So which did you like better, ‘Avengers, Endgame’ or ‘Game of Thrones, The Long Night’. If you think about it they have a lot in common. Both are the climax of story lines that have been developed over a decade or so. Both have had major subplots. Both have introduced major characters along the way. Both wind up in tremendous battles between the forces of good and evil. I could go on but I’ll just add one more because both include the loss of several characters that we have all grown to care about over the last ten years! No spoilers here, I promise!
However this post is about the ‘Avengers, Endgame’ the 22nd movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Now while ‘Endgame’ is a direct sequel to ‘Avengers, Infinity War’ each of the previous 21 movies have contributed to the overall story arc if only, as in the recent ‘Captain Marvel’ by adding a new character who plays a role in ‘Avengers, Endgame’.
‘Endgame’ starts where ‘Infinity War’ ends, with the bad guy Thanos triumphant. Thanos has managed to possess all six infinity stones and used their power to eliminate half of all life in the Universe, which he thinks is a good thing to do. (The motive of Marvel villains may be strange but they are rarely just purely black.)
Obviously our heroes aren’t going to just let Thanos win. So ‘Endgame’ begins when the remaining Avengers, who happen to be the original six, are joined by Captain marvel and together they go after Thanos to get back the infinity stones in order to use them to bring everybody back. Unfortunately Thanos has used the stones to destroy the stones and I’m not going to go any further, you’ll just have to go see the movie!
And plenty of people are going to see ‘Endgame’. As I write this it’s just been announced that the movie is now the second highest grossing movie of all time, and it’s only been out for ten days. It seems to be only a matter of time until ‘Endgame’ takes the top spot from 2009’s ‘Avatar’.
Without giving too much away I would like to mention a couple of the subplots within ‘Avengers, Endgame’. The first concerns the relationship between Iron Man and Captain America, arguably the two most central members of the Avengers. (Thor is an alien with his own home planet and Bruce Banner doesn’t want to be The Hulk). From the first time they met these two superheroes have had a bit of a completion over just who was the group’s leader. Steve Rogers (Captain American) is the old fashioned kind of commander, all courage and an iron will while Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a modern leader, all brains and technology.
The conflict became open war in the movie ‘Captain America, Civil War’ and ‘Endgame’ is in fact the first time the two have been together since then. Their first meeting is tense but later on the two are forced to go off alone together for 15-20 minutes and almost without their even noticing it they settle their differences and become comrades once again.
The second subplot is the whole question of whether a superhero can have a personal life. In previous movies in the MCU the superhero Hawkeye had basically retired to be with his wife and children, he was the only original member of the Avengers not to appear in ‘Infinity War’. Hawkeye returns in ‘Endgame’ only because Thanos’ use of the infinity stones has eliminated his family.
So not only is Hawkeye fighting to get his family back but during the course of ‘Endgame’ Iron Man, Captain America and Black Widow are all faced with the effect being a superhero has had on their personal life. This subplot is particularly poignant today because our society is wrestling with the problem of how much we demand from the members of our military and police, the cost to their personal lives for protecting us.
This layer of real life social and psychological conflict has always been a hallmark of Marvel. Whether it be superheroes who don’t want to be superheroes or those whose flaws make them seem more human than superhuman. ‘Avengers, Endgame’ may really be just a comic book made into a movie but somehow the Marvel characters seem like normal, relatable people despite their comic book superpowers.