New Movie Times: endgame

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Sunday, 4 August 2019

Let's Catch Up On The State Of The Marvel Cinematic Universe In Time For Avengers: Endgame

Screenshot: Disney (YouTube)

Hello friends! As you’re well aware by now, Avengers: Endgame opens in theaters this weekend, finally bringing to a—uh, well, not a close or a conclusion, but uh like some kind of large-scale branding transition for Disney and its Marvel Studios subsidiary, where they will arbitrarily plant a flag and say that a certain phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ended and the next one is beginning, but in all other respects will continue cranking out broadly samey superhero movies for as long as the public continues dumping billions of dollars onto them. Anyway I’m fuckin’ pumped.

It’s been about a year since Avengers: Infinity War, the last big entry in this very long series of movies that began with 2008's Iron Man. For those who are not hardcore Marvel fans, let’s catch up on where all of our favorite 9,717 Marvel Cinematic Universe characters are as of the ending of that movie, so that everybody will be ready to make sense of however the heck Endgame starts. (This will necessitate lots and lots of spoilers for that movie that came out a year ago.) Ready? Let’s do it!

Iron Man

Iron Man is not dead. He got all fucked up in his battle with Thanos and at one point Thanos skewered him through the guts, but then Iron Man sprayed some nanites on it, which as we all know is the cure for being impaled. I’m sure his organs are just fine in there and he does not need any antibiotics at all. He survived the Snap and appeared to be marooned on the planet Titan at the end of Infinity War.

Captain America

Captain America also is not dead. Thanos whomped him pretty good in the final fight of Infinity War, in the woods of Wakanda, but he survived the Snap. Also, he had a beard! And shaggy hair! And instead of his iconic shield and goofy but charming classic red-and-blue outfit, he had a pair of these dumb gauntlet things and was wearing a grim-’n’-gritty black outfit. At the end of the movie he said, “Oh God.”

Black Widow

Also alive, also in Wakanda. Took surprisingly little damage in a long battle against the evil tall alien lady who worked for Thanos, before Scarlet Witch came along and chucked the alien lady into the whirring blades of a giant lawnmower. Infinity War didn’t seem to have any real idea what to do with Black Widow, which frankly kind of makes sense, because the bad guys at this point are so preposterously hyper-powered that it seems kind of ludicrous for someone whose superheroic ability is “good at martial arts” to be playing any kind of crucial role in defeating them.

Thor

Thor nearly stole the show in Infinity War: His arrival in Wakanda with his cool new space-ax was the high point of the movie, and he nearly won the fight when he bashed that sucker right into the middle of Thanos’s chest and then pushed it even deeper in there. I don’t know anything about giant purple alien anatomy, but it makes sense to think that, for a creature shaped and proportioned like a (very very large) human, the torso is the best place to store most of the vital organs. In which case, having a giant space-ax bashed a foot into the center of one’s chest seems like it should be a fatal wound, to me? Like if you bash a proportionally similar ax into the middle of my chest, I’m definitely gonna drop extremely dead instantaneously.

Anyway it didn’t kill Thanos. He snapped his fingers and wiped out a theoretically randomly distributed half of all the life in the universe (while somehow sparing all of the Avengers from the first Avengers movie, including Thor, who is my personal pick to be the guy who lops Thanos’s head off in Endgame). Then he used the fucked-up remains of the Infinity Gauntlet to zap himself off to a vacation retreat.

As of the end of Infinity War, Thor was in Wakanda with his space-ax. I think it’s pretty much beyond dispute at this point that Thor is the coolest Avenger.

Hawkeye

Also alive. He wasn’t in Infinity War, unless he was in one of the 56 extra scenes Marvel habitually staples into the end credits of their movies to punish people who ever want to go home from the theater. I would just like to say here that, similar to Black Widow’s case, “very good at archery” is sort of a weird superpower in the context of a world with all the other Avengers and Thanos and such in it. There’s also no reason to think Captain America wouldn’t be able to do archery just as well as Hawkeye, and no particular reason to think the Avengers would need an archer on staff.

I don’t know where Hawkeye is as of the end of Infinity War. His farmhouse? Maybe. Apparently he was on vacation or something while earth was being invaded by genocidal aliens. Like he just saw on TV that earth was being invaded by aliens in giant circle-ships and they were smashing up New York City in a fight with some of his best friends and he was just like “That’s cool, I’ll sit this one out.”

And honestly, that’s reasonable! He wasn’t gonna swing the fight with his archery skills.

Hulk

Not dead. Thanos kicked Hulk’s butt in the beginning of the movie, and then he spent the rest of the movie cowering inside Bruce Banner. It’s been a rough two-movie stretch for ol’ Hulk! First he got whomped by Thor in the arena in Ragnarok, and then Thanos just straight up beat the damn shit out of him!

Anyway, in Infinity War Bruce Banner had to sorta jerry-rig Hulklike smashing powers by wearing a huge Iron Man suit to the battle in Wakanda. His most memorable moment was when Thor showed up and Bruce told the aliens they were screwed.

Scarlet Witch

Scarlet Witch got Snapped in Wakanda and is dead. Honestly the events of Infinity War went uniquely bad for the Witch. First, Thanos’s cabinet secretaries interrupted her and Vision’s romantic getaway by, uh, skewering Vision through the chest. Then, when they were all in Wakanda fighting the aliens, she got baited into leaving Vision’s side, which allowed Scary Hood Guy to thwart the work of safely removing the Mind Stone from Vision’s forehead, which meant the only way to destroy the Mind Stone was to also destroy Vision. Which of course only Scarlet Witch’s magic is powerful enough to do.

She had to explode her own boyfriend’s brain to save the day! That scene was awful. And then, when she’d finally murked the love of her dang life, Thanos just used the frickin’ Time Stone to run it back 45 seconds, bring Vision back to life, and re-kill him by yanking the stone out of his face. Then Thanos snapped his fingers and turned Scarlet Witch to dust. All in all not a super great day for your pal Scarlet Witch.

Vision

But an even worse day for Vision! He’s dead as shit, man. He died twice in the span of like one minute. He’s dead.

(On the other hand, unlike many others he was not turned to dust. I suppose in theory if the Avengers get the Mind Stone back from Thanos they could plug it back into Vision’s brain and reboot him. He’s just a computer, after all. I reboot my computer like once every six months, and it’s fine.)

Captain Marvel

I haven’t seen that movie yet. Apparently it was good! Anyway Captain Marvel wasn’t in Infinity War and I don’t think she is dead. Is she higher in the Avengers chain of command than Captain America or what. Maybe she can be promoted to Major Marvel.

Black Panther

Image: Disney

Dead... for now. Black Panther’s dusting at the hands of Thanos was the exact moment everybody knew for an absolute fact that the sequel to Infinity War would definitively undo the entire climax of Infinity War—which drained that climax of basically all its emotional power and made the decision to end a day-glo comic book movie with the genocide of half of humanity seem even more ghoulish and misbegotten. Black Panther made like eleventy bazillion dollars at the box office and is by far the most acclaimed and celebrated entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the people in charge of making these movies would sooner depict Captain America napalming a doggy daycare than wipe out T’Challa before they’ve made at least two more Black Panther movies.

Anyway, T’Challa led the good guys in the fight in Wakanda but got Snapped at the end.

Spider-Man

Spider-Man, like Black Panther, is temporarily dead. He was on Titan with Iron Man and Doctor Strange and the Guardians of the Galaxy when the Snap happened, and he turned to dust, while begging for his life. It was upsetting. I looked over at my young kid when it was happening and I could see him struggling to keep it together. He was upset about it for the whole rest of the day and had trouble sleeping that night because he kept thinking about how scared Peter Parker was when he died. It’s stupid that these are the kinds of comic-book superhero movies American culture makes.

Anyway, there are already teasers for the sequel to 2017's very charming Spider-Man: Homecoming, so I think it’s safe to guess that Spidey will return.

Ant-Man

GIF: YouTube

I finally watched Ant-Man and the Wasp this past weekend. It’s charming! The best MCU movies are the ones that put their monstrous budgets and infinite cultural capital toward creating something fun and silly—something liberated rather than weighed down by its origin in comic books. Give me a thousand ramshackle, goofy, Looney Tunes-y capers like this one before another grim, gray-and-navy bore about Captain America Taking Duty Very Seriously.

Anyway Ant-Man was not in Infinity War but definitely will be in Endgame. I gather that the events of Infinity War left him trapped in the Quantum Realm because all of the people who were standing by to zap him back out of it got Snapped. That’s a tough break! Other other hand, Michelle Pfeiffer hung out in there for like 30 years with no food or water and she turned out okay, so I’m sure Ant-Man can handle it. Just gotta tighten the old belt and make the best of your time in the Quantum Realm, as I have always said.

Doctor Strange

GIF: YouTube

Doctor Strange was at the big battle against Thanos on Titan, gave Thanos the Time Stone, and got Snapped, and is “dead.”

The big important clue-type shit going into Endgame involves Strange: Early in Infinity War, Strange made tediously clear that his absolute highest priority was keeping the Time Stone out of Thanos’s hands, even explicitly telling Iron Man that he’d let him or Spider-Man or anybody else die without hesitation if it allowed him to keep the Time Stone safe. Then there was a scene where he used the Time Stone to view like 14 million possible alternate futures, and in only one of them were the good guys able to win. Then, after that, contrary to what he’d said earlier in the movie, he handed the Time Stone over to Thanos to save Iron Man’s life, and explained it to Iron Man by saying that “we’re in the endgame now” and “there was no other way.”

This seems to indicate that, in that one possible future out of 14 million in which the good guys win, Thanos gets the Time Stone and Iron Man doesn’t die on Titan, and Doctor Strange knows that, and that’s why he made the deal he did. You’d think he might have made more of an effort to explain that during the long minutes he and Iron Man and Spider-Man and the Guardians of the Galaxy were just hanging out on Titan after Thanos left, but, uhhhh........ maybe in all the possible futures where he explained it to them, that somehow caused Thanos to win? I don’t know, man, I have a headache.

Let’s pause here for a second for a note on Titan.

A Note On Titan

It does not speak very well of either the biodiversity of the planet Titan or of the taxonomical rigor of its inhabitants that the term for what Thanos is, like species-wise, is “Titan.” He’s a Titan from Titan. This is like if Earth were named “Human”—Hello, I’m from planet Human—or if people were called “Earths.” (This is Tony Stark, the Mad Earth.) No wonder that place went to shit! The big purple assholes at the top of the food chain thought themselves synonymous with the planet itself! In my opinion this disqualifies Thanos from making life-and-death decisions for the whole rest of the frickin’ universe.

Loki

Loki is dead as hell. Thanos choked him out and then—if the grody sound effect is to be believed—broke his neck, after taking the Tesseract (which was the Space Stone with a box around it) from him. Then Thanos blew up the space ship with Loki’s dead-ass body inside it. It’s hard to imagine even an elite-level trickster like Loki wriggling his way out of that jam.

Idris Elba

He has a cool song out!

I have been listening to this song on repeat for like a month. Also Thanos skewered him through the chest with, like, a pike or something. He’s extremely dead.

Eddie Vedder

Eddie is the worst of the MCU characters by a thousand miles. His superpowers are that he lost his arm a long time ago and got the leftover super juice that made Captain America special jacked into his bloodstream by weirdo Nazi scientists. That’s it. Evidently the Avengers are so hard up for rotation depth that they keep a spot open on the bench for a guy who has exactly one-fourth as many overpowered robot limbs as an empty Iron Man suit running on autopilot.

This grim-faced emo doofus was the MacGuffin of Captain America: Civil War, which was the silliest and most embarrassing part of that dull and excruciatingly over-serious movie that critics nonetheless loved for reasons surpassing all comprehension. In turn, the absolute lowest and most insulting point in Infinity War was when T’Challa—the Black Panther, the frickin’ King of Wakanda—personally marched down to Eddie’s frickin’ Hagrid Hut on the edge of Wakanda to present him with a new robot prosthesis, as though the fate of the world hinged on ensuring this gloomy sad-sack Budget Cap had exactly one (1) above-average limb to bring to the ensuing fight for the preservation of the human race. Get the fuck out of my face, Eddie!

Anyway this piece of shit was the first person Thanos turned to dust at the end of Infinity War. Serves him right.

Wings Man

Illustration: Me (Me)

I don’t give a damn about Wings Man! What even is his deal? Get this goober the hell out of here.

Wings Man turned to dust at the end of Infinity War.

War Machine

My kids are big fans of the Lego Marvel Superheroes video game series. Largely this is because of the truly astounding number of playable Marvel characters you can unlock and use. There are hundreds of them! Sometimes it seems as though every wacky costumed character Marvel ever crammed into a comic book made his or her way into these video games. Captain Britain and Moon Knight and Union Jack and Super Skrull and on and on and on.

It strikes me as less than ideal that out of all these wild and wacky characters, this insanely lengthy movie series has held open a crucial lineup spot for a guy whose deal is basically “An Iron Man suit, but with a different guy in it.” Don Cheadle could have played Silver Surfer! That would have ruled. Instead he is That Guy Who Borrows An Iron Man Suit. That doesn’t rule at all.

Anyway he’s not dead. He survived the battle of Wakanda and the Snap and was standing there in his goofy primer-gray Iron Man suit at the end of the movie.

Star-Lord

GIF: YouTube

Snapped. Star-Lord was the secondary villain of Infinity War. He took too long to make good on his promise to kill Gamora when the time came; he refused to take seriously the need for a plan to deal with Thanos on Titan; and he decided he absolutely had to shit-talk Thanos and punch his face before they got the stupid Infinity Gauntlet off, which screwed everything up and led directly to Thanos getting the Time Stone, which led directly to Thanos being able to get the Mind Stone, which led directly to the Snap. It seems only fitting that he got dusted!

When they undo the Snap, they should make this asshole clean up all the wreckage. He should also have to dig Vision’s grave!

Gamora

Dead. Thanos chucked her off a cliff on the pretty sunset planet so that he could get the Soul Stone. Lots of characters will be brought back from the dead in Endgame, but it seems like Gamora’s death has to be one of the permanent ones.

Rocket

Photo: Sam Greenwood (Getty)

Rocket is not dead. He survived the battle of Wakanda and the Snap.

Groot

GIF: YouTube

Groot got Snapped in Wakanda. This wasn’t as emotionally devastating as I might have expected—it almost certainly didn’t wreck anybody’s shit the way “We are Groot” did—mostly because cranky teen Groot just isn’t nearly as lovable as either baby Groot or original recipe Groot. Alas, that is what it means to be a teen: That if you get magically disintegrated by an intergalactic supervillain, people will say “Honestly, that could have been sadder.” But also, by the time Groot got Snapped, I’d already realized I was watching something incredibly cynical and cheap that existed solely for the purpose of its own undoing in the sequel.

Drax

Snapped.

Bug Lady Whomst Make Bad Guys Go To Sleep

Snapped.

Nebula

Photo: Francois Mori (AP Photo)

Alive. Thanos’s angriest daughter survived the big battle on Titan and lived through the Snap. She and Rocket are the only Guardians left. Buddy road-trip comedy time! (Sike, all the rest of them are coming back in Endgame except maybe Gamora.)

Nick Fury

I think Snapped? I think he got Snapped in one of the mid-credits scenes in Infinity War. I will leap into a volcano before I will confirm this.

The Serious Woman Who Is Always Hanging Out With Nick Fury

Probably also Snapped. There are too many people in this movie series.

Shuri

Did Shuri get Snapped? I honestly have no idea. She was in Wakanda trying to take the Mind Stone out of Vision’s forehead without killing him, then Hood Guy snuck in and attacked and Vision tackled him out of the window and that was the last I saw of Shuri.

Ideally I would have to hope that she didn’t get Snapped—ideally the matter of whether one of the MCU’s very most enjoyable characters died or not would have some weight—but it doesn’t matter, because all of that shit’s gonna just get undone later this week.

Okoye

Not dead. She survived the battle of Wakanda and was looking Black Panther dead in the face when he turned to dust. That’ll put a dent in your day, buddy.

M’Baku

Not dead. M’Baku fought in the battle of Wakanda and was kicking mega-ass and doing the insanely cool battle chant thing when Thanos did the Snap, and then had to stand there like a real fuckin’ schmuck while half of all his countrymen turned to dust around him.

Lupita Nyong’o

Photo: Joel C Ryan (AP Photo)

Lupita Nyong’o never appeared in Infinity War! That seems dumb to me. Maybe her Black Panther character, Nakia, was on vacation at Hawkeye’s house while aliens were attacking the nation she defends with her life. Lupita Nyong’o is not dead; as for Nakia, who knows?

The Wasp

GIF: YouTube

Snapped.

Valkyrie

Valkyrie wasn’t in Infinity War. I guess that means she died when Thanos attacked the big ship with all the Asgardians on it in between the end of Ragnarok and the beginning of Infinity War. The alternative possibility is that she survived that attack and Thor just left her floating in outer space when he joined up with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Not cool, Thor.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Photo: Amy Sussman (Getty)

The news has been pretty rough for Gwyneth Paltrow lately. Iron Man is marooned on Titan, Goop had to pay a bunch of money to customers who bought its bullshit about vagina eggs, and then she sued for crashing into somebody while skiing and then just skiing away like a real asshole.

Bilbo Baggins

I don’t recall seeing Bilbo in Infinity War. Maybe he was using the ring to be invisible. I do not know whether the power of the One Ring would protect him from the Snap. Frankly the lore is very unclear on this subject.

Tony Stark’s Uptight Limo Driver

This blog is over.

A Non-Fanboy's Spoiler-Laden And Mostly Cranky Review Of Avengers: Endgame

GIF: YouTube

Avengers: Endgame is not a movie. Here is where some poor Ringer writer with Bill Simmons looming over their shoulder like Dennis Quaid in that The Intruder trailer would write “it is a Cultural Event” or “it is the End Of An Era” or “it is the high water mark of brand synergy in the IP marketplace” or some such. No. What Avengers: Endgame is is the awkward and over-serious series finale of a long-running television sitcom. It was not made to tell an interesting story of its own, or to expand meaningfully on the themes established in the earlier episodes, or even to reiterate those themes in thoughtful or fun or inventive new ways. To the extent that Avengers: Endgame even has an artistic purpose—to grant that it exists to do more than just soak up another couple billion dollars for Disney—its purpose is to get these actors onto the next phases of their respective careers, and in a way that is gratifying for people who especially give a shit about their Marvel characters.

If you are not someone who especially gives a shit about these Marvel characters, there’s a very good chance you will find this deeply annoying. If, for example, you are someone who has enjoyed the various Avengers movies well enough, for their cool action and quippy dialogue and generally unserious tone, but without investing a whole lot of emotional bandwidth in the question of whether Robert Downey Jr.’s stint as Iron Man is brought to a close with proper reverence, there’s a strong likelihood that you will spend the first two-thirds of Endgame surprisingly fidgety and bored, if not genuinely bewildered by how much this damn movie expects you to care about whether a crudely constructed immortal alien god who expresses anger by shooting lightning from his eyeballs finds emotional closure with a minor character from a movie you half-remember watching like eight years ago. Or the sloppy redemption arc of a guy whose entire moral decline is articulated in one deeply cheesy six-minute ninja fight sequence in Endgame’s endless first-third where-are-they-now phase.

The emphasis on Doing Right By These Tentpole Characters is so overwhelming that for long stretches of the movie it obliterates the conflict that has ostensibly motivated their actions in the plot. When Rocket and Thor find themselves off on a quest that is of absolute importance to the team’s long-shot hope of saving literally half of all living things in the universe, Thor’s angst over his career and lifestyle choices not only diverts his half of their effort, but is given the vast majority of screen time. We get plenty of Thor’s heavy-handed and cliché-laden reconciliation with a cameo performer, while Rocket literally scampers around desperately in a few throwaway cut scenes, actually fighting to save trillions of lives. The only way to interpret this, as a viewer who cares much more about the plot of the movie than about whether Thor will like Take The Mantle Of King Of New Asgard after the movie is over, is as proof that the plot is just a noisy excuse for the filmmakers to establish as much of what comes after it as possible.

That’s just one example. Here’s another: Tony Stark and Captain America go on a similar quest, with the same stakes—succeed or accept the absolute finality of Thanos’s Snap. It’s seemingly a risky gig, too, involving taking a potentially one-way trip to a secured facility to steal top secret shit guarded by armed badge-wearing types. At one point the duo’s attire and demeanor draw suspicion, and some of those armed badge-wearing types are mobilized. Cool! Surely this will raise the stakes—surely now we will get a sense of just how huge and daring and likely doomed this quest is for our long-suffering heroes! And we get the shot of Captain America coming one way through a narrow corridor while some of those armed types head toward him. Uh oh! How will our heroes escape this one?? I’ll tell you how: Captain America ducks into an unlocked office, whereupon those of us who are a little distracted by the quest to bring back to life actual trillions of beings are disappointed to learn that the whole potential conflict with the armed guards of a top secret facility was just a way for the story to force Captain America into that exact office at that exact moment, in order to confront some of his personal baggage. The MacGuffins he and Stark are after aren’t even there to move the plot; they’re there to give Captain America a boner.

And even the eventual undoing of the Snap itself—listen, motherfucker, if you thought they weren’t going to reverse the Snap, I’m afraid you’re just too stupid to watch movies, let alone read about them—is positioned by the story arc as ultimately about prolonging the resolution of the question of which of two central Avengers characters will survive the movie. This is a narrative trap of Marvel’s own making: under no circumstances were the Avengers not going to reverse the Snap; under no circumstances were they going to lose to Thanos. The only thing left to learn is under what specific circumstances they’d reverse the Snap and win. There’s a ghoulish God-view angle to this, though, because inevitably some part of what we are watching is not the development of a plot, but the sensitive extrication of actors and a studio from a project. As much as you may tell yourself that you’re watching to learn what will happen to these characters—or even just to enjoy the thrill of watching them do the only thing they can do, which is win—it’s impossible to ignore the knowledge that some number of these characters must have their stories closed, as a practical matter.

At one point in Endgame Thanos describes himself as “inevitable,” and it’s a little queasy, because as much as he is the author of his own genocidal designs, he is also an axe in the hands of the filmmakers, who simply have no choice but to kill some of these fuckers. By about the 120-minute mark of Endgame, if not far earlier, if not whole actual months ago, you have fully transitioned from wondering which Avengers will be killed by Thanos to wondering which will be killed by Disney. If you are not the sort of person who has invested disproportionate personal emotional significance in the fate of Gun Lady or Arrow Fella (for example) there’s a good chance this grim game of musical chairs will resolve itself in your brain into an uncomfortable and removed analysis of shit like genre conventions, if not brand fatigue and the dreaded IP. So when Gun Lady and Arrow Fella are faced with a terrible do-or-die choice, and the scene quickly evolves into an explicit test of which one can survive, you never quite escape the feeling that the cruelty that has forced them to this moment is less cosmic and more corporate, an artificial Sophie’s Choice being foisted upon the filmmakers, by the filmmakers, with the emotional weight sort of presumptuously passed along to you, the viewer.

The Avengers franchise is only the one-millionth story to run into the problem of how to produce an inevitable outcome in a way that feels compelling and urgent. What makes it a television sitcom, though, is the inevitable outcome they’re stuck producing is external to the plot, and is the retirement of a franchise that is ending for reasons that are arbitrary to the world of the story. There is no storytelling reason whatsoever that the MCU can’t conjure up the next big scary villain and throw these same superheroes in his or her path, in the same way that there’s no particular storytelling reason why the gang from Friends couldn’t continue snarkily hating each other at a coffee shop for another 100 episodes. The MCU movies are episodic, duh, because what makes comic book superheroes superheroes is their supernatural ability to return things to their prior condition in a certain number of pages. Their adventures on the page will quite literally never end, because there will always be someone to draw a new one, and anyway once you’ve gotten readers to accept things like reincarnation and the multiverse, you have permanently foreclosed on the possibility of retiring a character. Ending their adventures will always be a decision; in the movies, those decisions likelier than not have to do with this or that actor aging out of the damn role. Now that Spiderman has made the leap to the multiverse and animation, you can forget about worrying ever again how his stories will end.

So, like, Sauron was never gonna win in Lord of the Rings, but also Samwise Gamgee was never gonna be spun up into like the grim and gritty story of an essentially immortal vigilante Hobbit gardener in order to wring out another few years of summer blockbusters. Peter Jackson never had to devote any of his movies to convincing viewers that the individual arcs inside his movies were actually, really, sincerely coming to a close, and then do the demeaning servicey shit of making LOTR fanboys and fangirls accept that very arbitrary decision without too much moaning. There’s no rule or convention or standard of kindness that says the makers of Endgame couldn’t have made an even vaguely self-contained sci-fi action movie, ended it the way all the other movies ended—with things returning more or less to normal—and then just said “we are now done telling the stories of those characters.” Frankly, that would’ve ruled! Instead they buckled under the wholly self-imposed pressure to like Do Right By Undies Man And Mech Genius In This Hour Of Their Retirement, and the result is a movie where so much of the important and permanent stuff that happens has the impossible-seeming quality of feeling both arbitrary and also inevitable. There are no surprises. Only children and the least savvy viewers will not spot the either-or choices the filmmakers have dug their way into a mile away.

With the actual plot thus encumbered, Endgame devolves fairly early on into a greatest hits reel, and the weight given to some of the character resolutions in the final third is goofy to the point of being unbearable, the kind of shit that could only deserve all its heavy-handedness if you consider Chris Evans as Captain America to be an important part of your childhood. If you’re just a person who thought the Avengers movies were fun and had cool punching and unpretentious dialogue, you may find yourself wishing they’d ended it with all the main characters going to jail. The Avengers movies have never before given me the urge to shake adult human beings and angrily remind them that these are comic book characters, until Endgame. That’s a talking raccoon. That’s a green space alien. That guy shoots lightning. That guy shrinks. Settle down.

Go To The Movies In The Morning

Photo: Larry Ellis (Getty)

Two of the better movie theater experiences I’ve had in the last few years were when I saw Hereditary in June 2018, and when I saw Avengers: Endgame in April. Hereditary was weird and terrifying and I loved it; Endgame was overlong and mostly bored me to death. What those theater-going experiences had in common is that I saw both movies bright and early in the morning, which may not be the “right” or “correct” or “only good” way to see movies, but is for sure the best.

The most obvious benefit of going to the movies in the morning is that almost no one else will be there, and so you will have an entire screening mostly if not entirely to yourself. For reasons that should be perfectly plain, this rules. You will not have to deal with rude people chatting or moving around or chewing noisily or texting. There will not be annoying silhouettes marching across the screen. There will be no line at concessions, and the bathrooms will be clean and unoccupied. You will have absolute freedom to put your feet wherever the hell you want them. Morning moviegoing isn’t the only way to get a theater to yourself, but the only other dependable ways involve seeing extremely lousy movies, or waiting several weeks to see good ones. Bullcrap.

And the experience of watching a movie in a silent theater can be vastly different from the experience of watching it in a loaded one. In the empty, silent theater, the scene in Hereditary [spoiler alert] where Gabriel Byrne’s character bursts into flames and suffers a howling death was shocking and horrifying and even a little bit sad? A week later I saw the movie again with the dreaded Albert Burneko, at night, at a full and lively Regal theater, full of giggling teens, and when old man Byrne went up like a roman candle, everyone in the theater was dying. Even I was laughing! Which is fine—I enjoyed it nearly as much as a moment of dark, absurdist comedy as I did as one of unbearable horror—but it’s eerie to think you might never know how you’d feel about a movie if your first experience of it hadn’t been influenced by a bunch of nervous teenagers, or dipshit MST3K wannabes, or Marvel fangirls and fanboys. The empty theater experience is a far less polluted viewing experience than the unspoiled one, in my correct opinion.

There are other, unexpected benefits to seeing a movie in the morning. At the Alamo theater where I saw Avengers: Endgame, the theater was serving brunch items during the showing. I wimped out and stayed clear of their tempting selections—just popcorn and booze for me, thanks—but I should’ve gone for it! Imagine tearing into blueberry waffles while, for example, Ethan Hunt does badass action stuff across the rooftops of Paris! A breakfast sandwich would’ve for sure made the 19 Endgame hours of fat Thor mewling about his career choices vastly more interesting. More importantly, it would’ve driven home the thrill of sitting in a theater and watching a blockbuster comic book movie on a big movie screen with Dolby surround sound before lunchtime.

That’s the biggest benefit of all. When the movie is over, whether it ruled (Hereditary) or blew (Avengers: Endgame), you get to walk out of the theater into the bright sunlight and suddenly remember that your day has just begun! It’s noon and you’ve brushed your teeth and showered and bathed and showered again, and gone out into the world and seen a damn movie in a movie theater. It’s a weirdly triumphant feeling. If you’d been sitting in your living room watching Avengers: Infinity War on your laptop for the 31st time, you’d feel like an asshole for how your day was shaping up. Or, anyway, you should. But when the pre-lunch movie-watching takes place in public, in a movie theater, you will feel weirdly and undeservedly productive, like a go-getter whose day is filled with plans and purpose.

There are potential pitfalls. Two of my local theaters set aside one day a week where early movies are tailored to parents with toddlers or babies, which means the sound is softened and the lights are dimmed but not extinguished. I blew it and saw Annihilation during one of those days, and it was a bummer, especially since obviously not a single parent chose to bring their small child to a showing of Annihilation, which is a violent and terrifying science fiction movie. So I was a 37-year-old man sitting alone in a theater calibrated to the sensory needs of a damn baby. This was less than ideal, but the truth is it was still a very good moviegoing experience, because there were no teens anywhere in sight. Just me, a quiet movie, some mood lighting, and a large soda.

This is an especially useful bit of advice for huge blockbuster releases. You are excited to see them, and you want to skip spoilers, because you are a goof. You could go to a midnight showing Thursday night, come out buzzed with caffeine and excitement, trek home, stay up too late, and wake up Friday morning feeling like hammered shit. Or! You could go to bed at a sensible hour Thursday night, wake up bright and early Friday morning, catch a 10 a.m. showing, and be right on schedule, having avoided spoilers and also gotten a full night’s sleep. By lunchtime you’ll be the one doing the spoiling, and after all isn’t that the point.

I realize that most of us have responsibilities, including jobs, which require most of our daylight hours. First of all this is definitely bullshit, and is a reason to throw off the yoke of capitalist oppression and take to the streets. And morning movies aren’t quite the same on the weekend—you are likely to run into many more people at the Saturday morning showing of Avengers: ReAvenging than you would on a weekday morning, which will go part of the way toward defeating the purpose. Still better than a Friday night movie! Also I urge you to search for workarounds. Maybe you’re home sick from work? Can’t you be just as sick in an empty movie theater, crushed beneath a massive tub of popcorn? Point is, whether you are experiencing this yourself, the fact is morning movies are the best. Have a good weekend.