two celebrities. Well really, they only grieve for the man-one.

Let us also talk about the fact that we move from the fairly diplomatic position of even-stevens half of all universal beings are dead to the position of "genocide is okay if you don't agree with their values." Despite Stan Lee's cameo plea for "make love, not war" in this not only is war followed by total obliteration as the outcome, but we return to the universal-environmental precipice of the start of Infinity War. IronMan could have snapped his fingers to create a peaceful, sustainable universe. But instead he annihilated those fighting for environmental causes. Basically I feel his death was justified given his role in the ethnic cleansing of the universe. . And he used to be one of my favourite ones.

Business as usual: 1, environment: 0. Sounds familiar.

They should just do Thor and Darryl, bigscreen, and bring back Jane - I mean Thor's feeling that. Overall it was better than I thought it might be, and better than Infinity War.

J* gives it 3 stars.

PS. Other points of interest. Antman is awesome, but not as good as in Antman & Wasp. Thor's housemates rock. Carol Danvers is more a god than Thor. I know most of us are hung up on Thor being fat, but Ruffalo fans should know he's just Shrek now. Can't wait to see the flying-horse-chick in Men In Black because she is the bomb... I mean she gets shafted in this film but she's the bomb in Creed and looks like the bomb in MIB. Red-hands-witch shows up at the end as witchy as ever but I'm not sure if yellow-rock-head did because the yellow rock was on the magic glove everyone was playing football with at the time. When I say hour-long-mega-fight, most of it was just a game of rugby with a sparkly glove.

PPS. I know my whinging about universal ethics here is in direct contradiction to my own stance which is that a film doesn't have to model the "correct" values all the time. But I choose that as my angle anyway.

(re-published from 2019)