Directed by: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Josh Brolin, Brie Larson, Karen Gillan
Rated PG-13, 181 minutes
Are we there yet? Is it over? Can we go outside again? Of course, we were never obligated to keep up with the Marvel cinematic universe, but now the superhero franchise, which began with 2008’s “Iron Man” and quickly became the “too big to fail” of Hollywood, has finished its flagship storyline, and “Endgame” is its monumental finale. This is surely one of the watershed moments in movie history.
It’s hard to even imagine what could come after “Endgame,” with its sense of finality, its summation of everything Marvel stands for, its cast list that puts classic the-gang’s-all-here films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” to shame. “Endgame” feels like the end not just of a franchise, but of an era in American cinema, an era in which winning an Oscar is a stepping-stone to starring in a superhero movie, an era of teaser content that goes viral as quickly as the most devastating strains of influenza, an era in which the secretive cabals who write movies hide the plot twists and cameos from even the cast and crew. Movies are dead; long live the movies.
“Endgame” is an important movie, but one that inspires misery. It’s miserable that the culmination of 130 years of film is a three-hour-long compendium of one-liners, struck poses, and single tears rolling down cheeks. It’s miserable that its budget could have fixed the pipes in Flint, Michigan, seven times over. It’s miserable that this massive cultural moment relies on a shaky time travel plotline. All of which is to say, “Endgame” is exactly the movie that it promised to be. The villain, Thanos (Josh Brolin), captures the essence of the film, and of the entire franchise, when he declares, “I am inevitable.”
While this may not be a poorly made movie, it’s also unconcerned, completely, with being good. Rather, its central goal is to sum up the entire American zeitgeist all at once, to use its one last chance to make a generational statement. In the history books that will cite global warming, music festivals, memes, and mass shootings as hallmarks of the early millennium, “Endgame” aspires to be front and center as the most reliable cultural document of our fixations, and more than likely it will be, not because it actually reveals any fundamental truth about us, but because we want it to so badly that we’re willing to fit ourselves to its mold. Moviegoers shout at the screen, address the fictional characters, give one another whispered history lessons in the theater so that everyone can play along. Marvel hasn’t merely sold itself as a boat too good to miss, but as Noah’s Ark, the very vessel of humanity’s survival; if you haven’t already claimed your place onboard, it might be too late now.
If this seems dire, it’s only because it is. After all, how many times in the last decade have we thought we hit peak cinema, the point where Hollywood’s tentpoles—everything from “Avatar” and “Star Wars” to the “Fast and the Furious” juggernaut and the “Despicable Me” minions—would collapse under their own weight? Here we are again, bracing ourselves for the implosion of the motion picture, but never has it felt so certain. And if this is truly the turning point, if we can really never go home again, then where do we go from here?
And what have we learned from it all, all this money and action and celebrity? The lesson “Endgame” tries to teach us, in its few moments of quiet, is that life is inherently difficult, but also inherently good, and that it’s up to each of us to hold on to the good: a father teaching his daughter to shoot an arrow at a bull’s-eye; a husband and wife dancing cheek to cheek in the living room; a first date; friends reuniting; friends helping friends through hard times. The message is delivered with emotional honesty, but is it enough for a behemoth to go out on such a ho-hum “life goes on” note? Is it satisfying to reduce the spirit of a generation to this lowest common denominator? Above all else, “Endgame” feels like a cop-out. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper dressed up as one.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/3/19.