Avengers: Endgame

Nothing is so easy as to find fault with human institutions; nothing so difficult, as to suggest adequate practical improvements.

-Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Populations

If AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR was a treatise on the Freshman year PoliSci theories of the intergalactic evil-monger, Thanos (Josh Brolin), then its follow-up is an epic poem on the cosmic futility of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Oh, it begins well.  Thanos proves he has the stones (in a special Infinity Gauntlet forged from the energy of a dying star) to wipe out half of all life in the universe. The titular team of super heroes huddles, licks their wounds, and broods until one of those random chance developments.  Thanos’ daughter, Nebula (Karen Gillan), knows where his post-apocalyptic retirement home is.

And it’s all about family, isn’t it?  In the prelude, we see Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) at home teaching archery skills to his daughter; Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) likewise playing with his kid by a campfire.  Surely Thanos loves his orphans from all the worlds he massacred.  He gaslights them because he loves them.  It’s evident he neither loves nor trusts either of his daughters, so why does Nebula know what she knows?

And why do Disney execs insist on beating the dead horse of an almost-romance between Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) when the platonic dynamics between her and Steve Rogers are so much more interesting?  When she says, “I get emails from a raccoon, so nothing seems crazy any more,” she isn’t kidding.  Nothing about the MCU surprises. It’s like finding a store of your favorite junk food.  It provides a quick burst of energy, but all tastes vaguely similar and the high wears off quickly.  To sustain this across twenty-two films (thus far), Marvel has focused largely on catastrophe porn as a route for never-ending escalation.

Can we really say that the movie works on its own, or co-opts memories of terrorist catastrophe—images of the Infinity War Memorial in New York City, an endless field of pillars engraved with names of the missing, presumed dead?  What about when it repeats beats from the previous film?  Of the six Infinity Stones that control the forces of the universe, the Soul Stone requires a sacrifice¹.  The gatekeeper utters the same words, the same difficult choice must be made, and the same lifeless appendages lie folded in the same comical manner at the bottom of the same cliff.   The repeated confrontations with Thanos become nauseatingly dry: Tug at the gauntlet, throw giant objects at Thanos, Thanos smashes giant objects, someone takes the gauntlet, someone swings away at the gauntlet.  You get the idea…

We all love Thor’s comical side, but scenes involving his lapses of hygiene and fitness seem to drag on purposely, lengthening the film’s running time.  And there are battles upon battles in which ships, heroes and enemy combatants materialize from thin air–in several senses of the expression.  Yes, they teleport from planetary systems near and far to join a great battle against fascism led by Captain America, punctuated by Alan Silvestri’s variations on Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.  This might have played out as a grand metaphor for the times, but for the inexplicable appearances of armies and armadas whose convincing by Wong (Benedict Wong), a Master of the Mystic Arts, is never seen.  Would it have been difficult to replace two minutes of fat shaming Thor with a flashback of the newly allied planetary systems waking to Thanos’ destruction?

Like Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) handing over the Time stone, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and directors Anthony and Joe Russo may have had little choice.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a business, not an artistic endeavor.  The film so egregiously compromises a key character’s nature that, while it’ll infuriate those paying attention, the general audience toward whom this film aims will defer toward the roller coaster ride.  I lost count at the number of times someone goes to do a thing, fails, finds an alternate path out of nowhere, confronts the bigger obstacle, gets beaten down, gets unexpected backup, fights back harder, and so on.  Because Marvel can’t find its way out of this rut, they invent larger, louder, and more crowded confrontations with bigger stakes.  Now the stakes reach the scale of the entire universe… But why stop there?

Why? Because the conundrum starts with a major flaw, and gets worse.  Erasing half the life in the universe also effectively erases half of the resources consumed by any life complex enough to care about its own existence; we aren’t mineral-eating Rock Biters from a different never-ending story.  You could wipe out the ten richest dynasties on every planet and reach the same conclusion.  Though other dynasties would supplant the ones you eliminated, and so on and so forth.  Thanos says he’s indiscriminate, but he’s precisely the opposite.  He intently sets about it in an oddly specific way while ignoring the more elegant (and truly equitable) one devised by natural selection which guarantees adjustment, eventually, wherever resources are consumed to excess.   He reminds us of another jowled know-it-all who thinks he’s a genius for having read Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints.. Logic is not his forte.  Nor Marvel’s, it would seem…

Thanos succeeds in each of some fourteen million realities but one, meaning each version of him always finds the stones, but even erasing him from all possible universes leaves the stones for anyone else to find–eventually.  So unless the Avengers erase the Infinity stones from the beginning of time, before realities branch off in different directions, someone somewhere will inevitably get them.  But because a different Thanos looks for a different set of stones in every reality, there is an infinite number of stones in an infinite number of realities.  If Marvel followed through on its own logic, we’d be stuck in the theater for weeks!

“No amount of money can buy us a second of time,” says Howard Stark.  But isn’t that precisely what Tony Stark does?  Would the plot of Endgame be possible if he and Wakanda, and other wealthy empires didn’t hoard virtually unlimited resources?  Would it be necessary?  Despots like Thanos perceive erasure of privilege as some kind of discrimination.  They fail to understand that discriminate imbalances cannot be indiscriminately resolved, lest we fall prey to Rand’s fanciful notion that the world is a meritocracy.

1. Think about this carefully after the movie.  Why does he get the Soul stone?