Assvengers part 3

So we come to the final act of the movie.
But we have a problem.
The villain was killed early on in an anticlimactic way.
The main dilemma in the movie (undoing the Thanos finger click) has been fixed, also in a very anticlimactic way.
So at this point there basically isn’t anything left to do in the movie.
But all modern marvel movies have to end in a gigantic, pointless CGI battle sequence, so Thanos shows up from the past to start shit.

You see, Thanos in the past has his own past version of robot woman Nebula (who used to be a baddie) who picks up signals from modern good nebula while good Nebula is in the past.
Fuck this shit sounds stupid when you have to explain it, doesn’t it?
So from this information, past Thanos (who has not met the avengers yet) realises that the Avengers are a grup from the future from after he succeeds but also dies, who have gone back in time to revert his evil ways.
He switches bad Nebula for good Nebula and uses some stolen Ant Man magic particles to transport his entire giant mega space battleship onto earth in the present.
Actually writing this, I just realised that this time machine also makes you appear anywhere you want, including on other planet.
So if you time travelled to one second in the future, you can go anywhere in the universe in one second.
Seems kind of a useful invention when you stop and think about it, but the fact I’m thinking of this while writing this down should give you an idea of how much the people in this movie make use of this ridiculous machines potential.

So Thanos is now in the past and ready for a big final battle.
His plan has been foiled, but now he wants to take the stones and redo his plan.
Yes, the threat comes down to “You know that thing in the last film? Well I’m going to try and do that again!”
BUT WAIT!
We are UPPING the stakes this time!
Seeing how the Avengers refused to accept what he had done, Thanos decides he is instead going to destroy EVERYTHING this time and just start the universe over.
This is so painfully lame and stupid on many levels.
Thanos’ whole character was interesting because he was obsessed with his insane goal that he legitimately believed would help the universe and would pay any price to achieve it.
But now past Thanos seeing that people weren’t happy about what he’d done has IMMEDIATELY completely changed his whole plan.
Shit if its that easy to change his mind, maybe just ask really really nicely if he could just not kill people? I mean he’s changed to a totally different goal once, maybe he will do it again? Worth a go, I recon.
This reduces Thanos from the dedicated fanatic following an overly rigid, extreme view point to just a cartoon bad guy who wants to destroy even MORE people.

Most people, myself included, actually misunderstood Thanos’ plan in the first movie.
The general understanding was that he intended to kill half of all intelligent life in order to stop over population causing all civilisation to collapse.
This was evidenced by us seeing flashbacks to Thanos initially trying to do this by having his soldiers literally line up and shoot half the people on each planet he came to.
My understanding was that Thanos had initially been trying to bring “balance” to the galaxy through these crude means, but realised it wasn’t enough and started seeking the Infinity Stones as a way to finally solve the problem.
But it turns out no, that’s not actually what he was doing.
His ACTUAL plan is to remove half of all animal life.
Now his original plan is pretty bonkers, totally immoral and has some problems.
A lot of people asked “won’t the same problem eventually reoccur when the population recovers?”
I wasn’t too concerned with this as Thanos never spelled out the exact details of his plan so we could fill in the blanks a bit.
I assumed the threat of him, or someone else, doing it again was meant to making people be more careful about over population, or perhaps he just intended to reuse the stones every few thousand years, or maybe he was doing what he could and in ten thousand years the universe would have to come up with another solution.
But under the correct understanding of his plan…Thanos is a fucking idiot.
Animals aren’t intelligent like people so generally fall into some kind of balance with each other. Their populations are controlled by disease, resources and predators and since they aren’t smart enough to overcome these barriers they have a sort of natural control on them.
Without people messing with the balance of things, animals are pretty stable, so killing them doesn’t help anything.
But worse then that, it actually HURTS Thanos’ goals!
Animals are the resource that people use.
If the people farm cows and you kill half the people and half the cows…other than disruption you’ve reduced the resources the people have just as much as the people!
Species do not reproduce at the same rate as each other. Predators are less numerous than prey (for obvious reasons). Killing half one species and half of another is not equivalent.
Killing half the rats in the world in the long term wont do much, but killing half the elephants or whales? You may well have just doomed those species.
Species with fewer individuals would recover far slower and their genetic diversity would suffer far more.
For a guy who wants balance, Thanos just fucked mother nature up the ass with his hair brained scheme.
I guess its good that Thanos has completely changed his world view and philosophy on a dime since they’ve now made his original philosophy completely idiotic.
(Also…does this mean back when he was shooting half the people with guns….did he used to shoot half the animals too? That seems time consuming.)

So Thanos fights with Captain America, Thor and Ironman using a really goofy ass sword with two blades.
At one point Thanos is tries to ram Thor’s axe blade into Thor’s chest, mirroring what Thor did to him at the end of Infinity War.
At this point another problem with this whole set up became evident to me.
Past Thanos has never met these people before.
He isnt’ the same character that our heroes battled in the last movie, he doesn’t remember any of the stuff he did with them. From his point of view this is the first encounter he has ever had with them.
Ramming the axe into Thor isn’t him taking cruel revenge for what was done for him, it’s a meaningless coincidence.

Speaking of Thor, something I haven’t talked about yet is Thor’s arc in this movie.
Thor tried to kill Thanos in the last film, but failed and in this film killed him after it was way too late and was meaningless.
This leads to Thor being depressed and becoming fat and washed up.
I kinda liked this.
I know a lot of people didn’t but I thought Thor losing his way and having to get back on track was kinda interesting.
And how does this resolve?
Well it doesn’t of course!
Thor never has some big hero moment where he finally beats Thanos and redeems his earlier failure.
He helps during the final battle, but so does every other fucker, so he is just another good guy in the crowd. He doesn’t contribute anything special so never achieves any satisfying redemption.
He’s just happy again at the end cause I guess it’s the end of the movie.

So anyway, Thanos doesn’t axe Thor but he does slap our three heroes around.
To be fair this bit starts to seem a bit exciting because it’s the final movie and maybe some characters are going to die, especially since at the time everyone knew that some of the characters weren’t coming back because the actors wanted out.
Eventually Ironman and Thor are defeated and only Captain America, his shield broken, is left standing.

Thanos than deploys his armies from his big space battleship.
Remember the generate CGI monsters from the end of avengers?
And the generic grey guys from guardians of the galaxy?
And the weird four armed CGI things at the end of Infinity wars?
Yes, Thanos has brought together an all star cast of lame, ineffective minions for this one! There are even a few new kinds of pointless CGI losers mixed in.
Why Thanos is deploying them now instead of killing Captain America is because they want to set up a big final battle and fuck having internal logic.
But just when it seems like all hope is lost, a load of magic portals open and loads of Wakandan warriors, Asgarians and all the other goods guys and heroes who got turned to dust at the end of the last films.
What follows is one of the biggest, dumbest, least interesting battle sequences ever committed to film.

As I already mentioned, Thanos’ armies are fucking shit.
I’ve seen them get totally battered easily in multiple films at this point.
They have not only never won a battle, they’ve even come close.
The last film had angry Africans with spears killing them! Not firing energy blasts from special Wakandan spears, just running up to them and stabbing them. This is an effective tactic against Thanos’ troops.
Strangely amongst the heroes to show up is Tony Starks wife, the hilariously badly named Pepper Potts. She now has her own Iron man suit (this is a thing in the comic apparently…but there was also a comic where Spiderman accidentally killed Mary Jane by giving her cancer because his blood is radioactive…AND SO IS HIS JIZZ! So maybe we shouldn’t translate every shit thin the comics did onto the big screen, huh?) I assume Pepper learned how to pilot and fight in an Ironman suit in the same way the Hulk did all his character development off screen.
I am assuming they probably did it together and had a whole whacky adventure that we didn’t’ get to see. I am sure it was really emotional and exciting.

Since Thanos is from the past his adopted children, his elite team of minions, are also back.
We’ve already seen them all get killed once in the last film, and seemingly the past versions of them are much more shitty then the present ones were, as they are all pretty useless in this battle, getting killed off in short order by the resurrected heroes.

There is a hilarious bit where Scarlet Witch (a character I defy anyone to give a fuck about) says she is going to get revenge on Thanos and he responds something like “I don’t know who you are”, which is true! He hasn’t met her yet and the things she is mad about (him killing Vision…another character no one cares about) he hasn’t actually done yet.

Thanos realises his shit army is failing horribly despite many of them having guns and their opponents just running directly at them waving spears.
So he gives the order for his big giant battle ship to start bombarding the battlefield, blowing up both sides.
The good guys use magic and special powers to stop getting hit by the bombardment too much, so it isn’t super effective.
But then, Captain Marvel comes back from space!
How did she know to come back? Who the fuck knows! But she’s here now and she’s out to make the battle even less exciting than it already was!
She smashes right through the battleship immediately destroying it.
It doesn’t crash down on the fighting below or explode and kill everyone, but crashes neatly out of the way. How lucky! Its almost like its’ a just a big shitty lump of CGI that has no weight or substance to it.
Captain Marvel basically does for the Avengers what Superman does for the Justice League. Captain Marvel is just so powerful that she renders all the other characters redundant. A giant space ship that had the entire godo guy army seeking cover just got destroyed by her by just flying into it.
Why the hell is anyone else even needed? She is literally more powerful then all the other good guys put together.

The battle goes on from a while and very little of interest happens.

One bit that stood out was a really weird bit where Captain Marvel lands and strikes a pose and then all the other women characters step up and post behind her one after another.
Apparently you can just stop fighting mid battle and all strike poses without getting killed.
I think it was meant to be some kind of feminist thing, where we are showing all the women girl powering together.
But most of these characters don’t know each other and have never met. Why are they all posing together? They’ve literally never seen each other before. I guess the bonds of the sisterhood over rides actually knowing who anyone is.
Also, the power level differences between these characters is RIDICULOUS!
Captain Marvel has already been established to be a demigod who doesn’t need help from anyone or anything.
Then you’ve got Valkyrie and Iron-wife who are pretty powerful and can at least contribute.
And then you’ve got black panthers sisters with some sort of guns on her hands and Mantis, who has never shown any fighting skills of any kind. In what possible way is Mantis going to contribute usefully to a pitch battle with thousands of CGI space goblins?
The scene doesn’t even work as a “girl power” moment because it just served as a reminder of how second tier all these characters are.
Black panthers sister, Tony’s wife, Mantis…its mostly just family members and side kicks.
They had to scrap the barrel to find enough women to do this scene, and the end result was freaking stupid anyway.

Now part way through the battle past Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy (who died last film, but time travel brought her back so does anything matter any more?)
shoots evil past Nebula.
Right so we just killed someone’s past self and this does…nothing.
Present Nebula is not affected in anyway.
The movie just carries on.
Past versions of people are apparently totally separate characters to the future versions of them and the two have no connection.

Now I was once again thinking of better story lines during all this garbage, trying to make what I was looking at make some kind of sense.
When Thanos first saw the heroes in the past, I assumed it was going to be a clever set up.
I thought he would use this knowledge (and the fact that events that have been observed cannot be changed) to set up a contingency plan.
So in the present, it turns out Thanos is not really dead and actually set things up so he was ready for the heroes when they arrived to kill him, since he had already see what they would do.
Effectively Thanos would have turned the tables on the time heist, setting up his OWN secret heist to out wit them. So when the heroes thought time travel was out manuvering Thanos, it was really just another part of his evil plans.
Thanos in the present would then return, explaining that he out played them all along and would now destroy them.

But that would be clever or interesting and use the time travel rules in a clever way so fuck that.

Instead the time travel rules seem to be imploding in on themselves.
The original rules no longer make sense, since bringing people from the past clearly completely changes the past.
But the alternate time line thing ALSO doesn’t make sense. If we take people out of the past that was supposed to cause other time lines to collapse, which is now not being addressed as people are getting killed and not being put back. But even worse, later on the heroes start time travelling to put thing back where they got them.
If time travel creates an alternate time line each time, its impossible to return anything, as everytime you go back you just create a new time line.
So if I took the infinity stone from the past, there are two time lines.
1- Past with no stone.
2- The present.

If I try to return the stone, I just create another timeline.
1- past with no stone
2-past with stone returned
3- the present.
If time travel creates new timelines it is literally impossible to return to the same past time you were in before as it will always be a new time line you just made!

Does time travel in this movie have any rules? I mean any at all?
I know it’s a cliché to say something just does what ever the writers want, but there is no other way to describe this twaddle.

Thanos starts knocking the heroes around to get back the Infinity stones, eventually getting them and his gauntlet back.
Captain Marvel then attacks him and grabs onto the gauntlet, showing she is stronger than him.
Note that this is Thanos WITH the gauntlet, so him as maximum power.
Thanos easily beat the hulk when he only had one or two stones in the first film, but even with all of them, Captain Marvel is kicking his ass.
Actually you know what? Captain Marvel is worse than Superman in Justice League.
At least Supes is an actual important member of that team.
Captain Marvel was barely in the film then just shows up at the end to make everyone look bad.
Thanos pulls the power stone out of the gauntlet and punches Captain Marvel with it, knocking her out of the way so someone else (ie, the actually characters of this film!) can have chance to do something.
I don’t know why the power stone in the gauntlet was too weak, but the power stone in his hand is strong enough, but I think the people writing this film just wanted it to be over at this point.

Thanos is about to click his fingers and redo his super snap but then realises the stones have been taken! Tony Stark nicked em!
So Tony does his own snap, this time turning Thanos and his grey goblin hordes of horribleness to dust.

What made Thanos an interesting bad guy was that he had a point of view, an ideology and clear goals.
When the bad guy has a philosophy, the heroes are fighting not just an physical battle, but an ideological one, where the villain is not only killed but proved to be wrong.
If you want an example of this, think about the end of Return of the Jedi. Its not a perfect film by any means, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
The Emperor believes he is all powerful, and that his evil view on things is ultimately the correct one. But Luke refuses to accept this and casts aside his lightsaber, proving that the Emperors hate fuelled, violent idea about how to control the galaxy are wrong.
The Emperor then drops any pretence and just starts blasting Luke with lightning, torturing him and aiming to eventually kill him.
This is the most direct representation of what the Emperor stands for, violent and hatred as the ultimate solution to all problems.
Fortunately, Vader sees what Luke is doing and what the Emperor is doing, is redeemed and turns against his evil master.
Thus the Emperor is undone because love is stronger than hate, good is better than evil etc etc.
Luke didn’t win cause he just beat the Emperor in a sword fight!
He beat him because Luke’s world view was superior to the Emperor’s world view and the movie validated this.
The Emperor is beaten physically (he falls down a pit and explodes) but he also lost the war of ideas.

Compare this to Thanos.
Is anything Thanos believes ever proven wrong?
Do our heroes have any solutions to offer, or even any comment on, the issue of over population and lack of resources that Thanos warned about?
Does Thanos realise he was wrong? Or that his life was misspent?
No, he just realises that he should have kept a better grip on the magic rocks so no one else could pocket them.
We don’t earn learn that using Infinity Stones to dust vast numbers of people is bad, its just you have to dust the bad people, not the good people.

When I was talking about alternate version where Thanos realises that Tony loving his daughter is better than Thanos sacrificing his daughter for his insane goals, the point was to not just have Thanos lose but have Thanos be WRONG!
Thanos presented his world view with total confidence, I wanted to see that confidence proven to be misguided.
Even if we don’t have Thanos realise his ideas are wrong, I wanted it shown to the audience.

The Emperor lost because love is more powerful than hate.
Thanos lost because Tony is better at pick pocketing than you might have expected.

Tony dies from the strain of the Infinity Stones because if he stayed in these movies and Robert Downey Jr’s salary continued to increase at the same rate by avengers 5 he would have to be paid more money than the GDP of planet earth.

After this, Captain America is sent back in time with the Infinity stones to put them back where they were in order to stop changing history…or putting them back to stop the other time lines falling apart….or I have no fucking idea this time travel makes no sense.
However, after doing his mission, Captain America doesn’t come back through the time machine.
Instead they realise he is sat near by, now an old man, having come back to the present the “long way round.”
I thought the time travel sent you to another time line, so how did Captain America return to the same time line he was in? Are we back to Hulks time travel rules again? Are there any rules to time travel left at this point?
Considering this is “End Game” I was actually surprised at how few characters died.
Obviously all the dusted people came back, but we already new that was going to happen so I wont hold that against them.
In the last film Vision got killed (and no fucks were given.)
Loki and Gamora appeared to die, but time travel has put them both back alive again.
They didn’t’ even kill off some minor ones like Warmachine in order to up the stakes a bit.
Thanos didn’t actually kill any other heroes. Ironman and Blackwidow committed suicide, Hulk changed character between movies and crippled himself with the magic rocks and Captain America chose to stay in the past and get crappy old man make up.
So really for the final enemy, Thanos was incredibly underwhelming.
I mean unless there are big crowd of angry vision fans protesting that I don’t know about.

I don’t like to bullshit you guys, so I will lay things out honestly.
I did enjoy this film in the cinema.
Being in a cinema is fun and engaging and a movie has to be pretty fucking horrible not to be enjoyable on the big screen to some extent.
But it left me hollow, unsatisfied.
My main feeling was “is that it?”
And the more I thought about it, the more the more surface level noise and excitement of the silver screen fell away and what was I left with?
This was the culmination of a decade of movies, building up to what was supposed to be the huge final pay off and it was all just disappointing.
After its initial release everyone seemed pretty positive about the film, but as time passed people have started to sour on it.
I think everyone really wanted this film to be good and tried to convince themselves it had worked.
But this film is like a meal of thin gruel.
Yes, technically you’ve had the meal. It ticks all the boxes of what would be considered a meal. You aren’t starving to death now.
But it wasn’t very tasty, it wasn’t very filling and it wasn’t very nutritious.
And the more you think about it, the more you wonder why that was all you got.

I don’t think people are angry at this film, it feels more like it just didn’t make much impact on them.
Look at all the memes that flooded the internet after infinity wars, how much everyone talked about people turning to dust.
There is nothing like that for End Game. It just didn’t spark that much excitement in people’s imaginations once the credits rolled.

I am sure these MCU movies will carry on making ridiculous money at the box office, but for me personally, I’m just not interested after this.
I let myself get hyped for the big ending and it didn’t amount to anything.
Why would I get excited again for another new build up? Especially now all the good characters have been replaced with newer, lamer ones.
Black Panther, Antman and Captain Marvel all seem freaking boring. Bennedict Cumberbatch is doing an embarrassing American accent and waving his hands around like an idiot to cause ill defined magic effects. I had enough of magic with Tony Stark’s bullshit science in this movie!
Spiderman is the only one that seems interesting and I still couldn’t be bothered to go see his new movie.

End Game showed me that nothing in these films really matters, there is no end to any of it.
One movie just sets up another movie, the characters will stick around till the actors literally refuse to show up any more.

Do you still care about the MCU?
If you do, I just want you to know that everyone is entitled to an opinion...except for you.
You are objectively wrong.
I hope you feel guilty about that.
You really, really should.