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Jul 8, 2020

Avengers: End Game: "I Couldn't Save Her." Times Eighteen

I have seen Avengers: End Game (2019).  Sort of.  I was completely lost through most of it, and kept asking "Who is he?" until Bob said "Just read the synopsis on Wikipedia."  So I did, and I was still lost. But here are my takeaway points:

At the end of the last movie, a Gray Guy used a glove embedded with magical gems to vanish exactly one half of all sentient beings.  On every planet in every solar system in every galaxy in the entire universe!

I don't know why he would do such a thing.  It's random, so he couldn't specify people he didn't like.  And he didn't try to take over afterwards.  Maybe it was explained in the previous movie.

FIve or ten years later (the timeline is all jagged), San Francisco and New York seem completely depopulated.  I guess many more than the half died  in the ensuing economic collapse and civil unrest.  Everyone is trying to move on; at a support group, a guy talks about his first date since the Event.  The other guy cried during the entree, he cried during desert, but they're seeing each other again..

A reference to same-sex romance!  Score!


The superheroes are all drunken, over-eating wrecks due to guilt over not stopping the Event, and the loss of "her."  (About 18 of "I wish I could have saved her.").  They come across a way to maybe reverse the Event by going to the past and creating alternate timelines, then borrowing the stones and...well, the story mostly involves visiting superheroes in their funk and convincing them to join the team.

They do -- after a lot of boring chitchat about "not saving her," every Marvel superhero you've ever heard of, and lots that you haven't, from various timelines:  Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, the Black Widow, Hawkeye, War Machine, Captain Marvel, Ant Man, Nebula, Rocket, Dr. Strange, Black Panther, the Destroyer, and a cameo from Stan Lee (his last screen appearance).  Except no X-Men.

A climactic battle involves both magical and science fiction superheroes, so ray gun zaps and magical zaps, flying horses and alien spaceships.

And they reverse the Event.  Almost everyone comes back.  It's 5 or 10 years later, but they haven't aged, so how are they going to re-inteegrate into a society that has gone on without them?  And the civil unrest and economic collapse still happened, right?

No matter, everyone just hugs.

Same-sex hugs:
1.  Iron Man reunites with Spiderman (who apparently was vanished), and they hug.

2. At the end, Thor and a guy I don't know become co-leaders of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and fly off with the raccoon, the tree person, and the rest

3. Two high school boys hug.  Wait -- how can the one who stayed behind still be in high school?

But those glimmers of same-sex desire are inundated by 18 scenes where a superhero is depressed because "she" didn't reappear.  He saved the universe, but couldn't save "her."

One after the other, until you are yelling "Get on with it!" at the screen.

Captain America has to go back to the alternate  timelines and return the gems.  Everything has to be precise, gauged to the microsecond.  But then that plot point is forgotten: after returning the gems, he decided to stick around in tthe post-World War II world  (where he came from originally) and spend thirty years with "her" before returning. They dance to 1940s music in a post-War  suburban house.  They kiss  The end.

I sat through three hours of depression, "I couldn't save her," and clobbering  for a boring, cliched She is the Meaning of Life ending?  I am disgustipated!

There isn't even any beefcake, in spite of all the hunks in the cast.

7 comments:

  1. Chris Evans is EVERYTHING. 🔥

    Or, should I say, Christ Evans. 👏🏻

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  2. The series has plenty of hunks- Pratt, Evans and my personal favorite Chris Hemsworth. Bucky and Captain America should have ended up together. In the comic books Bucky is a kid sidekick- but in the movie he is the hot adult man Sebastian Stan. Stan and Evans had chemistry and they should have ended up as lovers not the safe heterosexist end- but hey what do you expect from a Disney movie

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    1. Could be because Golden Age Bucky was like, 10. That's what I can think of. Kid sidekicks were more of a DC thing, except for a little-known Bronze Age mutant from Canada, and even his kids oddly mirror Batman's.

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  3. Thor ends up with Peter Quill (Chris Pratt)who is the leader of "Guardians of the Galaxy"

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  4. In the comics, Thanks did it because he was in love with Death. Yeah, seriously, that's his motive. "I give you everything you ask for and the universe to boot, but still you deny me even the slightest of smiles?" (Oh, you didn't just tell her to smile.)

    Death, for her part, loves Deadpool.

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    1. So if Death gets half the population in one giant burst, won't that kind of ruin the fun of getting beings killed off gradually?

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    2. She did take issue with his methods, if not his goal: She thought the living outnumbering the dead was a dangerous cosmic imbalance.

      And yeah, Jim Starlin wrote Death as a woman. George Pérez drew her like Raven. (Which is funny because Raven is one of three Titans Wolfman low-key confirmed to be bisexual in his run.)

      In the movies, Thanos is more concerned with overpopulation, something he does pay lip service to in the comics.

      In the comic, by the way, he's done in by his own granddaughter, who, between the abuse he's out her through and all that power at once, goes mad and then Adam Warlock has to team up with Thanos to set things right.

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