Pop Culture is Dead to Me 6: Avengers Addendum

Concluding my trip through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as usual well after the Lord Mayor's Show, with some comments about the double-fisted Avengers films that tie up the first (three) phase(s) of this sprawling introduction to the Marvel comics characters in film form.

Avengers: Infinity War
I tried to explain this film to someone who hasn't seen it without spoilers. It is essentially a Marvel film; the Avengers are in it, but this is really all about everybody that's been seen and how they fit into - they're all Avengers and they need to battle Thanos, who has sped things along at a tsunami pace after dawdling his way through the preamble like a man with no real motivation. The Infinity Stones were the be-all and end-all of his purpose, yet he seemed to treat it like a side project. The urgency of why he's now desperate to retrieve them all seemed slightly rushed and, you know, Infinity Stones in the singular make the bearer really powerful and Thanos kicks Thor and the Hulk's arses inside the first 10 minutes of the film and still has an army of subservient subordinates doing most of his wet work and he only had one stone. These stones on their own are powerful enough to need several heroes to contain them - as we've been shown - Thanos is still taking Thunder Axes in the chest after collecting all six and winning the free gauntlet.

The thing is, it's Marvel's Empire Strikes Back (yawn, boo, hiss at the use of the reference) and it's all the better for it and the pay off, while not as shocking as they might have hoped did what all good comics need to achieve, to be as good or better than the ones before it and to set a bench mark for the one that follows.

It's rare that films of this ilk feel like they need to be longer, but Infinity War probably did need to be a bit longer, or maybe, with hindsight, some of the other films needed to lay down more than just teaser moments about things to come.

Over all though, Infinity War is a fun film with some glaring omissions and some good set pieces. As the first part of a double header, it flicked 90% of the right switches.


Avengers: Endgame
After managing to avoid 99% of the spoilers, I went into this film knowing that [spoiler] dies, but no one else and that time travel would be involved. I even hypothesised about the film in the previous edition of this sub-divided themed blog and I might have got some things right. Yahoo to me, but it has been loosely following an original comic or comics.
Endgame is... No, hang on a minute, I need to quantify my right to have this judgement of this film. Part of me despises the idea of Doctor Who, especially when the 'laws of time' are conveniently written for the benefit of the story rather than in a consistent manner. I love time travel stories, films TV series. It's my little obsession hidden inside a general liking for the genres where time travel might appear.

I am, oddly, in the same mind as Stephen King when he wrote The Langoliers, that the past doesn't exist any more so it's impossible to return to it because it simply isn't there to go back to. Going into the future - apart from the fact we're all doing it - is a concept that I have more ease with. That said, I enjoy a good time travel romp like the best of you, not so much ones that are playing with it in such a way that it gets difficult to follow or so easily-achieved.

We'll get to this in a minute because I want to talk about the first hour of Endgame. It was... unexpected. Incredibly well put together and devastating and yet there's this beacon of hope just popping back after 5 years in the twilight zone and what follows that is mumbo-jumbo; throwaway soundbites saying that fictional time travel is nothing like the real thing, yet no one really bothered to explain how it would work; how they would be able to navigate the quantum realm so easily and more importantly none of them realise that they are actually creating a time loop by actively removing things from their place in time, using them to alter reality before returning them to the exact point in time they were stolen to fulfil their original destiny, which in turn creates the situation that requires that to happen again. Not to mention what peripheral continuity errors they've now built into the entire franchise.

Let's not even try to figure out how pre-Endgame Peggy Carter and post-Endgame Peggy Carter fit into a universe, at the same time, never and for always...

What actually happened? Well, for those of you who don't want to know, you'd better be ready to bale out. Because the invigorated Avengers reunited with a weak and feeble Tony Stark and powered up by the presence of Captain Marvel are now on a mission to change things back, so they track Thanos down only to discover he's destroyed the stones and there's nothing they can do. Thanos gets dispatched really quickly and easily and the rest of the first hour is five years later and how the world is not coping at all well with what happened. Up pops Scott Lang from the Phantom Zone and within 30 seconds we're talking about navigating the weird time zones Michelle Pfeiffer casually mentioned at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp and changing time. Scott Lang is a petty criminal with a magic suit, he's struggled to understand most of what Hope and Henry Pym have told him and here he is inventing the Tardis.

Oh and the Hulk is now Bruce Hulk or maybe Hulk Banner; he's big green and intelligent and a little cocksure of himself, as you'd expect. He has his moments, but he's largely underused. Hawkeye's become a samurai wielding Punisher clone with good aim and the rest of them are just the same but a bit older and tired.

Then we're off again, this time to the past for a chance to relive old moments, except we don't really. There's a lot of the first Avengers film and the first of the problems in that the way the stones will eventually arrive back where they are stolen from and that has changed in a number of ways from the original films - it wasn't fully or possibly even generally explained what consequences it might have for the future if things prevented that time from happening the way it did/does/is.

The events in space essentially mean the Guardians of the Galaxy shouldn't exist, especially as Quill never steals one of the stones, Gamora isn't in custody with the Nova Corps, there's no reason for Rocket and Groot to get themselves arrested and do you see where I'm going here? Unless there was something like months between Quill obtaining the stone and getting detained then the events of this film prevent that from happening. Gamora was ever-present in a period where she should have been in custody.

There's also the matter of War Machine disappearing in the Time Tunnel but Nebula being taken over by 2014 Thanos, but both of them reappearing at the same time. But gripes aside, (apart from the fact that as much as I lust over Karen Gillan, she really can't act to save her life) they recreate the Infinity Gauntlet, Professor Hulk puts it on and then comes weird bizarre thing number 2. Tony's asked Bruce to ensure that his relatively happy last five years are retained; he has to bring everyone back, as they were, but five years later. Did I hear that correctly? How come all of Peter Parker's fellow schoolfriends seemed to be the same age and still at school? Is it 2023 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe now?

Or how about when Loki disappears with the Tesserac in the cock-up in 2012; how does that now impact on the Marvel Universe, especially as other things become clear.

I didn't expect [spoiler spoiler] to die and in what seemed both a heroic and pointless way and makes you wonder how a film featuring [spoiler spoiler] now will fit in with the direction Marvel might be going? But if someone returned the stone at the point it left - to ensure no multiverse is created (or something like that), how come [spoiler] is still dead... This is supposed to be a fun film why is my head hurting?

That bit when you know who snaps his fingers and the threat from 2014 simply disappears is also perplexing in that this means that technically as 2014 Thanos is dead there isn't a 2015 thru 2018 Thanos to cause any problems. The stones are wherever they were before he got any of them.

If you take out the melancholy, the nostalgia, the tributes and the comedy it's just a big bombastic explosion of... actually, it isn't. There's not a lot of action; there aren't really any set pieces until the final battle which, truthfully, felt more Lord of the Rings than the Avengers Last Stand.

The thing is Infinity War felt more... large. It felt like Thanos's lackeys were kick ass and mean and could handle the likes of Thor and Iron Man. In Endgame, Giant Man is trampling all over the Doomsday lookalike the way a child does with a toy. He's also not getting light-headed and faint, like he did, very quickly, last time he tried that stunt.

And there was this feeling that we'd missed some things. Gamora and Nebula growing up was something briefly touched on in earlier films, but mainly through anecdotal exchanges between the two, yet in Endgame there's this feels like a bit of rewritten history has been inserted to allow the events to happen the way they did. A lot was made of their growing up which felt the opposite of what we'd been led to believe. And when the future Nebula kills herself - so to speak - something else should have happened and... the paradoxes this film creates is unparalleled.

And there's this weird relationship between Stark and Peter Parker that seems to have escalated considerably since Homecoming. It also felt contrived and exaggerated to enable parts of the plot and the next Spider-Man film. It would have been nice to have had some kind of explanation for Pepper Potts's Iron Woman suit and frankly if you'd come in cold you would have been as lost as a blind man in Hampton Palace Maze.

It is in my opinion a complete mess and it's a real disappointment of a film. If the plan is to sort out continuity or just leave it as it is, I'm not sure I want to know. The most interesting characters have finished their respective stories - after a fashion - and the new breed are simply not as... iconic. I'm sure that will become obvious over the next few years.

Another thing is at 3 hours (well, 2 hours and 48 minutes, there's 13 minutes of credits and no post credit scene, so if you sat through it at the cinema then I feel for you) it didn't feel overly long, but it did feel as though it had been edited badly and some of the scenes blending the past with today felt... a little like being clever for the sake of it rather than the necessity. Also while it felt like it rollicked along at a decent gallop, there were times when I wondered if anything remotely interesting might happen. It was like an over-produced album that can't find its way out of the tracks because of engineered bits.

I am also, as I said, really quite disappointed because I don't think the finale has been a fitting end to what, on the whole, has been a well-built inter-connected labyrinth of stories leading to one place. As a franchise film series, it has re-invented 'event cinema' to conclude these events they appear to have opted for schmaltz over sense (and excitement). The overriding feeling is 'Was that the best they could do? After all that build up?'

I'm not even sure I liked the make-up of the film either; they didn't feel like a team but so much time was spent with them as a team it felt like papering over the cracks. Perhaps this was intentional, but if it was it made the tone feel... wrong. There were too many looks and expressions that told much about the previous five years coping with the loss with none of them ever really being explored, giving it a slightly surreal feel, like we've wandered into something armed with no more than a rudimentary knowledge.

Oh and Captain America with Thor's hammer - the original one that has been snatched out of time - was bordering on ludicrous. I actually winced and continued to wince every time he wielded the power of Thor. It was like in this reality Captain America versus Thanos was like an ant versus a JCB; he'd had his moment in Infinity War, that wasn't going to work against a more ruthless, vengeful Thanos, but they needed Steve to have his moment in the sun.

Plus, the what I can only describe as 'Home Run' sequence was just ... there in the film, like any number of giant staged bits that felt like the time could have been better used between scissors. It was a spectacle without substance, or if it had substance it wasn't rounded and whole.

I wonder now if Marvel are going to be clever or if they're going to forget that a convincing narrative, regardless of how fantastic a setting, is essential to something staying both relevant and interesting. I'd like to see some time spent, in some way, explaining how this post-Thanos reality works; what did and didn't happen as a result of the climax and some way of introducing parallel universes that have the estranged Marvel characters in them as well, in some cases, existing Marvel heroes and villains as a way of eventually merging them all and giving us a new generation of the heroes and villains we're unlikely to see again.

In conclusion; expectation is often a bitch and I think I've entered into the last half dozen Marvel films with far too much and have ultimately been found wanting. I can now look at the previews for Spider-Man: Homecoming for fear of spoiling my upcoming enjoyment. Don't get me wrong; there were some genuine tear-jerking moments in the film, but it felt hollow and slightly fake. People will take from this what they want; I've taken very little.