“Avengers: Endgame” perfectly wraps up Marvel’s Infinity series

Erik Jimenez/Staff Writer

Last year after seeing “Infinity War” I crowned it in my review as not only the best Marvel Cinematic Universe film to date but also the best superhero film with the only film in the near future to top it being this film (or as it was known at the time “Avengers 4” due to the title not being announced yet). And now one year later I am back to say… I was slightly off.

Don’t get me wrong. “Avengers: Endgame” is great–an emotional roller-coaster that manages to wrap up so many plot threads and character arcs in its three-hour run-time. What makes it second to “Infinity War” is the use of a plot device that manages to work in the moment, but upon further analysis, offers more questions than answers after contemplation, despite the highly satisfying emotional resolutions the film brings.

I plan on keeping spoilers to a minimum but to sum it all up: it ends the story line of the MCU so far, so well, that the franchise can easily end here and we won’t be missing anything. Well-paced with each hour compromising its own mini-movie–the first two being so well made they feel almost Steven Spielberg-ian, and the third act simply being the best scene ever put into a superhero film ever.

For those of you that need a little plot synopsis, the surviving heroes of the “snap” at the end of “Infinity War” that wiped out half of all beings in the universe, which include but are not limited to Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannsen) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) are looking for a way to undo said “snap” without the use of the Infinity Stones due to spoiler reasons in the film.

Their answer comes in the form of Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) who managed to escape the quantum realm after getting stuck there at the end of “Ant-Man and the Wasp”. Realizing that time moves slower in the quantum realm, he suggests that if one can manipulate time in the realm, they can turn it into an improvised time machine. The Avengers team up with  remaining superheroes to pull off the ultimate time heist: to go back in time and get all of the Infinity Stones before Thanos (Josh Brolin) on reverse the snap.

The time travel aspect is an admittedly fun and entertaining part of the film. It elaborates on previous scenes that fans have seen before while also allowing said fans to indulge in an MCU “Greatest Hits” compilation of sorts. But the problem with the time travel is upon reflection.

No film is perfect, but these scenes open up several plot holes that you won’t notice due to the great time you have. They never fully set up their rules so it’s confusing when some actions in the past have consequences and others don’t. For example, a major villain in the past manages to escape capture by the Avengers during the heist, but never appears again in the film.

But the finale is where you’ll forget all of those thoughts as there is no doubt that if you’ve invested in this franchise for the last decade, you will cry tears of joy at the end of it all.

If “Infinity War” is a 9.95, “Endgame” is a 9.75. And it needs to be seen and celebrated for its vast accomplishments in raising the bar for this type of finale in future films to come, comic book-based or not.

Featured image taken from Wikicommons.