Hello, film aficionados! Welcome to Episode 4 of The Fansplainers, in which Ian and Dave discuss Avengers 4! (Geddit?)
This episode is all about instant reactions rather than considered opinions, as Ian and Dave watched Avengers 4: Endgame on opening night and then hurried back to Sneaky Dragon headquarters to record their thoughts.
In short: they enjoyed it. But why? Well, let Ian and Dave fansplain it to you!
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Hey!
First, I have to share this. You made a comment about seeing the movie via a time machine (or something like that), and that’s nearly the plot of this video:
I like Marvel movies for the character bits. I’m fine with action, but at a certain point it becomes a video game cut scene and I lose interest. So Infinity War didn’t really work for me, because it was (as I remember it, anyway) nearly entirely action, and I didn’t really care about anything that was going on. But the end! I knew from the comics that Thanos kills off half the universe, but I wasn’t expecting the movies to go with such a downer of an ending, and the fact that they did made me excited to see part two.
And it delivered! I enjoyed seeing the different way the heroes dealt with their failure, from Iron Man’s isolation, Thor’s PTSD, the Black Widow’s inability to move on, and Captain America’s focus on helping other people. I like that for most of the movie, there wasn’t a villain driving things. The time-travel bits were fun and fan-service-y, but also delivered some good character moments. Even the final battle was good.
I only have two complaints. Firstly, Captain Marvel didn’t fit in. She’s just so powerful, I guess they didn’t want her to take over the movie (especially when so much of it is about Captain America and Iron Man). So they kept her away, other than when she was needed to move the plot.
Secondly, the scene with all the women felt off to me. I get that they wanted to show that Marvel has a bunch of great women characters, but it seemed artificial and threw me out of the movie for a moment.
(That said, I had the opposite reaction to the group session at the start of the movie, where Captain America listens sympathetically to a guy talking about a date he was on with another man. That’s an unequivocal endorsement that being gay is OK. That’s something that shouldn’t be controversial, but kinda is. Similarly, I read the scene with the women as an endorsement that women can be heroes. That also shouldn’t be controversial, but somehow is.)
Cheers!
Thanks for your recap and analysis. There were so many brilliant moments in the movie. The old saying that there are no small parts really applied to this film. No matter how few lines the actors had, they all acted as though they were main characters in the storyline they were in. It’s like you could take any scene in the movie and imagine a whole other movie around it.
Ken Jeong as the Storage Unit Guy was another fun Community alum cameo.
I thought that moment when the female characters assemble to back up Captain Marvel was kind of lame. Women are already fairly well-represented in the movie up to that point and are shown to be strong and integral to the plot. There was no need for the film to pat itself on the back about it. Imagine if all the black characters converged in the middle of the battle behind, say, War Machine.
I love that it’ll be the past Gamora that Star-lord will be most likely be meeting up with in Guardians of the Galaxy 3. It’ll be fun seeing Star-Lord trying to convince her they were in a relationship and if Rocket and the others will back him up or screw around with him about it.
I actually waited to see Endgame a second time after you guys discussed it on Fansplainers. Endgame and Infinity War before it, were more like the big cross-over comics I loved as a teen than anything I’ve ever seen on screen. As a kid, I used to fantasize in my mind exactly what superheroes would look like if they really existed, so I drew them as lifelike as possible just to satisfy my thoughts. I designed movie posters for the Avengers and Fantastic Four as far back as 1980 just to see what they would look like.
Even though his work is stylized to a point, you can imagine how I reacted to the realism of Alex Ross’ art years ago. Then the Marvel Universe was born and I was really into it, all those years of wondering what these films would be like and now I know and I’m more than fulfilled.
One of my good friends who collected and read comics with me used to call me “The Cross-Over Kid” because I really enjoyed the books crossing over one another. I guess I’m still like that because Infinity War and Endgame was just one huge crossover from all the films. Star-Lord meeting Tony Stark, Doctor Strange meeting Spider-Man and Thor meeting Rocket…it’s all like a dream come true.
A few things that linger in my mind over Endgame. I really would have liked to see Black Widow appear on the quantum time pad when they were expecting Cap to return. Just to know that Cap had traded the soul stone back for her life.
The adventure of Cap returning the stones is like a film in itself, and I wonder how it went when he saw the Red Skull on Vormir?
I really liked the “Banner-fied” Hulk upon the second viewing, I like that he’s actually undergone an evolution during the last eleven years. Big, dumb, mad Hulk just gets boring after awhile and Ruffalo has worked wonders for that character.
And something I heard elsewhere…the rat that was walking across the dashboard of Scott’s van is the real hero of the film. Without that rat, the quantum device wouldn’t have been activated and nothing else would have happened, so that rat is the MVP of the Marvel Universe!
I love Fansplainers!! Keep up the great discussions. I actually watched “Us” before the next podcast so I would be able to enjoy it to it’s fullest…