Review of Avengers: Endgame (2019) by Sahlab — 07 May 2019

TL;DR: Avengers: Endgame is a massive extravaganza film with a lot of enjoyable moments, but without soul, purpose, artistic vision, philosophy or literary value. It's just a big teaser/commercial for upcoming "products" by the Disney;Marvel brand.

Final verdict: I'm done with the MCU.

The Good: -Moments, plenty of memorable moments, plenty of funny moments. It almost feels like the script had the sole challenge of gluing as many cool moments together while marginally providing a way out of the dead end they wrote themselves into with Infinity War's ending.

-RDJ delivers a solid performance, without which I think this movie would be unwatchable.

-As per usual, visual effects are great, especially with characters that rely heavily on motion capture, and the de-aging tech is becoming scarily good.

-In spite of my harsh criticism of this movie's direction (that is still to come), I still think the Russos deserve praise for taking on the monumental task of handling a comic cross-over event.

The Bad:

-Writing: Bad writing: bad storytelling, bad character arcs, SJW crap breaking the immersion every few minutes, bad dialogue, lazy jokes and a time-traveling plot that doesn't make any sense. And mother of God, plot convenience is the one true hero of this movie. Scott Lang is saved from being trapped in the Quantum realm by plot convenience mouse, Stark figures out time travel by plot convenience AI, Thanos finds out about the avengers' plan by plot convenience cross-time Nebula, and many many other examples.

As for SJW crap, Thor and Hulk has been neutered, and Captain Marvel were shoved in this movie without any vision or purpose.

-Direction:

The direction was weak; The five year gap in the beginning screws up the pacing and is in my opinion a symbol of the triumph of corporate vision over artistic vision. Since there is no discernible effect of the this 5 year gap on the plot, or even most of the story threads. I can only guess this 5 year gap is a corporate device to house spin-off shows and things of this sort. Something we'll just have to wait and see.

The pacing of the movie is terrible all throughout. But specifically, the impact of the heist part is totally undercut by the "past Nebula revealing the plan to Thanos" crap, this crap was there only to produce the mandatory final showdown, which wasn't very inspired but had some "cool" moments, the plot ends about 15 minutes before the end of the movie which is always a problem.

In Infinity War, the directors did a good job of juggling the many characters, but in Endgame, not at all. A good example would be that the only thing BP did in this movie was be on screen for a few seconds and say: "Yibambe"! Add to that the clear SJW motif of neutering Hulk and Thor, and you get a 3 hour movie that neither develops, nor even build upon the development from past movies, of most key characters.