I have a sort of okay relationship with the MCU. I'm a deep weeb at heart, which has always led me to have a somewhat muted reception to western geeky stuff. I try to be fair and to like things for what they are, but the result is somewhat idiosyncratic opinions that can often antagonize my friends. Civil War had the best action in the entire MCU canon. Infinity War's action was ok, Bucky is the most useless thing in the world, I never know how cool Captain America is gonna be in any given movie...
Anyway, this is just to give you a sense of where I come from when I watch this film. But I come from another place:
I was 13 when Iron Man came out. I'm 24 now, so we'll fudge things a bit and say that I'm double the age I was then. Which means that, for half of the time I've been alive, MCU movies have been coming out with me being varying levels of excitement to see them.
Avengers 1 was already sort of a weird culminating moment for me, then, even if I'm not that fond of the movie in retrospect. I know it sounds like I'm just kvetching here, but I think it's really important to get across a certain cynicism I at least felt in the movies, fairly or not. It's not exactly original to feel the franchise is milked, or to feel superhero fatigue. For my part, I've always held up the Spiderman movies, particularly 2, as an example of the heart of the genre.
What does it mean to be a hero?
It's a question that the Marvel movies (and superhero movies in general) have all asked, but some more honestly than others. Is my radar completely right on this? I doubt it. Little things can make me love a movie or can throw me off. I think Iron Man 3 is an amazingly written film that's ultra-touching. Captain America 1 makes me cringe every time, and for that matter, so did Spiderman: Homecoming. Man of Steel despite being a piece of shit action-wise and me hating Zack Snyder (and most of the things he stands for vis-a-vis superheroes), amazingly, seemed to me to have genuine and heartfelt themes. All in all, I understand that I can be a bit temperamental with regards to these movies and I'm not really going to try to hide that.
But man, End Game had me really thinking.
What's it mean to be a hero?
What did they lose? What did they sacrifice? As I watched the film, I found myself marveling at all the ways they could have fucked it up. 14 million to one, right? Tony Stark could've been too much of a martyr. There could've been a lot of Cap'n jerking that didn't make any sense. This character could've had too little screen time, this much too much screen time, but more than all these, every single one of the main characters had ten years of character development that could've been fucked with a gestural "ok it's better now" scene that, without making anyone explicitly unhappy, would've left you with a deep sense of dissatisfaction by not dealing with their deeper character conflicts.
I mean, I'm sure it felt gestural to plenty of people. As we left the movies my parents were bombarding me with question after question. Who was that guy again? Man, why did Cap'n decide to stay in the past anyway? I don't get why Tony Stark had to die! To be honest, despite watching I'd say most of all the MCU films, I didn't even really have a sense of these deeper conflicts at all. I simply hadn't cared enough to pay that much attention. Tony was sort of a dick in Civil War, he didn't like Cap'n anymore, they were split in IW1, Thor was... funny.
But, sort of dizzyingly, it all makes a lot of sense to me now. Tony and Cap'n are workaholics -- Tony's never had any problem sacrificing himself, but he's never done it for the right reasons. Amazingly, it took me ten years to see that this narcissist's arc over all these years was learning to truly love himself and want his own happiness. And only then, only when he truly decides to grab his own happiness and wants it above everything else and everyone else -- only then was he allowed to truly give it up for the sake of the universe.
End Game solidifies what everyone kind of knew deep down: Tony, not Captain America is the main character of the MCU and I wouldn't really have it any other way. But yeah, that's what Captain's ending is all about. He learns from Tony. At the end, he decides he's done his duty and decides to live a happy life. And... I don't know. I don't really know what it means, but somehow I get that's part of being a hero too. You know? Loving yourself. That's pretty hippie.
I hate spending too much time writing these long review essays, but sometimes I feel like I'll literally explode if I don't get them out, so let me get back to the point. End Game is centered around time travel, right? It's all about things we lost, things we want to get back, about not wasting what time we have. It combines most of the great time travel tropes, like Thor and Tony getting a chance to talk with someone long dead and gain some clarification, it even has an amazing fucking mirror match where Captain America fights himself in the past and the film just shows through fucking action Captain has mellowed the fuck out. It's fucking amazing to me. You can just see it in the choreography, this upstart, edgy leader of men taking himself on when he's finally learned what it means to fucking chill and deal with other people.
Forgive me if this has been tread over a bunch, but I haven't actually read any reviews or anything for this film: End Game's about us. Maybe. About Millennials. Ok, that's a bit conceited. Let's say anyone who's grown a lot in the last ten years, sometimes in the wrong direction, who've felt let down by who we became, or, at the very least, find ourselves lost and unsure where to take ourselves from here.
Being the person you are, instead of the person you're supposed to be, right? When Iron Man 1 came out, I was in eighth grade, just a few weeks away from graduating from the only school I'd ever known until then. My entire eighth grade class went to see it -- including a close friend who I had a friendship with for 11 whole years after the movie. And, well... we don't really talk. It's personal. He reminds me a lot of Captain America, honestly, as silly as that might sound. Proud guy. Served in the military. And he'd do anything for a friend.
A lot of kids from my eighth grade class went in crazy directions, and for some reason, way more than highschool they all stick out in my mind. Some people got pregnant, some people got someone pregnant, married early. A lot of people suffered from depression and anxiety. One kid went to jail in a very notorious incident in our town.
Maybe I'm a little young to be saying this, but all I can think about is, man. We were really kids back then, huh?
One thing about End Game is that even though they undo Thanos's snap, our main Avengers never get back lost time. They don't revert to who they were before everything went crazy in Infinity War, and they especially don't get to go back to who they were in Civil War... the first Avengers, or anything. That's part of what's so sad about the movie. Seeing the squad in all their youthful glory, seeing a happy go lucky Quill dancing around, just, all this shit that we'd seen in the movies over the years, these heroes having no idea everything that's about to happen and just how much they're going to change.
I guess it reminded me of kids. You're watching all their past moments knowing they're about to fuck up, and well, they're going to do some great things too. Because yeah, getting pregnant isn't the first thing you want to do in highschool -- but being a mother is a wonderful thing. Period. No one wants depression or anxiety, but it is heroic to be able to go through life functioning well when you're fighting your own head. Going to jail at a young age is awful, and there were horrible mistakes made on the way there. But... the road to making yourself a real, serious, hard working member of society again isn't an easy one. It's an admirable one.
So, we've all had those SNAPS in our life. Those moments were everything changed, and things were never going to go back to the way they were.
You can't undo the SNAP. You can maybe do a new SNAP, that fixes the worst things about the old one. But that beer gut isn't going away in one quick training montage. Some of the friends, some of the people you lost along the way... just aren't coming back. 11 years ago, long enough ago for a baby to now be stupidly good at FPS games, you were someone. You might have had some idea or hope of what you were gonna be one day. I don't know if you got there, if you did and found out it's not what you wanted, if you're still trying to get there. Or, hell, maybe you just got there. If you did, then you're honestly doing wonderfully in life.
A lot of people found the release of the final Harry Potter book or even movie to be the end of an era for them. I didn't, and I definitely didn't expect End Game to affect me so poignantly, but here I am feeling the full weight of 11 years. I find myself trying to remember what I really wanted back then, if I lived up to it, if I did the best I could to live up to it. I find myself wishing I could go back, just for a day, to take a field trip with my eighth grade class and go watch Iron Man 1 and then eat some shitty three-quarters cooked pizza from the food court. I find myself wishing I'd made certain better choices, and I find myself wishing other peoples' lives went a bit differently because... well, we just had so much hope back then, you know?
What's it mean to be a hero?
It's a pretty complicated answer, actually.
Maybe it's not just about being willing to sacrifice yourself. It's about knowing what things are worth sacrificing for. What things are worth sacrificing. About understanding that sacrifice isn't just about trading pain for good, but that sacrifice means giving up something truly good for something even more important.
Maybe it means understanding that being lost is part of the job. That there are heartfelt convictions that we can never let go of, but that there are also ones that we have to gently bend -- and that there'll be plenty of times we don't know which one is which. The road forward may not be the same one we used to get to a good place. Sometimes the right way to go depends on the things we're deathly afraid will take us to the wrong place.
Treasure your past by honoring it and learning from it. Treasure your present by protecting it the best that you can. And treasure your future by being willing to move forward bravely amidst your heart and your brain, your greatest hopes and your greatest fears all fighting to control you.
In the end, that's all you can really give, right?
Submitted May 05, 2019 at 11:30AM by kiffinpls http://bit.ly/2LlBNFn
