Assvengers- Rear End Games

I thought Infinity Wars was pretty good.
It had a lot of plots going on and did a surprisingly good job of juggling them all.
It wasn’t without problems. The huge CGI battle near the end against hordes of CGI goblin things was boring and pointless and had no real tension to it.
But what really made the movie work was the ending.
If you haven’t seen it (and if you haven’t seen it by now you probably don’t care if I tell you), the ending involves big purple baddie Thanos clicking his fingers with his magic gauntlet and causing half of all living things to turn to dust and vanish.
This was a very shocking ending that did a great job of getting everyone hyped for the next one.
Where would the story go next after such an apocalyptic event?
My friend Red Ned is a cold hearted, soulless fucker, and he immediately saw the problem with this situation.
The next movie would be all about undoing everything that happened in the previous film. We’re fighting to reset the status quo.

The first third of the movie is a strangely dour and glum affair.
The characters are all down and dejected about the last films failure.
After the events of Infinity Wars, Ironman is lost in deep space along with cyborg blue chick Nebula (did I mention there are way too many characters in this film? If you are expecting me to explain who they all are you can fuck right off.)
This stuff is quite nice as Stark bonds with Nebula and shows her kindness even as his own inevitable death grows nearer and nearer, as oxygen, food and water run out. He even records a final message to Pepper Potts, expressing his final thoughts before the end.
But then Captain Marvel shows up and rescues them, flying them back to earth.
If you thought that sounds abrupt, you would be correct.
She just flies in and carries their ship back to earth, resolving all that tension for us in as anticlimactic a way as possible.

Our heroes manage to track down Thanos to another world where his is living peacefully, doing some farming.
He is heavily scarred and seemingly permanently debilitated.
He is just making breakfast when our heroes show up, beat him up and chop his arm off.
Now I know he’s evil and killed half the galaxy, but this still felt a bit weird to me. The fact they are beating him up now that he is helpless felt a bit unsavoury to see from my super heroes.
Thanos explains that he used the Infinity Stones a second time to wish the stones destroyed , crippling himself in the process.
There is then a really cool bit, maybe the most interesting part of the movie to me.
He speaks to Nebula, a character he has always treated horribly, abusing her and torturing her to help his own agenda without ay concern for her as a person.
For the first time in these movies, Thanos expresses regret for how he treated her, saying perhaps he was too harsh to her. This is the first time Thanos has expressed that he regrets any of his actions. Could it be a small chink in his emotional armour? Some sign that perhaps he could come to realise his insane schemes are misguided?
Could he finally reconcile with Nebula in some way?
But then Thor chops his head off so I guess the answer is NOPE.

So with Thanos dead, our heroes are left just kind of moping around.
Killing him didn’t improve their situation and his evil scheme still succeeded, so there doesn’t seem much for them to do other than be generally depressed.

At this point I just want to talk a little more about Captain Marvels role in this movie. It’s…weird.
As you might have noticed, she just sort of shows up.
There aren’t really any meaningful interactions between her and other characters.
She seems very uninterested in what’s going on, and never expresses much emotion about having lost anyone.
She is very over confident and kind of irritating, as she smugly expresses that Thanos won’t be much of a problem now she is around.
To make matters worse, all the other characters start doing a weird thing where they start shilling for how awesome she is.
Tony Stark (looking really gaunt and unwell) starts ranting angrily at Captain America about how the Avengers all failed and are frauds, but then pauses to say except for Captain Marvel who seems great and is exactly the kind of new blood they need around here, before resuming his rant. It honestly feels like they stoped the movie to tell me that Captain Marvel is a great character I should really like.
When Thor shows up he pauses to mention that he really likes her and even sarcastic asshole Rocket Raccoon stops to mention how cool she is.
I was worryingly reminded of the Simpsons character Poochie, the dreadful addition to Itchy and Scratchy.
I was half expecting Captain America to say “captain Marvel sure is one outrageous dude! She’s totally in my face!”
Fortunately, like Poochie, Captain Marvel almost immediately returns to her home planet.
Well okay, not her home planet, but she says there are problems on other planets too so she is going to take care of those.
She then leaves the movie.
So erm...thanks for that Captain Marvel?
The whole situation is really strange. It feels like the director was told he had to include her character and so did the absolute bare minimum with her before writing her out. She honestly had about 10 - 15 minutes of screen time, where she didn;'t do much and then went.
She shows up again near the end for what amounts to a glorified cameo, but what just happened was the bulk her of her screen time.
I feel rather sorry for the people who went to see Captain Marvel’s stand along film in the belief it would involve some vital information to understand End Game, because what I’ve just discussed is all her involvement in the film.
I am pretty sure you could do a fan edit to take her out and no one would notice.
Unfortunately, awkward as her leaving was, like Poochie’s departure it came as a relief. This strange, unlikeable character that every body seems to love for no reason had me cringing in my seat. When she abruptly left, I was honestly relieved to realise she probably wouldn’t be coming back.

So it starts to feel like the story has run out of gas...until Ant Man emerges from a portal in the back of a van.
I didn’t watch Antman and the Wasp, a film they didn’t hype as being important to understanding End Game, so I’ve no idea what that was all about.
I assume he got stuck in some microscopic universe or something.
Anyway he explains that time passes differently for him when he was in the tiny verse and so they should be able to time travel.
Yeah and time passes slower for me when I’m bored at work, but I’ve never thought I could be uninterested enough to go back to dinosaur times.
But all the characters treat this weird nonsense he’s talking as making complete sense and go to get Tony Stark to help them.
Tony is now living in a cabin with his wife and new daughter.
He says he doesn’t want to work on time travel for them so they have to go and get the Hulk to help with it.
Bored yet? Cause this was really fucking boring to watch.
I don’t want a super hero film where the best way to describe it is “pottering around.”

Also, yes we are doing time travel now.
As soon as the characters started talking about this I felt a bit dejected.
Time Travel is the laziest way to resolve a cliff hanger.
It renders all drama and consequences meaningless as you can just instantly fix anything no matter how bad.
Star Trek Voyager used to do this all the damn time to the point that I stopped going “how will Voyager get out of this one?” and started saying “How will they fix it with time travel this time?”
There is literally no problem, no matter how ridiculous that Time Travel can’t fix it.
It’s a cheap get out of jail free card for any problem a writer may have got their characters into.
Considering that a big selling point of this film was how they would resolve the big dilemma at the end of the last one, learning it is just going to be put right with time travel was supremely disappointing.

Last time we saw the Hulk he was having a crisis of confidence. Having been soundly beaten by Thanos and was refusing to emerge when Banner wanted to transform.
The idea of Hulk becoming afraid was an interesting concept, so I was interested to see how this would be resolved.
But like everything else from the last movie, this character arc is completely discarded.
In between movies, Bruce Banner and the Hulk have some how reconciled so they now have the big strong Hulk body but Banner’s personality. Yep, that all got sorted out off camera.
Worse yet, this new Hulk effectively erases the previous Hulk entirely.
So if you liked Hulk raging out and going “Hulk smash” that character has died between movies and he now acts like a smart scientist who just looks like Hulk.

What I find so strange about this film is that everything is so damn awkward.
It feels like they made Infinity war with literally no idea where it was going or how any of this stuff could be resolved.
It almost feels like one writer finished part one and then just handed it off to someone else with no further information.
Its rather astounding to realise that it was the same writers for both.
Why they are unable to come up with sensible resolutions to problems THEY INVENTED is beyond me.

Hulk is now super smart and good at science, but can’t quite figure out how to make time travel work, even with Antman’s Pim Particles (which have the ability to shrink things and now also do time travel cause those things obviously go together.)
Luckily, Tony Stark gives it some thought over the weekend up at his cabin and figures out how to get the time travel working.
So that was lucky.
I always assumed inventing time travel was more difficult than that, but I guess that’s why I’m not a scientist…or indeed a magical wizard which is what Tony seems to be at this point.

So far the movie is depressing, boring and directionless…
In part 2 of this review we will see how the movie stops having these problems and comes up with a whole new set of problems.