Avengers: Endgame – Film Review
Where do I even start with this review?! My mind has been reeling since I watched Avengers: Endgame a few hours ago – there is so much to process and I honestly feel like my brain has been unable to retain everything that happened! But what I do know is that I came away from it satisfied, impressed and very emotional. It’s the end of an era, man!
As this is a spoiler-free review, I will keep the plot very basic. The film picks up after the events of Avengers: Infinity War (as well as the mid-credits scenes in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel), where half of all life on the universe has been wiped out by Thanos (Josh Brolin). The remaining Avengers – including Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) – try to figure out a way to bring the fallen back.
The expectations for Avengers: Endgame were extremely high – it is the culmination of 11 years of storytelling after all – but somehow the incredible Russo Brothers have managed to make a film that not only meets those expectations but surpasses them. They took on the extremely difficult task of weaving all the storylines and bringing all the characters together and made it work in a way that astounds me. Despite the amount of storylines and characters, they’ve managed to keep the trademark humour, give each character a moment to shine and deliver plenty of exciting action and scenes that fans will love!
The film naturally takes a while to get going because there are so many characters to set up and plot points to get in order so there is a distinct lack of action in the beginning, but it more than makes up for it in the second half. I knew going in that it was three hours long and I get it, there’s a lot of ground to cover, but at times in the first half it did sag a little and I was aware of how much was still to go. Some moments probably weren’t entirely necessary but I’m really glad they kept in all the fun character-building moments because I enjoyed those a lot. It can’t be all plot all the time!
The plot confused me a little, I’m not even going to pretend I understood what was going on sometimes, but I just enjoyed watching the characters working together once again. The Russos really do give us fans some wonderful moments – I will talk more about these in my upcoming spoiler-heavy review – and I was mostly satisfied with how their storylines concluded. My hands-down favourites for comedy were Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Paul Rudd as Ant-Man. They made me laugh out loud so much.
I usually hate a CGI-heavy end battle. They are usually a mess and I switch off during them, but this is an epic showdown of proportions never seen before. The scale of it is insane – I couldn’t believe my eyes! It gave me tears! Yes, there is a lot of CGI and there are characters all over the place and sometimes it’s confusing what’s going on but the action is interspersed with humour, character moments and I was on the edge of my seat because I knew the stakes were very real and very high this time and I was about to find out how it all ends.
It is exciting, tense, thrilling and very, very emotional. I cried a lot more than I expected to and I imagine a lot of fans will be the same. If that ending doesn’t make you well up then what is wrong with you?!
In cinemas Thursday 25th April