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Now that I've had time to process everything.
My initial posts on Endgame were generally positive, I think; it's one incredibly impressive callback to all the things we loved about the MCU.
After a while, though, the bad shit seeps through, like, well, a rotting corpse set out for a showing.
Probably four key things that bugged me. Except that the Tony thing doesn't really bug me; I just figured that people would want to know.
0. I like time-travel as a rule. I love Back to the Future. I love Twelve Monkeys (original Bruce Willis flavour). I love Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Multiverses are incredibly enjoyable to play with in Buffy, and the Stargates, and Eureka, and so forth.
But...I hate what they did in Endgame. They start off saying there's one timeline and they can't fuck it up, then they fuck it up nine ways to Yggdrasil and then Loki takes the Tesseract and Steve goes back to a timeline in which he did stick with Peggy but still manages to turn up in the original timeline where he didn't and wait, no, what, ARGH!?!?
Yes, I know, multiverses, etc. But they said they had to be careful not to fuck up the timeline, implying that it was a bad thing - and then they went all out and fucked it up. Pick a line and stick to it, ffs!
If your flavour of time travel involves changing the timeline (Back to the Future) then sure, go for it. If your flavour of time travel is 'what has happened has happened' (Twelve Monkeys), then absolutely fabulous, give it to me hard. If you're going to have alternate alternate universes (in the immortal emphasis of Jack O'Neill with Two Ls) then just swing with it. Don't tell us one thing and then change your mind halfway through!
And that is how I feel about the time travel in Endgame. *sigh*
1. I think it's shit that Nat got the short end of the death stick, particularly after Gamora already got stuck with dead in IW. That said, while contextually, it's a seriously problematic death (the only woman in both original teams dies, and they both die in the same circumstances? And Nat is specifically listed as childless, the man she loves more than anything in the universe - and who apparently loves her back since her sacrifice at Vormir actually produces the Soul stone - has a children with another woman with whom he's a family), at least it's a meaningful one in the immediate context of the story.
2. I'm actually okay with Tony's death. I mean, it's heartbreaking but it's a fitting end, if you know what I mean. It has meaning. It does BIG things. And he had more screentime than absolutely anyone else in the series except possibly Steve and even that's pretty debatable because Cap3 was half Tony.
3. Steve's ending. Sorry, but America's ass ain't so attractive after he's been sitting on it for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years and doing sweet fuck-all while the world burned, rights were fought for and activists died, and Bucky whiled his years away as a HYDRA stooge. SORRY. DO NOT WANT.
Also, the confusion about 'single timeline' vs 'multiverse timelines' means that, yes, if Steve got old with Peggy, then he didn't do anything because in the timeline that we've watched through the 22 movies, all those things happened in spite of Steve growing old with Peggy which...no. Just. No.
That's not a happy ending. That's not heroic. That's not worthy of picking up the Hammer. It just isn't.
--
Infinity War was a mill that just chewed everything up into little pieces of dust and tosses them everywhere.
Endgame gathers the bits of dust together, stuffs it all into its cinematic maw, masticates it, and then spews it out and thinks this is pretty neat - hey, look, some chunks are still recognisable, after all, and didn't you like that bit of corn back when it was fresh on the cob?
Let's put it this way. I can appreciate what they were trying to do; but it wasn't the ending that I wanted for the MCU.
My initial posts on Endgame were generally positive, I think; it's one incredibly impressive callback to all the things we loved about the MCU.
After a while, though, the bad shit seeps through, like, well, a rotting corpse set out for a showing.
Probably four key things that bugged me. Except that the Tony thing doesn't really bug me; I just figured that people would want to know.
0. I like time-travel as a rule. I love Back to the Future. I love Twelve Monkeys (original Bruce Willis flavour). I love Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Multiverses are incredibly enjoyable to play with in Buffy, and the Stargates, and Eureka, and so forth.
But...I hate what they did in Endgame. They start off saying there's one timeline and they can't fuck it up, then they fuck it up nine ways to Yggdrasil and then Loki takes the Tesseract and Steve goes back to a timeline in which he did stick with Peggy but still manages to turn up in the original timeline where he didn't and wait, no, what, ARGH!?!?
Yes, I know, multiverses, etc. But they said they had to be careful not to fuck up the timeline, implying that it was a bad thing - and then they went all out and fucked it up. Pick a line and stick to it, ffs!
If your flavour of time travel involves changing the timeline (Back to the Future) then sure, go for it. If your flavour of time travel is 'what has happened has happened' (Twelve Monkeys), then absolutely fabulous, give it to me hard. If you're going to have alternate alternate universes (in the immortal emphasis of Jack O'Neill with Two Ls) then just swing with it. Don't tell us one thing and then change your mind halfway through!
And that is how I feel about the time travel in Endgame. *sigh*
1. I think it's shit that Nat got the short end of the death stick, particularly after Gamora already got stuck with dead in IW. That said, while contextually, it's a seriously problematic death (the only woman in both original teams dies, and they both die in the same circumstances? And Nat is specifically listed as childless, the man she loves more than anything in the universe - and who apparently loves her back since her sacrifice at Vormir actually produces the Soul stone - has a children with another woman with whom he's a family), at least it's a meaningful one in the immediate context of the story.
2. I'm actually okay with Tony's death. I mean, it's heartbreaking but it's a fitting end, if you know what I mean. It has meaning. It does BIG things. And he had more screentime than absolutely anyone else in the series except possibly Steve and even that's pretty debatable because Cap3 was half Tony.
3. Steve's ending. Sorry, but America's ass ain't so attractive after he's been sitting on it for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years and doing sweet fuck-all while the world burned, rights were fought for and activists died, and Bucky whiled his years away as a HYDRA stooge. SORRY. DO NOT WANT.
Also, the confusion about 'single timeline' vs 'multiverse timelines' means that, yes, if Steve got old with Peggy, then he didn't do anything because in the timeline that we've watched through the 22 movies, all those things happened in spite of Steve growing old with Peggy which...no. Just. No.
That's not a happy ending. That's not heroic. That's not worthy of picking up the Hammer. It just isn't.
--
Infinity War was a mill that just chewed everything up into little pieces of dust and tosses them everywhere.
Endgame gathers the bits of dust together, stuffs it all into its cinematic maw, masticates it, and then spews it out and thinks this is pretty neat - hey, look, some chunks are still recognisable, after all, and didn't you like that bit of corn back when it was fresh on the cob?
Let's put it this way. I can appreciate what they were trying to do; but it wasn't the ending that I wanted for the MCU.
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Endgame gathers the bits of dust together, stuffs it all into its cinematic maw, masticates it, and then spews it out and thinks this is pretty neat - hey, look, some chunks are still recognisable, after all, and didn't you like that bit of corn back when it was fresh on the cob?
Hah, VIVID!
Yes yes yes to all this, as you already know, particularly Nat and Steve. -- Did they HAVE TO frame Nat's death the exact same way they did Gamora's. Well yes, because they interpreted it as the "good version." But really, it points up how INTERCHANGEABLE and expendable women are, to these dudes, these four dudes who have had the privilege of writing this story and reaching millions of people, and who have, frankly, fluffed it. Thanos can sacrifice Gamora and Clint can...sacrifice Nat I guess, except they keep saying it was NAT doing it so that also doesn't make sense. It goes right back to the nasty interview the same writers did re Civil War, when people were all -- wait, Steve is kissing Sharon AFTER Peggy's funeral? and they said, quote, Sharon was distantly related to a woman he once kissed. Sharon didn't work out, so at the very beginning of EG we get "lost the love of my life," and just to pound it in, Steve looking at the compass as they go to Thanos's planet....which MAKES NO SENSE, because Peggy wasn't snapped. There's no way to bring her back. Why is he looking at her picture? It's nothing more than a contrived signal: This Is What Steve Lost.
I'm not even going to touch the whole "he's in a branch timeline and could have done all kinds of things BUT he came back BUT he couldn't change anything" bullshit. And STEVE ROGERS is going to sit there through the fifties and be happy? I really don't fucking think so. But it doesn't work, because they didn't make it work. They wanted the soft-focus romance of, aww, they finally get their dance, end of story. All the dudes get what they want: Tony gets his happy ending, AND to save everyone and kill Thanos, Clint gets his family, Bruce gets to integrate, Steve gets Peggy (like a trophy), Thor is like ASGARD LOL LATERZ and trucks off. Nat gets to die. That difference is so stark (hah) I think it should horrify everyone for a hot second, but we're getting "it was a great close to her arc, she got to save Clint when he was an assassin like she was, she wasn't the sidekick, she was the protagonist, she got to save everyone else!" and paralleling her with Tony. And I'm just like, BUT SHE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A FUNERAL. AFTER ONE SHORT SCENE THAT IS ALL DUDES NOBODY FUCKING MENTIONS HER AFTER SHE DIES. That's not heroic, sorry. She's just being erased.
(and then I was all wow I bet tielan feels like this about Maria all the time)
"The movie was three hours long already!" We see Nat's broken body alone and then Clint crying about it, we see Tony have an extremely heroic exit in front of everyone and he KNOWS he has to do it and Strange signals him and it's his choice, and then everyone rushes to him on the battlefield and cries and praises him and Pepper has a heartbreaking line AND THEN, there's a huge funeral. I mean. I know it's just as the fangirls say the Doylist reality of RDJ kickstarting the franchise bleeding through, it's a goodbye to him, BUT ALSO Tony has so inappropriately been the focus of so much of the series and it's just kind of like a little audiovisual exercise in "who lives, who dies, who tells your story." Who matters.
And you know, I am seeing a bunch of Endgame fixits already.....and I dunno if I am just looking wrong, because I never can find what I want on AO3 ever, but very few of them are from Nat's point of view. The majority of the fixits appear to be stuff like, Steve was married to Bucky all along, and I'm just like....that's nice? But let's see, the total is Gamora died and now we have her from 2014 before her character arc, such as it was; Nebula KILLS her former self, no bad symbolism there nope nope; Nat dies for everyone else; and all the other women had very small parts. After Black Panther, where women explicitly got to frame the conflict of the movie in that scene between Nakia and Okoye, and CAPTAIN FREAKING MARVEL, it was like a slap in the face. But really that's business and I do mean business as usual for the giant entertainment complex industry. It's going to make two billion dollars, what's what they care about. (I mean this is a movie that LITERALLY OPENS with a woman as wife and mother serving her family, that's all she's doing, before she goes poof. It's like they outlined it in bright pink crayon.)
Gahhhh. I just need to write some fix-it fics of my own rather than being insufferable in everyone else's comments about this.
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STEVE: I think we both need to get a life.
NAT: You first.
NAT: //dies
STEVE: //gets to warp the time travel rules of the movie to go off and be with Peggy
STEVE: Decided to get that life that Stark was always telling me about. Hey we got a time machine and de-aging, I could still totally make some cameos!
NAT: //still dead
BONUS
WORD OF GOD: How did Steve get that shield? That is very interesting! That story could be told!
ALSO WORD OF GOD: Black Widow is gone for good, sry
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Most sadly, for me, is that I enjoyed it far more on first viewing, and having watched it again the flaws loom SO LARGE.
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I have not seen the movie, but that was my impression after reading everybody's reaction posts and attempts to make it make sense.
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