I think I’ve figured out why Endgame frustrates me (beyond what it does to my favourite characters). It’s related to the discussion about stakes being too high. And it really boils to this: you can’t show darkness on that level if you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences.
As far as I understand it (and… I don’t, really), the film ends with the dusted characters being brought back five years after they were dusted. Which means that half of the population remembers those five years, had to live them. The other half didn’t and now has to live in a world with the consequences of that snap.
Now… look… I realised going into this film that we weren’t going to have a proper exploration of what exactly it would mean for half the population to disappear. There just isn’t the time to capture the scope of it, so all the film did was hint at it. Steve’s support group. The kid who wouldn’t answer Scott’s question. (Weirdly undercut by the reaction to Bruce - enthusiastic fans of an Avenger who failed to stop the devastation they were living with? Considering how Thanos’ name was common knowledge surely their failure would be too?)
But we didn’t get much beyond that. Which is pretty frustrating, because it makes the MCU feel kind of small, with masses of civilians we are never given reason to care about unless they are directly connected to one of the protagonists. Sometimes it almost feels like the protagonists wouldn’t even care without those connections.
It’s not ideal. But I get it. I get that it’s too much, and the film was already pretty dark as it is. But then they… they didn’t completely reverse it for some vague and illogical time stream reasons. Which means that the MCU-present should be 2023, right? With all that - all that - as part of that universe’s history.
What does this mean for FFH? Half of Peter’s classmates should have graduated by now, right? Is that film going to deal with this? Unless the trailer was widely misleading, I doubt it! Even the idea that after all that they’d have a field trip to Europe and that parents who had lost their children for five years would actually let them go is a bit *head scratch*.
But beyond that… imagine how devastating those consequences would be. Imagine how many people would be utterly traumatised! Governments collapsed, much of the world presumably descended into anarchy. Food shortages (especially since half of plants/livestock were snapped, thanks Thanos), power plant failures, riots… you name a catastrophe and it probably happened somewhere. On the personal level, some people will have moved on! Imagine coming back to your partner and seeing that they’re with someone else, that your children call someone else mother/father. Imagine coming back to find out someone you love has been killed in the aftermath. Will anyone who has been gone for five years still have a job? What about that person who searches for years to reunite with their loved one only to find out they were killed when the plane they were both in crashed when the pilots got dusted? All those people were brought back to were they were - are we to assume that people started dropping from the sky (putting aside for a moment that Earth does kind of move: it wouldn’t really be the same place)?
And you can hand-wave some of those points away! Maybe Bruce used that big brain of his to make sure everyone was in a safe location, whatever. But not all of them. Maybe I massively misunderstood the ending of Endgame, and I kind of hope I did, because to be honest this ending leaves me at an utter loss. How do you go on from that with happy superhero films? Now this wouldn’t be as big a problem if Endgame had indeed been the end of the MCU. But it’s not. Setting aside prequels (like presumably the Black Widow film) and space-based adventures (like GotG3), I assume some films (like SM:FFH) will have to deal with this. And I just don’t think they can.
The thing is, you can’t have it both ways. I don’t want the next phase of MCU films to be an angsty exploration of how a temporary genocide on a universal level would affect society! That’s not what I see superhero films for! But you can’t have that there and then pretend like everything’s ~mostly~ gone back to the status quo. Don’t give us the stakes if you’re too scared to show us the fallout. IW and EG are films that demand to be taken seriously - they’re dark! they’re grown-up! the stakes are high! - but aren’t willing to go all the way with their ideas which the Russos have done before. Thanos as a character is almost begging us to be taken seriously: a comic book villain with a ludicrous motive that is nevertheless played as a tragic or at least earnest figure (there’s a whole other essay to be written about how weirdly this film understands power and its wielding). But what does any of that mean if you cannot deal with the fallout? How can we care about the lives of the people within the MCU beyond that select few? Post-Endgame Earth would essentially be a post-apocalyptic society. The MCU can’t deal with that, not really. So presumably it won’t. And that just isn’t particularly satisfying to me.
The obvious solution to this would have been to revert everything to the moment of the snap, then lie to everyone about what had happened because even knowing that half the universe had disintegrated would be ridiculously traumatising. I don’t know whether they felt that would have been too cheap, or whether they felt like they couldn’t do that with Morgan. But man… forget the protagonists, I just want to give the civilians of the MCU a break.
I will say this, though: the idea of trees just popping out of the ground at random places is kinda funny.
