Spoilers Avengers: Endgame grade and discussion thread

[Captrek]

Hasn’t Anna Kendrick expressed interest in playing Squirrel Girl? With a star of her stature, you’d think they’d make it happen.

(Nothing against Milana Vayntrub, but I only know here from the AT&T commercials. I have no idea whether she’s capable of carrying a film or TV series.)

 

[theenglish]

None of that is relevant. No one is being denied anything by having white males cast in roles that were created as white males. I have NO problem with women in positions of power on screen. No one ever said otherwise. Let it be organic rather than putting them on display on a soapbox and saying, "look--a woman! Fake feminism!"

When it's forced, it doesn't work the same. Supergirl is the most guilty of the fake feminism move. Wonder Woman didn't do that. GOT didn't do that.

I find it hard to understand why you miss the irony that actual women who are feminists don't agree with this point of view. Or the irony that a white male is trying to explain to women what feminism should be and how it should be portrayed.

 

[theenglish]

All that matters is that the stones exist in the universe. That's why it doesn't matter be that to the tesseract and scepter were destroyed. Cap will put the stones back, and those timeline will continue, diverging from the original.

I don't think this is what was said in the movie. When the stones are returned the divergent timelines collapse and cease to exist according to the ancient one. That said, something seems to have happened with Gamora (as there appears now to be two versions of the 2014 Gamora because she was brought to the future). The Loki thing I am not to sure about as it seems like he just gets recaptured by the Avengers in 2012.

A She-Hulk series where she deals with superhero based legal issues could be fun.

I would love a version of her comic from about ten years ago. It was fun but it also dealt with some important issues.

 

[Awesome Possum]

I'm surprised Squirrel Girl hasn't already been announced as an upcoming Disney+ series.

Once we get Doctor Doom in the MCU, we need Squirrel Girl since only she is able to defeat him so easily. My favorite being the time she invaded Latveria with an army of squirrels to borrow a time machine, Doom just pointed her in the right direction to avoid a problem.

 

[JD]

\Hasn’t Anna Kendrick expressed interest in playing Squirrel Girl? With a star of her stature, you’d think they’d make it happen.
(Nothing against Milana Vayntrub, but I only know here from the AT&T commercials. I have no idea whether she’s capable of carrying a film or TV series.)

It was going to be an ensemble series, so she wasn't going to be carrying the whole thing herself.
As for Kendrick, she's probably either too busy, or to expensive for a series.

 

[UssGlenn]

I don't think this is what was said in the movie. When the stones are returned the divergent timelines collapse and cease to exist according to the ancient one.

I don't think the dialogue supports the reality collapse idea:

AO: "The Infinity Stones create what you experience as the flow of time. Remove one stone and that flow splits. Now, this may benefit your reality but my new one, not so much. In this new branched reality, without our chief weapon against the forces of darkness, our world will be over run. Millions will suffer. So, tell me Doctor, can your science prevent all that?"

BB:"No, but we can erase it. Because once we are done with the stones, we can return each one to it's own time line at the moment it was taken. So, chronologically, in that reality, they never left."

AO:"But you are leaving out the most important part. In order to return the stones, you have to survive."

BB:"We will, I will. I promise."

AO:"I can't risk this reality on a promise. It is the duty of the Sorcerer Supreme to protect the time stone."

Banner does use the term "erase" but in the context of preventing a bad future in the new timeline, not erasing it from existence.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Hasn’t Anna Kendrick expressed interest in playing Squirrel Girl? With a star of her stature, you’d think they’d make it happen.

(Nothing against Milana Vayntrub, but I only know here from the AT&T commercials. I have no idea whether she’s capable of carrying a film or TV series.)

She was on a scifi comedy series on Yahoo's attempt at a streaming service called Other Space. She was good on it and it was a funny show. Joel Hodgson was on it as their burned out engineer and Trace Beaulieu was his robot buddy.

Yahoo still has them uploaded. You have to dig around for them though.

 

[ITDUDE]

(Nothing against Milana Vayntrub, but I only know here from the AT&T commercials. I have no idea whether she’s capable of carrying a film or TV series.)

Watch Other Space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Space)
OMFG the best sci-fi show you never heard off!
She is awesome in it.

Edit: Damn it @Awesome Possum

 

[Awesome Possum]

Paul Feig created it, the second show he created after Freaks and Geeks. Both were pretty brilliant and cancelled way too soon.

 

[Captrek]

Thanks, @Awesome Possum and @ITDUDE . I’ll check it out.

 

[Trekker4747]

Okay, so I went and saw this last night and have been mostly thinking it over and processing it.

In terms of a grade I'd give it a flat-A. Part of me is kind of leaning towards an A- but this movie being the end of a saga that's spanned 22 movies over 11 years it deserves a good nod of respect for that achievement. It plays nicely as an end to the "original" MCU Avengers.

Anytime a movie dicks around with time-travel it obviously opens up a lot of questions and head scratching and this movie tries to get around that by flat-out saying you cannot change your own past and you only create divergent timelines. This "works" for the sake of the movie and the franchise in that it doesn't erase anything that's happened since the ending of Infinity War (that is anything that's happened in Shield or the Netflix series "the snap.")

The problem for me is that this sort of creates... Well, it creates a pretty damn bleak world even with everyone returning five years later. I mean, the world would be between decimated and moved on and now everyone just returns? We saw abandoned, desolate, city streets in ruins. I mean, the world is pretty damn fucked-up and it's hard to see how it could just go back to some level of "normal" once everyone returns. It's... Just a lot to grasp.

It sort of shadows Tony's line in the first Avengers movie, "we may not save the world but we can avenge it," but... Sheesh and Wow.

I know it'd been a... "cheaper" way to go but they should've just gone with the logic of them simply preventing Thanos' snap. I mean, if he can reverse time to undo SW killing Vision, or Dr. Strange can reset the time several times over to bargain with Dormammu and undo the destruction of the city, I'd think they could've done the same thing to stop Thanos and "the snap."

And... Gamora is still gone? That kind of makes things... Odder for GotG:3 (even if she's replaced by the "past" Gamora, that still greatly impacts the relationship and history between her and the rest of the GotG.)

I really liked the stuff between Tony and Nebula on the Benatar, there was just a certain sweetness to it given Nebula's past. I would've liked to have seen their interaction with one another come more "full circle" with them playing flick the paper football somehow playing into them working together in the final battle.

The "Back to the Future: Part 2" style of seeing the previous movies from different perspectives was fun, like them watching Starlord dancing in the cave, but them seeing him dancing and singing to the song without the benefit of hearing the music. (As "we" are able to.)

Touching ending with Cap going back in time and spending it with Peggy but.... MAN does that open a lot of questions when it comes to returning the stones and without their containers.

I mean the "easiest" thing to do was probably to put the Space Stone back in the SHIELD base in the 1970s, even though he didn't have the Tesseract, well easier than that was probably handing over the Time Stone to the Ancient One. even if it was no long in the Amulet.

But....

How did he "sneak" through Asgard to return both Mjolnir and the Aether/Reality "Stone?" .... Did he inject it back into Jane? Did he take the Soul Stone back to Vormir amd run into the Red Skull? What happens when you take the Soul Stone BACK? Do you get the sacrifice back?

Did he take the Power Stone back to Morag? The Mind Stone back to the aftermath of the Battle of New York? (and Hydra) I mean... there's a LOT of questions there when it comes to that journey as it just doesn't make any sense if thought about for even a couple seconds, but him returning the stones (and Mjolnir) just seemed mostly shrugged off.

As for The Great Controversial Scene of 2019?

I didn't even notice it. Didn't register to me, and when I heard/saw people talking about it afterwards I was just like... "Huh? People are triggered by a heroic shot of all the female characters lined up?"



Glad I'm not set-off by such things.

But, overall, great movie and highly enjoyed it worth the journey we've made.

I'm kind of glad Captain Marvel had such a small role in this movie, for no reason other than I haven't seen Captain Marvel yet (been pretty busy lately) and didn't want to have to "deal" with a character I wasn't familiar with.

Professor Hulk? Loved it. (Though it sort of also goes with the "yadda, yadda, yadda" way of story telling that's impacted this and the previous Avengers: Infinity War where it seems like a lot of things happen off-screen and we're just kind of told "yeah, this happened in the intervening time. Accept it." In Infinity War it was Thanos getting off his ass after 20 movies and finally collecting all of the stones himself in ONE movie, here it was Bruce and Hulk working out their "issues" they were having in Infinity War to now co-existing at the same time. Yeah, five years have passed, but it just seems like quite a bit to sort of just gloss over.

And there has to be SOME story behind the rat that "accidentally" reactivated the Quantum Tunnel to let Ant-Man out. That just seems way too contrived and... gimmicky for this movie series for that to not have been "something" controlled by some other force.

Captain America wielding Mjolnir? That was great to finally see after the tease in Ultron.

Tony with his daughter was precious and sweet to see.

That's what I got for now, just some random thoughts as I think over the movie.

 

[UssGlenn]

The New Warriors project status is odd. It's never been officially killed. I still expect it to see the light of day someday. Maybe Disney+.

 

[theenglish]

Really, no one has a problem with? If it happened several here have already demonstrated they would. Wait until Anthony Mackie goes from The Falcon to Captain America (some here will take it as a liberal assault upon their delicate sensibilities). Absolutely no one got riled up when Thor was transformed into a woman.

Exactly. Given the era in which most characters were created it was natural to have them be predominantly white male, but there is nothing to say that a contemporary reboot of most characters should not be constrained by this rule. Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and Tony Stark are not defined by their skin color.

 

[David cgc]

Banner does use the term "erase" but in the context of preventing a bad future in the new timeline, not erasing it from existence.

Yeah, given that the Ancient One wasn't the one who introduced the idea that time-travel automatically created parallel universes, I'd take her illustration as more indicating that there's a generally beneficial big-picture flow of events that all timelines tend towards which requires all of the Infinity Stones to be present. Removing a stone is catastrophic on a history-of-the-universe level, while changes like Loki escaping New York or Thanos and his army disappearing are comparatively marginal and will eventually smooth out over decades, centuries, millennia, eons...

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

It was Steve--Peggy was a soldier and a spy and she knows that she needed to keep the information from the Steve in that timeline. (Of course, the in production real life reason is that the Russo brothers probably didn't have any idea that Steve's time travel would be written but it doesn't take a stretch of mental gymnastics to color the picture in.)

But elderly Peggy--in telling Steve to get on with his life--

"The world has changed. None of us can go back. All we can is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over."

The risk in telling him that (if the idea she was concealing future knowledge has any weight at all) is not knowing if he would do exactly that, whether with Sharon (in the original timeline he did develop romantic feelings for her, until she was unceremoniously dropped from the MCU) or another woman, which could prevent him from staying in the past.

As you point out, the filmmakers probably had no idea Steve was going to be a part of a time travel plot (for his own purposes), so the dialogue in The Winter Soldier has to be accepted as it was meant to be when the film was released in 2014: Steve being told to move on with his life, with no thought of alternate realities or time travel, which means Peggy married someone else.

 

[Awesome Possum]

But elderly Peggy--in telling Steve to get on with his life--

"The world has changed. None of us can go back. All we can is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over."

The risk in telling him that (if the idea she was concealing future knowledge has any weight at all) is not knowing if he would do exactly that, whether with Sharon (in the original timeline he did develop romantic feelings for her, until she was unceremoniously dropped from the MCU) or another woman, which could prevent him from staying in the past.

As you point out, the filmmakers probably had no idea Steve was going to be a part of a time travel plot (for his own purposes), so the dialogue in The Winter Soldier has to be accepted as it was meant to be when the film was released in 2014: Steve being told to move on with his life, with no thought of alternate realities or time travel, which means Peggy married someone else.

The Winter Soldier and Avengers Endgame were written by the same people and directed by the same people.

 

[Set Harth]

What happens when you take the Soul Stone BACK?

Red Skull goes, "Thanks, man!"

 

[theenglish]

Definitely a set-up for (maybe) Phase 4 and (definitely) Disney+

At least in that interview, the Russo's don't seem to say it was an alternate timeline. Although now I'm intrigued.

Even so, Black Panther himself didn't need to be black, at least based on the story. Killmonger could be a racist, and the attitude you describe from him above is quite racist, but T'Challa's race was not relevant to his character at all--other than this is how his creator envisioned him (which should be respected). Black Panther's race is not why he is awesome. His character is--black, white, purple, male or female, T'Challa is awesome.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what the movie was about and what the character was about. If T'Challa is not African then the story become Dances With Wolves or any other white savior film.

On the other hand, although MJ's hair color is a visual element in the comics like Lois' purple eyes, it has no effect on her character. Lana Lang was played by a brunette in Smallville. Now, that MJ's personality is entirely different in Homecoming actually does make it a different character.

 

[theenglish]

Brie didn’t say that white men shouldn’t review movies, that’s absurd. Just that a reviewer who is in the demographic that it was made for may connect to it better. Because of that we should hear more voices when it comes to reviews. More, not less. Adding more voices does not take away from anyone.

It doesn't take away but it dilutes, so suddenly you have a world in which the white, male voice isn't the dominant one any longer, or at least it has less weight than it used to. And that is what many white males (full disclosure--I am a white male) find scary and intimidating. People are scared of that their life long world view is changing.

 

[Awesome Possum]

It doesn't take away but it dilutes, so suddenly you have a world in which the white, male voice isn't the dominant one any longer, or at least it has less weight than it used to. And that is what many white males (full disclosure--I am a white male) find scary and intimidating. People are scared of that their life long world view is changing.

That's a sad worldview, their imagined superiority is entirely dependant on silencing everyone else because the mere idea of any disagreement causes it to collapse. It's like claiming you're the boxing champion of the world without having a single fight and refusing to take on any challengers.