Game Over: Avengers Endgame Review
** Spoilers ahead. Please read with caution at your own responsibility **
It has been seven years since the first ever Avengers (superheroes collaboration) movie came out. Since then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has managed to pull in everyone's - both comic fans and non-comic fans - attention. Last week, the last movie of the Avengers installment was released and fans all around the world have had mixed opinions on it.
As someone who has been keeping up since the MCU fandom (which includes religiously reading fan theories on the web), it's easy to say that Endgame offered something completely different from what many had anticipated.
The plot of the film moves quite fairly fast compared to the other Avengers movies. The movie picks up directly after Infinity War and then jumps five years ahead to after the Avengers kill Thanos. We then watch how the remaining characters deal with the aftermath of it until Scott Lang - aka Ant-Man - comes to the rescue with his idea of using the quantum realm to time travel. Sure, there were some dull scenes that simply didn't have to be crammed into the three hours film; however, it's undeniable to say that it did pay off well in the very climatic climax.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one of that found the first half of the film dull. The majority of the first two hours consisted of and heavily relied on unnecessary scenes and dialogues that only created audiences glancing at their phones for the time.
Instead of focusing on the infinity stones and fighting off to restore everything that had happened, the film focuses more rather on the individual struggles from Thanos' snap. Each character faces a dilemma and choice of what to do - while individuals like Black Widow focus on finding out what the universe has left, other characters like Hawkeye choose to punish rebels through bitter killing and crimes.
Despite its carefully written plot of the aftermath, what I have personally have felt the movie was leaning towards an intense reliance of very unnecessary fan service. Personally (and by all means, I'm not saying my opinions are true), I felt an unsatisfying feel of closure with many of the characters. There were some tear-jerking moments, of course, but there were definitely more scenes in which it seemed too good to be true (ie. Cap and Peggy's dance in the end). Simply said, the ending seemed like it was directly pulled out from some hit fanfiction on Wattpad.
This isn't Twilight, where everybody survives and lives happily ever after. There is a happy ending, but Endgame portrays it in a way where it reminds that it's impossible to have everything in the end. Some lost loved ones, some lost time. This is real life, where war brings out the worst situation possible, and Endgame was how we saw them cope with their failures that were brought in Infinity War.
Simply said, the film, as usual, has not failed to meet up to its hype.