Avengers: End Game (5/5 Stars)

A victory lap is the perfect description of Avengers: Endgame. It is a good enough story on its own, but is not afraid to tack on much earned nostalgia. If Lord of the Rings: Return of the King garnered a Best Picture Oscar in part because it was the culmination of a gorgeously executed triology, I don't see why the same logic wouldn't apply to Avengers: Endgame which is the perfect culmination of ten years and twenty-two movies of Marvel storytelling

Leaving off where Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp ended, half the life in the universe has been snapped out of existence by Thanos and his Inifinity Guantlet. The Avengers not snapped out of existence conveniently include the original assembly: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, The Hulk, and Hawkeye. Captain Marvel shows up almost immediately after and they all get in a spaceship and track down Thanos. Unfortunately by the time they get to him, he has already destroyed the Infinity Stones. It's over. What happened cannot be fixed.

Then the movie jumps five years. It is a ballsy move and cements a feeling of reality over the events of Avengers: Infinity War. Usually comic book movies don't have dramatically acted scenes, but this one contains a particularly good bit of acting by Robert Downey Jr, as Tony Stark/Tony Stark, who excoriates Chris Evans, Steve Rogers/Captain America, decision several movies ago in Captain America: Civil War which broke up the Avengers and made Thanos harder to stop.

There is a catch of course as there must be. It comes in the form of Ant-Man who was stuck in the quantum realm when the Snappening happened and comes back five years later. (There is an emotional scene where Paul Rudd, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, finds his name on a memorial for those who died during the Snappening and when he reunites with his daughter.) Scott shows up at the Avengers headquarters with an idea that has to do with time-travel through the quantum realm. Much exposition is needed in this movie and quite a bit of it is people explaining things to Ant-Man who hasn't been around in the last five years. Most of it is quite funny.

Alot of this is quite funny. Some characters' arcs are rather dramatic like Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. But other characters are firmly in the camp of comic relief. Two characters that have completely hit their stride are Hulk, who is now Professor Hulk, a big, green and unangry Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Then there is Thor. What happened to him over the past five years is the stuff of comedic legends.

The question here isn't if Avengers: Endgame will reverse the outcome of Infinity War. We know it must simply due to sheer amount of marketable product that was snapped out of existence. The question is whether how this is accomplished is too predictable or too confusing. It isn't predictable and it generally makes sense (in a comic book science sort of way). A few times in the movie I was sitting there wondering how they were going to accomplish what they had set out to do and then how they did was quite satisfying.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the Avengers actually visit previous movies. Three in particular: The Avengers, The Dark World, and The Guardians of the Galaxy. The team splits up into groups to go back in time and retrieve what they need from those films. It is always when you have many full formed characters and then mix and match teams so people who have not really met or interacted before are doing so for the first time. Thor's interactions with the Guardians of the Galaxy is great in particular. Captain American fights himself and that is satisfying too. There is a lot of good stuff all over the place here. One particular moment, where Captain America finds himself standing alone in front of an evil army, and the moment right after, garnered cheers from the audience that I was in. I felt like cheering too. I really like these guys.

Following the example of other great culmination of movies, the last hour of Avengers: End Game has a lot of goodbyes in it. I believe the movie earned these moments. I look forward to the next twenty films.

Captain America: Civil War (4/5 Stars)

At least once a year I feel the need to point out the moral ambituity of large-scale action sequences in modern blockbusters, specifically the untold and unfelt thousands of deaths that necessarily must occur when entire cities are reduced to rubble. I had been crying in the wilderness to nobody in parituclar about this for so long that I expected that I would continue to do it indefinitely. Imagine my pleasant surprise then when Marvel’s new movie, “Captain America: Civil War” not only admits the reality of human collateral damage but makes it the focal conflict for the entire story.

It starts with a covert operation in an African country by Captain America, Black Widow, Hawk, and Scarlett Witch (new to me but apparently introduced before). A bad guy is trying to steal a biological weapon. The fight starts in a parking lot moves to an office building and finally ends in a crowded marketplace. The bad guy has a suicide bomb in which he means to kill everybody. Scarlett Witch, whose mutant power is to telekinesis, moves the bomb explosion from the marketplace to the air but miscalculates and ends up killing about fifteen people in an office building. The Avengers given that they are conducting vigilante military operations are held suspect for this outcome. A proposal is passed to give the United Nations oversight over the Avengers.

Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, feels guilty enough for this occurrence (The fifteen dead were charity workers although any fifteen dead people would have been good enough for me) to support the resolution. Captain America, coming out against democracy, believes that the resolution would stop him from taking action for or against whatever he deems himself to be important. It may be obvious whose side I am taking in this conflict. I’m with Iron Man all the way. Captain America apparently thinks he knows better than entire democratic societies. That is the sort of behavior that gives Freedom a bad name.

The amount of characters and superheroes already introduced in this umpteenth of Marvel movies makes listing all of them and the actors playing them time prohibitive, but they line up in equal numbers on each side. Thankfully Thor and The Hulk are somewhere else, as their presence would seriously tip the scale against the more destructible members of the Avengers. The action sequences are better and more entertaining than previous Marvel movies. This is because instead of relying on the spectactles getting bigger and more explosive, the superheroes fight themselves (and thus aren’t nameless pushovers) and thus humor and creativity have to be employed to make sure nobody gets embarrassed. The abandoned airport fight is especially good. Also, as I said before, no massive human collateral occurs. The result is a very enjoyable movie and my favorite Marvel movie so far.

Joining the Marvel universe for the first time is SpiderMan (the other two Sony franchises have not happened in this particular franchise) and Black Panther. Now this is a good opportunity for a compare and contrast between what is considered to be one of the most beloved characters of Marvel and what is sure to be the most boring.

Spiderman, aka Peter Parker, is a dorky teenager who lives with his Aunt May in Queens, New York. Black Panther is the handsome well-mannered prince of the aforementioned African nation. When Stan Lee created Spiderman, his stated intention was to give the character all the regular flaws a teenager generally has like immaturity, acne, and a hopeless crush on a girl. Such honesty and relatability became endearing pushing Spiderman to an upper echelons of popular superheroes. Black Panther, in contrast, seems to be a corporate marketing committee’s response to an outcry for political correctness. He stands in like Two-fer in “30 Rock” as proof that the corporation believes black people can be noble, properly educated, and not sidekicks. It is perhaps a good thing that the effort was made but the fact that they went about it in a way that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s goes a long way in making the character generally unrelatable and almost as important, boring. He has no flaws and by the end of the movie his one conflict is resolved. I can’t imagine what will happen in the next movie that will allow the character to learn and grow in complexity. Perhaps he will join Thor battling interstellar ice monsters. Peter Parker as we all know has a long journey ahead of him since not incidentally he starts from a far humbler beginning.

(I doubt anyone else has noted this but the term ‘black panther’ refers to the militant wing of an oppressed poor minority group. Is it not culturally insensitive for a wealthy member of a ruling majority class to appropriate the moniker? Or does this not count because they are both black.)

But enough about this. I really liked the movie and would recommend it to anyone interested in seeing a blockbuster. The humor, the action, and most importantly the maturity set it apart from most others. Finally I have added the original Captain America movie to my DVD queue. For the first time I have wanted to see it and fill in that particular gap in my Marvel movie knowledge.