Avengers: Endgame: Movie Review

Avengers: Endgame in some ways resembles a Wagnerian opera with a lot of good and some annoying bad, as well as, several loose plot points and self-referential nods to previous Marvel movies.

The opening is one of the best movie openings in a long time, and the ending is emotionally powerful. In fact, in many ways, the movie expresses the most important rule in filmmaking, which is to touch the audience's emotions with very sad scenes, as well as, very funny scenes, keeping the audience intrigued for much of the movie. That said, some of the false threads should have been cut, and the movie would have been reduced to a much more reasonable, compact, and more compelling time frame.

In the previous Avengers movie, Infinity War, the evil, crazed environmentalist, Thanos, obtained all the ultra-powerful "Infinity Stones" and snapped his fingers, killing half of all the sentient creatures in the universe.

(Major spoilers removed. Go to Movieguide.org for full review, spoliers included.)

Plot point after plot point, character arc after character arc, motivation after motivation leads to the final battle. Who will win? Who will die?

Avengers: Endgame has one unified plot with many characters and themes merging into it. In the interest of finding the emotional moment in each scene, some of the plot points are unresolved and some of the storylines are left hanging. At one point in the movie, this gets to be tedious and may be confusing if you haven't seen all the previous Marvel movies up to now. That said, the good outweighs the bad. But, Avengers: Endgame has a lot of foul language, including strong blasphemies, intense action violence, and other immoral content that warrant extreme caution.

On the good side, family is of prime importance in the movie's main storyline. Also, people are respected as equals, and individual life is appreciated. Patriotism, freedom, and free enterprise are portrayed in a strong positive light as in previous movies.

On the negative side, some children are taught to curse. Even Captain America curses, even though it doesn't ring true to his character from previous movies. Avengers: Endgame also contains strong references to witchcraft and a gratuitous, annoying reference to perversity in one scene. Eventually, some important relationships come to naught. Also, it becomes clear that some beloved characters aren't going to appear in the next Marvel movie unless it's in a flashback. Most annoying to one reviewer was the constant nods to political correctness.

Marvel has developed a good formula. They just need a little more attention to detail. Clearly, they love families. So, they should avoid getting edgy and using so much foul language, since it alienates the very people they want to reach.

Some of the reviewers thought Marvel has reached its summit. If so, they're sowing the seeds of alienating the huge audience they've built up in the past 22 movies, not counting the first three Spider-Man movies released by Sony. However, there have been filmmakers and studios that looked like they were peaking, then they self-corrected and went on to greater achievements.