Avengers: Endgame - Review │Blue Soup Blog

Last night, after quickly planning a post-spring-concert trip to Cinemark Theaters at Hampshire Mall, I joined the party super late and saw Avengers: Endgame. Surprisingly, this ended up being one of my favorite Marvel films in the last couple years so I thought I’d write a little pre-official-first-post review to christen the blog. It won’t be super in-depth— just some basic thoughts.

First, a little background since you guys don’t know me like that yet. I’ve been a pretty consistent MCU watcher since around when the second Iron Man came out. In the past couple years, however, I’ve dropped off a bit in keeping up on the films. Going into Endgame, I hadn’t seen Captain Marvel (I know, I know), Ant-Man and the Wasp, or Doctor Strange. I’ll probably get around to watching these movies in the next couple months but, for now, I only have a bit of basic info about them. 

As I said, I wasn’t really expecting to love this movie. Though I’m a big fan of the ending and generally enjoyed the film, I found Infinity War to be super repetitive and a bit fan-servicey in how it incorporated all the different characters in the MCU. It may be that Endgame just has fewer characters, making juggling everyone less difficult, but I was actually really impressed at how the Russo brothers balanced each storyline and all of the different crossings over of characters and films. The movie rarely seemed to sacrifice the character arcs or placement/timeline principles for a laugh or a push to get the audience excited. (Not that there weren’t countless moments that made me laugh or made my suppressed little fangirl heart flutter— that mix of comedy and genuinely lovely lighthearted moments are what make Marvel movies great). As someone who naturally notices character development over plot, I particularly appreciated how each character— even less central characters such as Valkryrie— had their own path and purpose within the overarching plot of the film. I think giving them that attention made the interactions between characters (and ultimately between worlds) much more organic and less gimmicky than the over-saturation of Infinity War.

Now, let’s get into some SPOILERS.

Quickly, I just want to give a little shoutout to my favorite Avenger, Thor. Looking back, Thor’s Endgame storyline seems slightly silly but I am super biased and I love Thor so I don’t really care. He was hilarious and the fact that he braided both his hair AND beard with a strike of lightning may be my favorite thing in the movie and my new #1 superpower (forget sitting in a chair for seven hours getting box braids I could get box braids every other week! this is a black girls dream, people).

Before getting into the big stuff, something on the smaller side that I want to highlight about this movie is the attention to detail in the inclusion of cameos— particularly in the time travel scenes. Returning to moments from past films could have easily become contrived and grow old fast, but I genuinely felt excited about seeing these scenes in a new light. I think this worked largely due to an attention to detail in balancing what (and whom) to include and leave out. As a film student, I also loved how a lot of the more on-the-nose callbacks to past films functioned through the inclusion of not just iconic characters and moments, but also iconic shots. The most obvious examples of this were the throwbacks to the original Avengers. First, we saw the repetition shot in which the camera dollys around each of the Avengers as the get ready to fight (a shot probably used in every single promotion of any showing of the original Avengers movie.) Then, we saw one of the very last shot of the first Avengers— which shows Loki’s perspective looking up at all the Avengers as Hawkeye points his arrow right at him— but from behind. I particularly liked this call back because it is so easily recognizable and exciting without being too in your face in its referencing.

Let’s talk about Iron Man and Captain America. I won’t say that Tony Stark’s death was the most unexpected of deaths in this movie— the daughter, the conversation with his father, and just the niceness of it all starting and ending with Iron Man was too hard to pass up. However, despite its predictability, the execution of Tony Stark’s death was written and filmed in a way which neither felt forced nor overly mushy. Just the right amount of mush. Though I’m not quite sure how Tony got the stones from Thanos, I thought it was an interesting twist to incorporate the stones into the Iron Man suit so I’m not too concerned about that detail.

Captain America’s ending was another aspect of the film that I was not expecting to like as much as I did. I know Cap stans are going to completely disagree with me but in the past couple of MCU films I have found Captain America as a character to be unendingly bland. I find his inner conflict surrounding his position as a superhero both compelling and entertaining; I’ve just never found him that interesting as a character since his first film. However, the way in which this movie incorporated everything that has happened to Steve since his de-frosting with his past-in-the-past was genuinely engaging and allowed his storyline to come together cohesively and authentically. Also, the butt jokes didn’t hurt.

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This movie was not perfect and though I thoroughly enjoyed it there were definitely moments the three-hour film could have done without. I’ve never really been a fan of Hawkeye so many of the scenes revolving around him fell a bit flat. I know they’ve tried to give his character some more depth throughout the first three films but, in all honesty, I’ve never found myself interested in his point of view or character development and many of those attempts (i.e. randomly giving him a family in Age of Ultron) were completely transparent. The main scene in which I think Hawkeye’s involvement fell flat was Black Widow’s death during the soul stone sequence. I fully understand how the pairing made sense in the larger scheme of the Avengers series— and I did like the little call back to Budapest; however, just spending that much time on a character that historically has not garnered much interest made Natasha’s death lose some of the emotional poignancy I think it deserved. Especially considering that the MCU has often been criticized for their lack of attention to Black Widow, focusing her death around Hawkeye didn’t really work for me. I did, however, really enjoy the opening scene with Hawkeye and his family— it brought us right back into the story and set up the tone of the film excellently.

All in all, I think this might be my favorite Avengers movie since the first and much of that is due to the attention to storytelling and character that the film presented through both the writing and the directing.

I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts so feel free to reach out to me on twitter @bluesoupblog!

See you soon,

Sofia