Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Okay friends, we need to talk about time travel.
First and foremost, time travel is still a distinct impossibility for humans in the year 2019.
Since we’ve never done it, we have no idea what would actually happen if we decided to flit backwards and forwards through time.
But, at least when our movies try to use it, they stick with one of two versions:
The Loop: This one is the “kill your grandfather” paradox. If you travel back in time and kill grandpa, then he can’t have kids and those kids can’t have you, so you don’t exist, so you can’t go kill grandpa, so now he exists again.
Alternate Reality: You start in Reality-A, then you go back to the past and change something. Whatever you just changed becomes the new Reality-B and you’re stuck there. It’s the butterfly effect, but with fewer typhoons.
So that’s it. Those are the two long-established options. You pick one and you run with it, because they aren’t particularly compatible with each other.
As much as I love the “Avengers” movies and everything the Russos have done for the series, they clearly couldn’t decide which version of time travel they wanted to play with.
For the most part, “Endgame” plays with The Alternate Reality idea, in that if you change the past, it makes a whole new future, so one of the final plot points is to put all the infinity stones back exactly where they were pulled from in the timeline, to prevent different realities from springing forth
But they didn’t follow through with that, which caused some problems:
Thanos found out about the plan to steal the stones before he could get to them, and lurches his way into the future. This makes for a great final battle, but it completely renders “Infinity War” and countless other movies solidly moot, as the MacGuffins are then out of the picture and there’s no snap.
When Tony and Steve travel back to the end of “Avengers” in 2011, their plan to steal the Tesseract is botched and Loki makes off with it. They try to get around this by traveling back to the 1970s to steal the cube from SHEILD storage.
But if the plan is that everything gets put back, then the 2011 mixup “still” happens, and Loki is still out there with the Tesseract...somehow. Which also means he couldn’t (didn’t?) die at the beginning of “Infinity War.”
One of Steve’s major character points during the entire series is how much he loved Peggy Carter and how heartbroken he is in the modern day. So, when given the task to return all the stones, he goes off-course and stays back in time to marry Peggy. It made for an endearing closing scene to “Avengers, season 1,” but absolutely flies in the face of their entire plan. If nothing else, then by letting Steve stay in the past, he doesn’t continue to be Captain America and the Avengers are out of one of their founding characters.
Note: I read a comment online that explains this: Steve goes back to return the Tesseract and live with Peggy. But because “Captain American: The First Avenger” already happened, there’s another Steve buried in the ice in the Arctic to get unfrozen when needed. Thus, Steve can still work through his whole arc of “Avengers” living, then return to Peggy in the past, and things still fall into place.
That’s it for my time travel gripes. Here are some other issues:
When they gave Hulk the new gauntlet to snap with and bring everyone back, they decided to simply bring everyone “back” to a universe that had progressed five years in time. That means, reasonably, that someone who didn’t get snapped away moved on, found a new life, new partner, new home, new kids, etc., only to have their old spouse/family/other reappear as if nothing happened. This would be equally horrifying for a parent who came back to find their kid aged 5 years.
Alternatively: Peter Parker was snapped away, and when he comes back he just returns to high school. The scene implies that nothing is changed, as if he was returned to the same school and setting and peers he was with five years ago, which clearly isn’t/can’t be the case.
Carol Danvers just existed. It was a big deal that Fury dialed her on his space-beeper at the end of “Infinity War,” and “Captain Marvel” was an entire film about how uber-powerful she was, because she was infused with the power of the Tesseract. But then, in “Endgame,” she’s just kinda there. She’s not special. She doesn’t do anything special. She’s not the linchpin that saves the day and stops Thanos; she wasn’t even particularly helpful in the final battle. Yes, she saves Tony and Nebula at the very beginning, but that could easily have also been resolved with a passing Ravager or Skrull or Kree ship. We didn’t need Carol for that.
Clint is just...he’s just a problem in and of himself. He didn’t lend anything to the movie, yet we’re supposed to like him because he was forcibly pulled from self-imposed retirement and has a family, but he just comes across as some weird try-hard, like that weird anime-obsessed kid in high school who thinks Katanas are cool because they’re Japanese.
The Soul Stone only required the recipient to lose something (read: someone) they loved dearly. So Natasha and Clint duked it out for who should get to die so the other can live.
For the story, Natasha died because she didn’t want to make Clint’s family live without him.
For the audience, Natasha died because no one cares about Clint and it wouldn’t have had an emotional impact to lose him.
Speaking of the Soul Stone: if Natasha died so Clint could have it, and Steve then returned all the stones, shouldn’t Natasha be alive again? Or, at least, since Thanos jumped into the future long before killing Gomorra for the same Stone, shouldn’t regular Gomorra have stayed alive?
Throughout the series, women are given a pretty solid amount of screen time, considering none of the movies are focused on them (except “Captain Marvel,” of course). And yet, for some reason, the Russos felt the need to put in a blunt “Girl Power!” moment during the final battle. There was no benefit to all of the battle-ladies suddenly lining up, and it didn’t make sense that they’d suddenly congregate like that during the fight. It was just ham-fisted and painfully obvious that they were going for some social progress karma.
Pepper Potts (Gweneth Paltrow) gets an automatic red flag for being an anti-vaxxer in real life. But ignoring that: in “Iron Man 3,” she’s imbued with the “Extremis” plot device and becomes an explosion-prone almost-Human-Torch. Yet for some reason, in “Endgame,” she’s shown wearing one of Tony’s Iron Man suits. Why? What happened to her ability to shoot fire beams from her hands or whatever that power was supposed to be?
