Unpacking Endgame. Of All The Problems...

You can probably find a couple dozen places to go and chew over all the difficulties that the time travel element of Avengers-Endgame present.  There are lots of them.  The filmmakers tried to gloss over that by using a convoluted "Hollywood time travel isn't how it works" strategy but it only works for the 3 hours you are in the movie's reality.  When you emerge...clipping all the branches doesn't really cut it.

I'm going to touch on the three things about the movie that still bug me even after watching it the third time.  None of these make it a bad movie, just one that leaves me scratching my head and with a bit of an uncomfortable squirm as a chaser.  The film itself still impresses and even manages to bring an impactful "big weepy" ending even on the third viewing.  When it comes to superhero stuff, I'm notoriously easy to please, but I think the consensus is that Avengers stuck the landing here.

My first quibble is not even time travel related.  It's something I thought was just Thanos stylin' in the first film but that turns out to actually be necessary.  The SNAP.  Apparently, the 6 most powerful pieces of reality in existence not only require proximity but an actual physical gesture.  A damned specific gesture at that.  It seems that only a creature with an opposable thumb that manages to mount all six Infinity Stones on a glove can wield them and only with an actual "snap" of the middle finger off the thumb onto the nexus of the ring finger and ball of the thumb.  Apparently the simple act of stopping this gesture is enough to stop whatever intended alteration of reality the user is planning.  I assumed that Thanos was just being showy in Infinity War when he used the "snap" since he had told the gang that he could do what he planned "like that" with a snap of his fingers before he actually got his hand on the collected Stones.  Nope.  A being powerful enough to hold his universe spanning murder binge in his head and pass that inconceivable thought through the stones to make it a reality still has to snap his actual fingers.  That just seems incredibly arbitrary to me.  What if a creature without humanoid digits manages to collect all six Stones?  Sorry pal.  No opposable thumb, no universal genocide for you. 

Problem number two and it's the kind of thing that ALL time travel stories fall apart over.  Current Nebula kills her younger self and yet, she's still kickin'.  Now maybe Nebula the Younger only took a flesh wound to the chest from her killbot future self but it sure looked like she wasn't getting up.  I get all the "the past is now your future" stuff they were shovelling but this one seems a little tough to get around.  Captain America has to return all the time stones to exactly where and when they were before all this to avoid horrible paradoxes, but a dead past version of a person still alive in the here and now gets a pass?  Captain Janeway's head would literally explode.

Number three.  I had to do my research on this one.  At first I was totally aghast because I misremembered Agent Sharon Carter's relationship to Cap's gal Peggy Carter.  It is thankfully less icky to know that Sharon Carter is Peggy Carter's grand-niece than what I originally thought.  Still.  Steve Rogers, the upstanding Captain America, will one day be (at least) flirting with his wife's (?) sibling's granddaughter.  As unfair as it would be to blame Cap for this tangentially incestuous scenario since he had NO way to know at the time...still...borderline icky.

There are many, many other things that don't really work once you dissect them.  Do they ruin Endgame for me?  Not one little bit.  I'm still grinning my way through the final "Avengers...Assemble" moment  of the film and loving every second of the All Girl Power interlude during the battle.  I still get teary when Captain America's legacy gets passed along and when Morgan Stark watches Tony's hologram message.  I'm still laughing at the melted ice cream that is the New Thor and loving the Mjolnir moment.  It's glorious on a ton of levels, even if it leaves a few lingering questions. 

At the end of the run of Smallville in 2011 I was lamenting how few superheroes were getting film and television gigs.  Less than a decade later, superheroes are THE dominant box office and to a lesser extent, television genre.  At my last count there were close on a dozen tv shows from DC and a similar number from Marvel and we could expect between 3 and 6 BIG superhero films in a given year.  Since then there have been some shows that finished or were cancelled (Gotham, Arrow, the Netflix Marvel shows) and the Disney/Fox merger appears to be set to reduce the number of movies to something like 3 or 4 a year at most.  Warner Bros is waffling on their superhero content and while the CW stuff still chugs along and Disney has a few shows in the pipeline, I don't think it's a stretch to call this moment a peak in the superhero genre.

An excellent way to put a bow on an era.  Well done all.