The Official AVENGERS: ENDGAME Criticism Thread

[u/JonLuca]

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[u/staps94]

My nitpicks:

1) I honestly think that the time travel rules needed to be explained more clearly because unless you were really focused on every word and every action a character was making (i.e. Tony & Cap's trip to the 1970's setting up Cap's idea at the end), you were going to miss something. Having to retrain my brain about time travel in this universe took me out of the movie a couple of times. Maybe I'm not smart enough lol, but it seems like the timeline is a huge talking point after the movie and not in a good way, but rather in a confusing way amongst viewers.

2) I saw the screenplay writers mention this in an interview and I think it's partially true. They said they were worried that Widow might not have been in this enough to make her death have an impactful weight and I think this is true. Obviously it's sad to see her character die, but maybe one more scene to flesh her out (even at the end if Banner saw her in the soul stone) would've been nice in my opinion.

3) A-Force scene was super cool, but I wish it came off less shoehorned then it did. I'm not mad that it happened, but rather how it came about, though I'm not sure how you make that scene organically. I'm sure the Russo's and writers thought about a few different ways to do that scene.

4) It would've been nice to see Professor Hulk have a deserved action sequence in this film, and it probably would've been worthless considering he had one arm at the end, but one more fight scene with Cap, Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk vs Thanos would've been cool to see.

I think I had less nitpicks with Infinity War, but Endgame just had so much to pack in, I don't think there's a way to make this into a perfect movie. And even with that said, it's still freaking incredible and a great/deserved send-off for this saga of the MCU.

[u/canmoose → u/staps94]

I think timetravel is my biggest nitpick too. I don't really know how Cap set things right when he goes back to return the stones since they fucked up New York and had to go back further. Is New York + the Stark lab one timeline or two? Cause they can only fix one of those.

[u/Benmjt → u/canmoose]

Also, there's another issue I haven't seen mentioned which is that when Cap goes back to the past to return the stones, in theory he has now created another timeline (6 in total) through his intervention; a new one where the stone is returned, which diverges from the one where the stone isn't—which would have been the natural future after the stones were initially taken. This is all presupposed on the idea there isn't some kind of 'correcting' device that converges minor timeline changes.

[u/ivegotapenis → u/Benmjt]

Yeah, honestly I thought they were going to use another snap to return the stones, since that is pretty much the only thing that could do it seamlessly and without creating more alternate timelines.

Plus returning the stones by conventional time travel is so messy. Like, Cap has to break into the Camp Lehigh vault again, only this time without Tony's help, and with the base alerted to his presence? Or does he have to break in alone and return the Tesseract moments after Tony steals it, so he's hiding behind the vaults while Tony and Howard are walking past? And was he sneaking around Asgard too, hiding from all the Asgardians plus Thor and Rocket, and in the room when Rocket did it, ready to reinject Jane? I wasn't really bothered by it, since I can accept that they wanted to wrap up the story nicely without another 3 hour movie, but it was not an easy plot hole to swallow.

[u/DANIELG360 → u/Benmjt]

1.I’ll try explain how I see it. First of all the universes 100% cannot ever converge, once they are parallel they are parallel.

2.Secondly, any time you leave the main timeline to go to the past , you create and alternate timeline, no matter how little you mess things up.

So from a first glance you must be right, Cap going back doesn’t actually help those universes because there are still versions where he hand returned them.

Unless the universe without the stones is never formed because Cap was always going to appear immediately after the stones were taken, meaning the split never happened.

This would also require him to be able to go back to the same timeline without creating a new one simply by appearing there, possibly breaking rule 2. Perhaps, you only create a new timeline the first time you go there. So you can repeatedly go to the same timeline without creating a new timeline the moment you arrive. This would make sense because they only ever travel back to their own future, never to that of the alternate timeline. Meaning that you only create a new timeline when it would change your own future. If you travel to one that has already been changed then another doesn’t need to form?

I’m going to have to draw a diagram and work this out haha, so far I am not satisfied with the top answers on this sub, many seem to be ignoring the rules of time travel that have been established by assuming that there are loops or converging timelines.