Hulk had one of the most anticlimactic endings to a story arc I've ever seen.

WOOOOOOOOOOOO LESSS GOOOOOOOO!

Honestly. If Thor was kept as he was in the movie, but with it treated as sad and sympathetic rather than a laugh, I'd love it. Depression isn't a joke.

So did Steve go back in time and then just leave his best friend to be brainwashed and turned into a sleeper agent, even though he knew who had him and where to find him?

My issue with Thor isn't that he's a fat and depressed alcoholic. My issue is that it's mocked and made fun of

What I hate the most is how they treated Thor’s depression compared to how they treated Wanda’s mental illness. Wanda committed atrocities as a response to her inability to deal with grief and Marvel loves to give excuses for her actions. A fake sympathy for the villain. Thor just got fat because of his deep depression and Marvel treated him as an incompetent slob that all his character arc before that must be reversed. He isn’t fit to rule so he has to give a throne to a drunken slaver who had a track record of selling thousands if not millions innocent people to their death for alcohol money.

Something I really wanted to see was Peter Quill mourning the loss of Gamora and dealing with the knowledge that he ruined the plan of taking the Gauntlet from Thanos and cost the lives of half the universe. Maybe him and Nebula could have talked, both understanding that they feel partly to blame or believe they could have done more and lost someone important to them both.

They didn't even have to get all the stones. All they had to do was get the Time Stone from the past, then use it on Thanos' gauntlet to revert the stones to their original state. There you go, you now have all six stones.

The moment Infinity War ended I told my kids: "don't worry, they'll use time travel to bring them all back." I thought I was joking.

Still destroys me that the only two things Tony needed to solve time travel was a single late night and Paul Rudd reminding him that time travel movies are a thing.

Natasha died and no one even acknowledged that.

What really bugs me , is how the "infinity snap" was undone with another snap (on top of that , Russo brothers lied to everyone that "there won't be any resurrections") , yet after Tony dies, nobody tries to bring him back using the time or reality stones. Heroes getting brought back to life ought to be earned - this felt very cheap.

Thor almost single-handedly killed Thanos with 6 stones in Infinity War. The fact that he and Cap combined couldn’t even scratch him with 0 stones in this movie really fucks with the world-building

It's crazy to think that half the MCU is only alive because one heroic rat pressed a button. I guess if the rat didn't do that it would've been eaten by a purple dragon at the end of time.

The thing that bothered me most about the captain America time travel was he went back in time and didn't rescue bucky... how???

Yet again the comics did it better. In the comics the disappearances caused by the snap only lasted 24 hours and most importantly EVERYTHING was undone. Edit: Holy shit. You did something I never thought possible. You made the whole “show your work” thing that was drilled into my head in math class actually make sense as to why it’s important.

I enjoy Endgame but fully recognize just how utterly flawed the story is.

Fun isn’t something one considers when critiquing media. But I must admit…this does put a smile on my face.

THANK YOU FOR THIS endgame has irked me from the beginning. I remember walking out of the theatre opening night deeply unsettled and confused. I kept thinking to myself, "that was it? that's what we got for an ending?"

Wait so does Hydra conquer the world in the Endgame timeline because Steve went back to 1945 but lived happily ever after with Peggy and therefore doesn’t sacrifice himself to stop Hydra’s plan? The worst part of this whole time travel debacle is they could’ve used it to inspire a lot of cool new takes on their stories. Imagine a movie where Steve selfishly didn’t save the world because he lived his whole life a hero and decided to enjoy life for once, so Hydra wins, and a new hero also based in the mid 20th century has to rise to the challenge and defeat Hydra. They had so many opportunities and decided to make shit like She-Hulk instead smh.

People were so overwhelmed with emotion seeing so many heroes in one place, that they didn't realize what a waste Endgame and Thanos were, how much better it could have been.

One of the biggest problems with the MCU is that every time someone writes a new film they have the mindset of "fuck what already exists and the current story, I'm just gonna tell *my* story" which leads to all the contradictions between stories and the shitting over previous films that we keep seeing

The thing that really gets me is that there’s no connection between the heroes and thanos from the past since they killed him in the beginning. And time travel makes me ask so many questions

Thank you for this Steve would have never. He is one of my favorite characters for so many reasons. One of them is his persistence. He would have never given up.

Wait, Dr. Strange looked forward through time to view 14,000,604 timelines of them failing to beat Thanos. You're telling me that out of 14 million timelines, Strange never saw far enough ahead to see the TVA pop in and prune everything? If the TVA knew he was looking and just waited until he stopped to prune that universe, what if he looked thousands of years into the future? Would the TVA wait thousands of years to prune that timeline? Wouldn't that make the "one sacred timeline" concept irrelevant?

They completely screwed themselves by allowing Thanos to "use the stones to destroy the stones." Instead of just defeating Thanos to retrieve the stones, or having to locate the stones after Thanos disposed of them, and then undoing the Snap, they instead FORCED THEMSELVES to break the very reality THEY CREATED.

fun fact: subsequent stories did NOT address these time travel issues

I remember going to the London premiere of Infinity War and being absolutely blown away. It was one of the best films id ever seen, the way they’d managed to juggle so many characters and yet give them all room to breathe was staggering. The ending blew me away and added real stakes to the story for the first time. And then the following year, I went to the premiere for Endgame. As soon as I realised they were going to do a time travel story my heart practically broke. Endgame was so bad it’s not even funny. Yeah, the final battle is cool, but they aren’t even fighting the Thanos who did them wrong!! He got away scott free while they fight some other dude!! They fucked up Hulks story, Black Widows, Captain America’s, Thors…. Just awful stuff. And the MCU hasn’t recovered since

i hate how they made a mockery out of Thor's depression, the theatre was laughing everytime he was on the screen, it was so annoying and i absolutely HATE that cheese whiz comment.

Steve's "retirement" should have come from a malfunction of some sort with the time traveling. He couldn't return, so he decided to live that simple life after doing what needed to be done for the "present". It shouldn't have been a choice, but a consequence of self sacrifice.

After Endgame and Far From Home barely paid lip service to the consequences of the Snap i was a little annoyed but i didn’t really think about it. Your segment on the consequences of the Snap however has opened a pandora’s box frustration inside my head now and also how much of a missed opportunity it was to not see the remaining heroes (and possibly villains) having to operate in this post apocalyptic galaxy. Its just like “oh that happened but things were mostly the same i guess” when in reality it would have been Mad Max with superheroes.

The other issue involving the Tesseract, is that… it was stolen twice. Loki steals it once in 2012 and Tony steals it a second time in 1970. The 2012 timeline CANNOT be set back to normal, because they don’t have a second Space Stone to bring there.

The thought Evil or Dark Thor makes my mouth water. That would have been so badass. Instead of sadness, that trauma turns into hate which corrupts his good intentions. He essentially becomes overprotective and more hateful towards enemies. Besides his current direction is undoing 10 years worth of build up

I went into Endgame blind, and immediately got super sad when I realised they were going with a time travel plot.

THANK YOU for defending that it doesn't really matter which version of Time Travel is chosen in a story, as long as that choice is CONSISTENT and worked effectively. I personally find Temporal Mutability (also frequently called Closed Time Loops) to be the most satisfying, because having the whole story feel like a puzzle falling into place with consumers knowing the end result first but seeing how we got there via convoluted methods is what I call a good time. But I can enjoy any of the three types if they're done well enough, and indeed have and will. But... BUT... handwaving paradoxes or MIXING the types with no rhyme or reason is just... infuriating. It shows a clear lack of regard for worldbuilding, even for immediate plot relevance, that just transcends mere immersion and has my fuming from my core. I despise lazy time travel stories, because they can be so, so beautiful with the right amount of effort and finesse.

I remember watching this movie, but I don't remember anything about it... Which is something that happens to me more and more often, even just a month after watching something. This would mean that either I'm getting old really quickly and my memory is failing, or movies are getting more bland and forgettable as we speak... Both of these options are bad, but for the common good, I hope that I just got senile at a young age.

Soooo basically Endgame is a classical example of a film that didn't do its homework when it comes to its story and relied solely on emotional payoffs to be regarded as a good film. Payoffs that were welcomed by the public because of the massive multiple years buildup to it. It's kind of a unique case in film history when you think about it, because it's very hard to actually make your voice heard when saying "Endgame is bad" with all the anticipation that came with it.

Just remember that Captain America got old and went back to the time when getting old doesn't matter because of Pym Particles.

The worst part was that even though Steve Rogers wouldn't give up, Chris Evans was done with the role. The movies in which these characters appear are based on the actors' contracts and if they're willing to extend it. They could've just had Captain America die alongside Tony, but they didn't want to do that since that isn't what many of us wanted. They sacrificed his character because the studio didn't want to take a financial risk by having him die but instead give him the one thing his character arc depended on giving up.

My head canon is that Cap went to the ancient one first and she reversed the stones to the casings they were originally in. But yeah, Endgame is an incoherent mess

They clearly wrote Infinity War without knowing how Endgame would go. The snap should have stayed and only the actors who wanted to retire should have been snapped.

Hit the nail on the head. What pissed me off about the whole Cap thing is that lots of fans forgave him for going back to stay with Peggy because “He deserved it!” That’s not the point nor does that matter. It doesn’t matter if he suffered in life and deserved the ending. It was out of character and destroys who he is.

Killing Thanos and then introducing a less interesting mustache twirling Thanos completely deflated all the tension Infinity War had.

Trying to explain this to anyone is physically impossible because they always ignore any points your giving and dismiss you as not knowing anything (actually just happened to me)

One thing that's weirdly underdiscussed in this extremely long video is the 5 year time skip. I'd be willing to accept a Thor who fell into an alcoholic depression, got fat, and shut himself off from the world and his responsibilities as the result of Infinity War. It's traumatic. The problem is that it comes at the end of a 5 year time skip, so we just cut to it for a gag, and we don't see the gradual fall of him going down. Same for the Hulk-they just skipped ahead 5 years and solved issues off-screen. There's no resolution of Steve and Tony's conflict because 5 years passed and of course they experienced a lot in the meantime. We just don't get to see any of it and how their relationship grew over those 5 years. There's no examination of the greater state of the world during those 5 years, just little snippets like Captain America holding a therapy session, but no answers to big questions about how everything is working. Just deciding to skip ahead 5 years creates a ton of narrative problems. I think the only reason it happens is because they wanted to...dare I say it..."subvert expectations" by destroying the stones and killing Thanos in the first 20 minutes.

I kinda wish that they had ended phases 3 with Infinity War and then spent phase 4 exploring the characters who survived the snap, show us the world, show us how the characters got to the points that they were in in Endgame. Then end phases 4 with Endgame.

The issues are covered over with the epic scenes and emotions of everyone being brought back, nearly everyone. They did a lot of characters dirty though, the vision, the hulk, fat Thor, Natasha, Howard Stark and Dr Pim. Killing off Tony Stark and letting Steve Rogers retire has pretty much killed the franchise.

I just noticed - Tony's dilemma is nonsense. He wants to have his kid and so on as well as the snap unsnapped. Fine. The stones can do that. They can't undo a sacrifice to them, but anything else is fair game. They are infinite in terms of power, or near as much to make no difference. What is his child? Atoms in a certain order. Done. Since the spirit stone is a thing, the spirit would be bound to those atoms. That would be his real daughter, not a copy, and even if her memories would be odd, she would be alive, and the unwinding of time could be done in such a way as to preserve his family.

I knew this movie was worse than infinity war, and that it had fan service, but I wasn't expecting the core of the movie to be so shallow. In retrospect, the perfect foreshadowing for the MCU going forward

Endgame is that movie that kinda gets worse as time past and as the MCU continues to grow and sorta treats this movie as a silly little footnote rather than the universe-shaking event it should be.

Thor was ruined, hulk was ruined, boring story, such baddd goofy jokes, and big finale was a big cgi fest, let me add the final battle(plan) made absolutely no sense.

Time travel could have been used effectively if it used a non-renewable resource. Namely, the Infinity Stones. If Strange left a spell with a fragment of the Time Stone to allow the time machine to work, we could maintain much of the plot's skeleton. Then, the final snap could be Tony using the Gauntlet on Thanos', matching unstoppable force against immovable object, mutually annihilating them.

You know what the biggest issue with Steve staying with Peggy is? In The Winter Soldier, Peggy stated that she had a husband and kids, that the man she married was one of the men Steve saved back in TFA. How the hell is this timeline supposed to not be altered if Peggy married Steve instead of that guy? And if the implication is that it was him all along, I doubt people wouldn't recognize him in the streets after being declared dead and I think SHARON would recognize her RELATIVE from photos before KISSING HIM. Unless the other implication is that they only had their one dance/one-night stand before Steve moved on and lived a normal life with someone else. Which is an even worse justification for him staying back in time; an one-night stand. This endgame implies Steve effin Rogers, a paragon of heroism and Captain AMERICA, lived through 9/11 without trying to prevent it, I just... Wow.

Something else about the Blip is that No Way Home establishes that to the people who were blipped, it's like nothing happened. Ignoring the mental trauma that would come with missing 5 years of your friends/family's lives, there is also the issue of remarriages. If you got snapped, but your spouse didn't, and within that 5 years they remarry and possibly have kids. Then when the person who got blipped comes back, there would definitely be a ton of tension in the air.

I thought it was just me. I really liked Endgame. I HATED what they did to their most powerful Avengers......Hulk and Thor. But it's like everytime I've rewatched, the Cringe Moments got More Cringy.

In Agents of Shield they offer up a few possibilities for how time travel works but never do they describe it as being “this is how it works trust me I know everything” and that works a lot better than Bruce giving the most insane explanation that he thinks is fact when they use of that travel doesn’t hold up consistently. 45:22 It’s a magical place. 55:51 Falcon and the Winter Soldier again assassinated his character by claiming he completely abandoned Sharon after Civil War. This just would not have happened.

Endgame after Infinity War was like following up a Michelin star meal with a $0.25 gumball as dessert. I saw fan theories about how to solve the snap that were miles better and would make continuity a million times easier than what they decided to go with. They should have never messed with time travel and alternate universes. It's hard to do well and they clearly weren't even thinking a single second past Endgame's credits with their solution to the snap.

I love how Thor's plan was to use the hammer to push the axe closer to thanos rather than... smashing him in the head with it.

2 hours and he didnt even mention how poorly composed the final battle is. At no point during the battle do we ever understand where all the characters are in relation to each other.

I was 16 when Endgame came out, was a super diehard fan of the MCU and marvel/DC comics back then, and I was utterly disappointed by Endgame (and not very satisfied with Infinity War either). I don’t think our opinion is too unpopular.

The way Steve sits around at the beginning like he's given up/retired and left Natasha to run the Avengers is so out of character. It took me the longest time to figure out why his role in this movie felt off, but once I realized what bothered me I couldn't really believe it. Wouldn't Steve be doing his dead level best to help mend the world after the snap? Why has he just left the running of the Avengers to Natasha?

I liked the part where Captain Marvel, after having just taken out Thanos' ship singlehandedly, needed a bunch of other characters who all happened to be women to stand next to her as she flew away.

you used the example of Looper for #3 in your time travel list, but the much better executed example I would use (strangely enough) is Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkiban. This is also known as the Novikov Self Consistency Principle, and is the only form of time travel that actually makes sense, but it's criminally underrepresented in film. It works because there are no timelines or paradoxes, everything that can happen has happened. Prisoner of Azkiban (the best Potter film imo) presents this very well by basically telling the story twice but from different perspectives but also with the same characters, the second group having the benefit of foresight. I also have to take a big issue with the critique of Tony's character. While Endgame is indeed trash, Tony initially choosing his family over everything else is actually within character. He's finally decided to hang it up and have the life he's been promising to his wife. He also has a child. And its been shown time and time again in every single study that that's the turning point for almost everyone. Once you have a child, everything changes. I'm not sure if Fringy has a child, but I'm definitely doubtful. If you told me I could sacrifice my son to save a trillion people I'd laugh you out of the room 100 times out of 100. If you gave someone the choice where they can press a button and for the rest of their child's life he/she will have whatever they want, have a long a happy life with the partner of their dreams, but pressing that button would cause one random person they don't know to die, 99% of parents are pressing that button every single time. Having a child really does hit different. My critique of endgame is the exact opposite. It would've made much more sense if Tony was like "nah, not this time bud, my family is everything, figure this shit out on your own." Also no, the Sokovia Accords were not the "right" decision just because "everyone agrees". Lots of people agreeing to something doesn't make it a good idea. It's why pure democracy always devolves into chaos. The right step is to demand the Avengers make better decisions, not to remove their decision-making ability. If anything, it should've been mutually agreed upon that Stark should submit to monitoring/judgement since it was almost exclusively him and his ego that led to Ultron. Once again, we're blaming a group for the actions of a single member (because it's easier and less nuanced). Steve was correct in Civil War, its not even really debatable. You have one side trying to force everyone to sign away their freedom, including literally imprisoning Wanda on house arrest over something she didn't do, vs a man that wants the freedom he's always had and has never demonstrated himself as being undeserving of it. Yes he did help Bucky escape, but he was also trying to get him help the whole time, not just evade authorities. Steve represents the independent spirit and accountability, Tony represent submission of freedom to government power. Sorry but Tony is the bad guy in the story

There are some parts that I liked about Endgame, but when they introduced time travel, I was like “oh boy…”.

I had to pause and say Thank You for your section on Steve Rogers. He's been my favorite character throughout this MCU journey, and you laid out exactly why I will forever be mad at Endgame. The Steve in Endgame is not the Steve I know. I'm repeating you, but he never would have left and abandoned Bucky, and he never would have gone back in time to a woman who Explicitly told him to move on. Endgame disrespected Steve and Peggy, end of story.

As a man who hasn't enjoyed Marvel since Endgame, and who rolls his eyes every time his friends start ranting about how "awesome Marvel content" on Disney+ is . . . I'm excited to watch this video.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but season 1 of CW Flash's has a better character arc than Captain America did in Endgame. So to recap the Season 1 finale, Barry Allen is offered the chance to go back in time and save his mother's life. Instead, he uses the opportunity to say one last goodbye to his dying mom before returning to the present to stop Eobard Thawne. Granted, it all gets undone in season 3 but you get what I mean. If Steve just traveled back in time to reassure Peggy that he's okay before traveling back to the present then it would be fine. Heck, you could even technically give Steve a happy ending by telling Peggy he's frozen in the Arctic. That way you have two Steves: ours who stays in the present and the alternate Steve who's thawed out early and lives a long and healthy life with Peggy.

When I first clicked on this video I liked Endgame, and was reluctant to say it was terrible (I knew it wasn’t one of the MCU’s best, but B-A tier at least). But I honestly can’t argue with the majority of these points, you’ve really changed my mind. Great job, your clearly put a lot of effort into this video and it’s great!

Everyone can benefit from a bad example. Remember that before you ask why this video exists, folks. There’s a reason Fringy spends so much time digging into long-term problems with the MCU. This stuff is difficult, and when you have a roadmap that is so long and so remarkably broken, you have a great list of things to not do. Here’s one the green birdmn missed: Don’t have your super McMuffins get “reduced to atoms” and also establish that their absence is a very bad thing on a universal scale, in a nonspecific way that doesn’t need further explanation.

I was bored throughout the movie, up until the battle at the end. Infinity war had me gripped from start to finish. I was surprised that so many people didn't see it as lazy fan service, but I'm glad most people enjoyed it. Nebula's character Arc IMO was the only meaningful piece of writing in the movie.

Everyone says the mcu ended after this movie but honestly, I think End Game was the beginning of the end already. It had all the issues the current mcu has just less prominent.

When my friends and I went to see Endgame (we got the pre-midnight viewing) we all went deathly silent during the time travel reveal. My friends are brainless MCU fans. They know it. I know it. They know I'm not a brainless MCU fan. When Tony unlocked time travel one of my friends turned to me and very gently cussed me out about predicting it. I predicted it as the single worst idea for a movie. The next best prediction was that Antman would explode Thanos by crawling up his ass. Then Bannulk (Banner/Hulk) brought everyone back. I half expected cheers from my fellow viewers. There was golf clapping. Thanos got dusted and there was murmuring. Polite comments about "why did Infinity War even happen then?"

Yeah, I *despised* how Thor was turned into a broken shell of a person and we're *supposed* to laugh at that... until we're suddenly not.

The blip needed a phase of it's own. Or shows about the characters. Natasha could have finally had her movie. Ronin could have had a show. Steve could have become a vigilante/nomad.

If you were looking for an example of temporal mutability in media, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban actually did it pretty well.

This was the video I was waiting for. I felt the EXACT SAME about the movie. I liked it when I saw it in theaters, but the more time passes the more I realized how terrible it truly was. It's like the cheapest, cheesiest of burgers. It sends all the signals to the brain that good things are happening as you consume it, but once that's over you start feeling sick and wishing you hadn't.

I feel like the fact that it was evident rdj and evans were leaving after endgame made their departures so much less impactful. It really takes away from the “it all comes down to this” and makes it feel more like “this is the farthest we can go”.

My biggest complaint about Endgame was described beautifully by you. How did Thor almost kill Thanos when Thanos had all the stones, yet stoneless Thanos can take on Thor and company without the power of said stones?

16:02 WAIT A SECOND! Guardians of the Galaxy said no one could touch the power stone without exploding!

Personally I was never able fathom why everyone held Endgame in such high regard and praised everything about it, so It's interesting seeing people coming around to the idea that Endgame wasn't a good movie.

I agree with you on Steve. Yes, he may deserve a normal life with Peggy and wish he had that, but it was his will to make sacrifices for the greater good. Even before he was a super soldier, he threw himself on what everyone believed was a live grenade, without a thought. He was chosen because he is the guy to make the sacrifice. It’s like Steve told Tony, “you’re not the one to lay down on the wire…”, because Steve knows that he is that guy because he has done it many times. I can’t believe that Steve could stand by, dancing with Peggy, while bad things were going on anywhere in his world. It is the will to make sacrifices that makes one a hero. You can’t be a hero if you can’t take risks and willing to make sacrifices to help others. So, after returning to the past, does Steve not fight Red Skull or crash the plane in the sea so he can dance with Peggy. Does Twinkle Toes Steve now use his super human endurance to win dance marathons? I just can’t see Steve mowing the lawn and fixing the picket fence while the world is going to hell. Do the other Avengers need to fight Loki and his Chitauri army without Cap? Does Steve just become Ward Cleaver instead of Captain America? Was Captain America now turned into Twinkle Toes Rogers, more famous for his dancing than fighting? I just can’t buy it. I did not think it was a great ending for Steve. The same skinny kid who would fight with a guy twice his size and leap onto a live grenade is the same guy inside all of that muscle. The super soldier serum just gave Steve a body that could back up his heroic mind.

"Rain fire!" "Sire, but our troops!" *They literally did that trope. Seriously.*

Very good and in depth. I think the only thing not really mentioned was the misuse or, lack their of, of the infinity stones. To barrow from the shaggy meme. We didn’t even see 10% of their power. There could have been a bit where each of the avengers grabs a stone and shows what they are capable of individually let alone united. Instead they are a McGuffin that do vaguely defined stuff when needed.

The one really gpt fucked was hulks storyline. He was absolutely useless. Hulk and banners relationship got resolved off screen and we were just meant to accept it. We shouldve had a hulk films instead of captain marvel. She shouldve been introduced after the infinity saga as she doesnt get the screen time she needs to solidify her presence in the avengers

Yeah I didn't like End Game. Which is weird cos Infinity War is really great imo. Great pacing, great action, more interesting characterization. End Game killed all that momentum right off the bat and then spent the rest of the movie slowly building up back to where we left off really. Only with a drastically less interesting version of Thanos. The movie ends with the usual mass CGI slogfest which many movies fall into. Whilst Infinity War had much smaller scale fights, but also massively more intense and grounded. I just found End Game rather boring and bloated. The only real thing I enjoyed was doing a decent job ending ongoing story of the MCU in a respectful way.

It's good to hear someone analyzing the problems with Endgame.

Ya know what something else about the Time Travel it just didn't feel necessary. The world wasn't post apocalyptic like in Xmen Days of Future Past. They were sitting around feeling sad sure, but things weren't in ruin. In Xmen Days of future past, mutants and humans with the X gene were being hunted down. The remaining Xmen were barely able to survive. Time travel is their last chance to set everything right. Meanwhile, in Endgame everyone persisted. Tony was retired and settled down with his family. Hulk was a celebrity. Thor and friends were playing Fortnite. Heck, even when planning for the time heist they were sitting around eating take out. Did all the supervillains get dusted? Seemed like nothing was really going on in the world.

You were brave to skewer this sacred cow. The post-multiverse MCU is utterly wretched and Endgame has one of the worst endings in movie history. Having to listen to all the Loki nonsense literally hurt my brain cells.

Something everyone talks about with suspension of disbelief, that I feel no one talks about, is the difference between continued and initial suspension. Let's say you start a new story, that plays on an alien world. You have the premise and when something new is introduced at the start of the story, you are a lot more willing to engage with it and let it pass. The grass is purple, there are no trees, there is some weird funky metal, it's all fine, cause you are going into the story with the mindset "This is an alien world" But the more you learn of that world, the more expectations and experiences you have to draw on. Okay, the grass is now blue. Why? I thought it was purple. If the story explains it, like "The rocks here are different and the pigments make it blue, not purple" you usually go: "Yeah sure, I can buy it" and when red grass comes up with the same reason, you are, again, more likely to believe it. But when they suddenly put trees in, after specifically stating "There are no trees on this world" and then go "Oh yes, well, except this one, of course, duh. Forgot to mention." it becomes contradictory and goes against your suspension. Contradictions being the biggest grind and drain on our Suspension. So when things are first introduced in a setting, we are a lot more ready to accept it, as we don't have any, or at least a lot less, contradicting notions of what should and should not be. And the longer a story runs. The more the world and characters are fleshed out, the harder inconsistencies, contradictions or convenient coincidences grate on us. because they grind up against more of those mountains of experience and expectations, that we built ourselves. And in the case of Endgame, we got a damn decade of characterbuilding, worldbuilding and events, that this movie really flies against.

The best thing about the charge in the Black Gate is that even in-universe, it has a reason for being there; it's supposed to be big to catch Sauron's attention and predictable enough to make him believe they had the Ring. In the book, Sauron doesn't seem to think they would destroy the Ring and wants to repeat the first battle in the Black Gate again but with him retaking it, when he finds out that he has been duped, he is described as having a meltdown because of it. It was an actual plan and it's a good character moment for pretty much everyone, even Sauron (who's barely in the books) shows his paranoia and arrogance through his response to it and everyone else pretty much knows there isn't much of a practical way of winning. It sucks that charges and last stands are used as set pieces rather than part of an actual strategy, they seem less impressive when they aren't well thought out.

Let's be real, if Bucky were a woman he and Steve would be each other's endgame long ago

I can't stand when people use "but it's just a silly story about superheroes!" as an excuse to ignore bad writing. Yeah, most superhero stories are disposable trash, but there are plenty that are genuinely well-written, thought out, dare I say even works of actual art. And dismissing a work's strengths and faults just because it's in a fantastical genre is especially rich considering some of the most popular TV shows of the past two decades were deadly serious dramas about dragons and zombies and robots that dress up like cowboys.

Having just watched Multiverse of Madness, it is fully interesting that Endgame chose to not have the infinity stones destroyed, because Wanda becoming a villain is completely dependent on her not using the reality and soul stones to wish her kids alive.

“Yes, even worse than Age of Ultron” Lol those were the days.

The movie ended for me the moment they killed infinity war thanos. There’s just no story left to tell at that point. I’m not completely against all the time travel garbage, but going to stop a different thanos is just kinda trash. there is just nothing interesting about a climactic battle against a villain that has like no connection to the heroes whatsoever.

0:00 Video begins 4:03 Addressing Possible Criticisms 5:41 Intro continues 7:02 The MCU as a Whole, and Endgame's Place in it 11:40 Critique begins (Time travel in stories) 13:24 Loki is Terrible- A Video Essay 18:19 Time Travel Mechanics, Including a Lesson with Professor Fringy 31:50 How did Cap return all the stones? 33:56 "bUt It'S oK bEcAuSe OtHeR sToRiEs WiLl FiX iT" 34:55 A Heist for the Ages. Or the timelines in this case. A Heist for the Timelines, I guess. The Avengers are dumb basically, also including a lesson with Professor Fringy. 39:53 Spectacle Over Logic- Endgame's Final Battle. 50:45 Characters- the Backbone of Storytelling 54:56 Captain America 1:01:46 A Tangent on the Snap and the Blip 1:07:26 Iron Man 1:13:20 Civil War's Consequences are Squandered 1:21:01 Thor 1:27:08 Hulk 1:29:51 Hawkeye 1:30:51 Black Widow 1:32:45 Nebula 1:33:48 Rocket 1:34:19 Thanos ("Look how they massacred my boy ☹.") 1:36:48 Recapping Everything 1:37:34 Golden Nuggies in a Landfill of Goo 1:40:42 Spectacle Over Writing. Fan Service at all Costs! 1:42:57 Subtopic: Fiction and Suspension of Disbelief 1:46:13 Subtopic ends 1:49:58 What Could Have Been 1:57:20 The State of the Industry (Conclusion) 1:59:53 kzfaq.info/get/bejne/h7txfNeC0teRfIk.html

I always hated that Peter Quill was among the dusted in the snap. He could've had a great arc in Endgame feeling responsible for what happened and could have helped rebuild the spaceship in the beginning enough that they wouldn't need to shoehorn in Captain Marvel. I figured that he'd have been spared at least when he earned Thanos's respect in Infinity War by choosing to sacrifice Gamora, but I could see an argument as to why he was snapped away since Gamora is also the one person Thanos cared about. Also I haven't seen a single Marvel film or tv show after Endgame aside from Spider-man NWH, I truly consider Endgame to be...well, a finale. Seems like that was a good decision with how bad everything is that came out afterwards. ~('

Frankly, you are not going to get as much disagreement or criticism on your opinion of the MCU movies that you might think. None of the MCU movies were all that good, except visually. All of the MCU movies, including Endgame, were made to be impressive visually. But at the cost of good story, continuity, plot holes you could drive a truck through, characters who acted in ways that made no sense, for no apparent reason, situations and events that made no sense. etc. The movie makers thought the fans/customers were stupid. We were supposed to look at the pretty explosions and forget everything else. When you first see the movies, you are impressed by all the glittery gadgets and special effects----but later, when you think about it, you go "hey, that made no sense." And the MCU had a problem with smart people. Look how they treated Tony Stark. Half of the stuff that goes on is having smart people do and say things that make them look ridiculous. The 'science" makes no sense, breaks its own rules and fails to have any kind of continuity. Why would Tony have anything to do with the time heist to begin with? He, of all of them, had to know what was at risk. Tony, just to mention one thing, was ricking the life of his daughter. He was risking un-creating her. Why would he do that? If anything he should have been opposed to the others trying this hair brained quest. The other "avengers" were so focused on their own losses, that they did not consider what harm they could do. Yes, Earth had been defeated and decimated; but it had survived and was beginning to thrive again. They were taking the chance of making things infinitely worse. Case in point: while the idea of time travel is difficult, what about the idea that they were, in essence, returning to life several BILLION people who had been dead for 5 years? Now, even getting past the legal and religious aspects of 4 billion people returning from death, these people would return with nothing but the clothes on their backs, no jobs, no families, no homes, no money, no future. They would be entirely dependent on their families or the government. The sudden need to feed, clothe and take care of an additional 4 billion people who appear overnight would cause the entire world economy and every government to collapse. So while it might seem like a good idea to bring these people back from the dead, it probably wasn't, as it could result in the total destruction of the world as we know it. Kind of makes the Avengers the bad guys, instead of Thanos. that entire scenario has about a hundred plot holes just by itself. Like for example, assuming missing people would just reappear safe and sound from where they vanished----which itself, is an enormous plot hole with so many variables it boggles the mind. Again, the MCU showing it's contempt for intelligence. What I hated most about "Endgame" is that it killed Iron Man for no good reason. If anyone deserved a happy ending, it was Tony Stark. The movie also destroyed virtually all the classic heroes. The end of the movie left us mourning at the funeral of Iron Man. This was not a happy ending of any kind. What was there to celebrate? Nothing. No one came out on top. There was absolutely no reason to kill Iron Man or destroy all of the other heroes, except for the fact that the MCU wanted to replace them all with their own girl boss versions---something that no fan had asked for or wanted. Well we have all seen just how good the M-She-U has turned out. No, Endgame was not the pinnacle of good moving making, in any sense of the word. And don't even get me started on the crap that was the Loki TV show.

Also also, people keep missing this, Tony in his message to Pepper says the ship is dead in the water a thousand light years from earth and they have a day worth of oxygen, meaning that captain marvel is, faster than light...

Yet another problem with the time heist is that EVERYONE traveled back in time. This means that if the time machine malfunctioned in some way then they wouldn't be able to get back to the present because nobody is there to fix the machine.