The Marvel film cycle that began in 2008 with the first Iron Man movie, Marvel Studios’ first film, is coming to an end. This article avoids major spoilers, but let’s just say that death is the catalyst for this change. Avengers: Endgame is the 22nd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or the MCU), the movie universe inhabited by Marvel Studios franchise characters like Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Black Widow, Ant-Man, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and too many others to list them all.
The main things to know before watching the new movie is that in Endgame’s predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, the supervillain Thanos destroyed half of the universe in order to save the other half from overpopulation, which stretches the universe’s resources too thin. (I’m going to give these movies the benefit of the doubt and assume this sounds less ridiculous in context than it does in the reviews I’ve read.) Some major heroes died in Infinity War, including Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange. The survivors try to find a way to travel back in time in order to reverse Thanos’ destruction.
Endgame has scored (polled?) extraordinarily high at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that, despite taking much criticism, including from myself in the past, I genuinely approve of and find useful. (They’re like a Gallup poll, except the voters aren’t anonymous.) The critics collected here at MUBI, however, have been much harder to please. Part of that is because these critics are usually more superhero-resistant than the majority of reviewers.
The best, most persuasive writing about the merits of Avengers: Endgame came from Sight & Sound’s Kim Newman:
There is so much story – so much character – to unpick here that three hours doesn’t seem unwieldy, even if the time-travel sequences fall back on the long-out-of-fashion plot structure associated with the early days of superhero team books. The big cast breaks up into smaller groups for individual quests (in the 1940s Justice Society, different artists handled each chapter) before reassembling at the conclusion. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely embed even large-scale action sequences with moments where characters connect (the down-to-earth Spider-Man is always useful for this). Sometimes, what might have been entire movies are compressed into single shots, such as the turn of battle that aligns the female characters into an incarnation of the comics’ modish late-60s one-off alternative to macho hero groups, the Lady Liberators.
The teams-within-teams idea reminds Newman of DC’s Justice Society. For me, this makes me nostalgic for the Kurt Busiek Avengers comics (1998–2002), most memorably in Avengers Forever (1998–1999), where Busiek had small groups perform side-missions simultaneously. The plot reason for this was to handle an epic-scale mission on several fronts because time was of the essence. The benefit for the reader was to see unlikely, in some cases unprecedented, character groupings, which created fresh new interactions. Without having seen Endgame, I’d venture to say that the Russos and Team Marvel took some inspiration from Kurt Busiek.
Keith Uhlich at Slant doesn’t buy Marvel’s hype insisting on the implied permanence or importance of these deaths.
You’d think they were putting the finishing touches on the Bible. There are allusions to The Leftovers, J.G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach, and Picasso’s Guernica, though there’s never a sense, as in those works, that society is truly in irrevocable decay. It’s all good, even when it isn’t: Death is a mostly reversible ploy, and sacrifice is a self-centered concept, a burnish to the ego above all else.
Like me, Stephanie Zacharek’s favorite thing about Marvel Studios movies is their A-list acting ensembles. They may be doing it for the paycheck, but these actors at least look like they’re having fun. Here’s what Zacharek wrote for Time:
I must note here that I have little invested in the Marvel movies as the result of any attachment to Marvel comics. But I do care about the work of the actors who appear in them, performers like Chris Evans and Scarlet Johansson, Chadwick Boseman and Robert Downey Jr., Zoe Saldana and Jeremy Renner. All of these people have been terrific in MCU movies, even when they could easily get by with being less than terrific. Watching Endgame, I realized that I do care about Marvel characters because these actors have made me care.
RogerEbert.com’s Matt Zoller Seitz wrote not a review of Endgame but a treatise on the changes in the movie and TV industries in the past decade or two that uses Endgame as its starting point. Seitz refers to this as “the decisive defeat of ‘cinema’ by ‘content,’” or art losing ground to commerce:
I was won over by the surprisingly relaxed, character-driven, self-aware yet sincere comedy that dominates two-thirds of this one. Much of the script suggests a laid-back Richard Linklater movie with superheroes, all hanging out and dealing with their PTSD, or maybe a very long episode of "Community," the NBC show that spawned the Russo Brothers, the MVPs of the MCU. [...] It bothers me that a film like "Endgame," wonderful as it is, takes up 12% of all screens in the United States, while the latest movies by Terry Gilliam and Claire Denis are struggling to find any screens at all.
Some critics are feeling apprehensive about the success of Endgame. If I’m summarizing their general sentiment correctly, the above-average quality of this mega-movie is disconcerting because it’s seducing so many into supporting one of the world’s biggest corporations and is flattening the competition by dominating the market even more than Marvel usually does. I’ll expand on that shortly.
Richard Brody of the New Yorker appears to have noticed this concern but disapproves of the movie for different reasons. He feels the white cishet maleness of the MCU is the biggest reason to lament the success of these films:
This narrow dramatic determinism is the principal reason that the Marvelization of movies ultimately feels deadening, despite the occasional spectacular delight or dramatic twist. It’s not because of the ubiquity of the advertising or the number of screens on which the movies play. It’s because their hermetically sealed aesthetic narrows the inner lives of the characters depicted to a terrifying homogeneity, grooming audiences to welcome precisely such movies and to imagine themselves in their terms.
What’s amplifying the worry over Endgame’s success is media consolidation. Disney and Fox merged in March of this year, which reduced the number of major media conglomerates from six to five. As of October 2018, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the merger could give Disney an estimated 40% of the film industry’s market share. Here’s a quote from Steven Soderbergh in 2013 that explains one reason this is alarming:
[...There’s been a] 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in [the release of] studio films, and yet, ten years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie.
I just did some quick math, and major studio market share in 2018 was at 83.6%. We’re sliding further and further in the wrong direction. The more successful the major studios get, the smaller the market for independent cinema becomes.
The merger was also bad news for Disney and Fox employees, but especially Fox. 3,000 employees were laid off in March due to redundancies caused by the merger. Writing for CNBC, Thomas Franck reports that not only is this the beginning of the massive layoffs, Disney is also making a killing from cost-cutting:
Disney’s executives have forecast about $2 billion in cost saving synergies as the combined company cuts business segments or employees that were duplicated through the Fox acquisition.
Despite the doom and gloom, Matt Zoller Seitz remains curious to see how mass media will change in the coming years. For better or worse, the industry transformation still fascinates him:
I can also honestly say that, at this point, I'm more curious than apprehensive about what the future will bring. This is the kind of cultural moment that people tell their grandkids and great-nephews and nieces about. Whether the tone of the remembrance is sad or wondrous depends on who's telling it, but tell it they will, because it's happening, right now, to all of us. It's not often that you get to watch the complete transformation and eventual fusion of two art forms [film and TV], the transformation of art and entertainment itself, and the technology that supplies and defines it. [...] But everything dies, and something else always takes its place. Something new. Contrary to the fantasies of both "Endgame" and "Game of Thrones," you can't bring back the dead. You can only move forward in time, keep your mind open while the next thing reveals itself, and note milestones as they happen.
MORE TO WATCH, MORE TO READ
At the New Yorker, Maya Phillips wrote an outstanding essay related to the MCU that touches on Aristotle, Ulysses, and the nature of never-ending stories.
For the Ringer, Adam Nayman went back to the beginning and wrote “An Ode to Robert Downey Jr., the Real First Avenger”.
Above I linked to a transcript of Steven Soderbergh's "State of Cinema" keynote address. Now here's a link to the video.
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The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation. It is written by James Kang, who works on MUBI’s critics reviews section, a large database of movie reviews that seeks smart writing.