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Avengers: Endgame
206 Plays3 years ago
100 episodes! For such a big milestone, we're discussing the biggest superhero movie ever made—Avengers: Endgame! Perry is joined once again by one of the biggest Avengers fans around, Van Allen Plexico of the White Rocket Podcast and AvengersAssemble.net.
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Transcript
Iconic Moments and Avengers Endgame
00:00:44
Speaker
Captain Sam, can you hear me?
00:00:50
Speaker
On your left.
00:01:46
Speaker
He brought back! He brought back!
00:01:49
Speaker
Is that everyone?
00:02:19
Speaker
Do you want it more? Avengers!
00:02:55
Speaker
symbol.
Podcast Introduction with Perry Constantine
00:03:30
Speaker
Welcome to the Superhero Cinephiles Podcast. I'm your host, Perry Constantine, and this is the big 100th episode. And for the big 100th episode, I thought, well, might as well talk about, to date, the biggest superhero movie, and that is Avengers Endgame. And for that, I've brought on one of the biggest Avengers fans I know, and that is Van Allen Plexico. Van, how you doing tonight?
00:03:55
Speaker
Hey, good to see you, Perry. I would agree. I've been an Avengers fan since 1977. So definitely a big part of my life. In fact, I'm even doing all of the Avengers now where I'm reading the entire series from the beginning and doing YouTube videos on it. So yeah, I'm certainly well steeped in the Avengers.
00:04:14
Speaker
Well, I mean, just to make you feel old, you've been an Avengers fan longer than I've been alive. So there you go. I already felt old, though, but I figured as much. Now, we had actually originally planned to have two guests on. And we had hoped that we could get Mark Buskett with you so that all three of us could talk about the Avengers movies.
00:04:43
Speaker
When the first Avengers movie came out, Mark wrote what I thought was the best Avengers review that anyone had written, and he had gone in depth into individual reviews of each of the characters that appeared in the movie.
00:05:02
Speaker
I'm not sure if it's still online anywhere. I know it was on its old Atomic Anxiety website, but if you're listening and you want to know what I'm talking about, try and Google it, see if you can find it that way.
00:05:17
Speaker
But that was just, and so I'd hope to have him come on for this as well so that we could have both of you guys on together because I think the two of you combined are definitely the biggest, probably the most comprehensive, the best combination of Avengers knowledge and Avengers fandom that I could probably think of. His reviews are great. I always enjoy reading his movie reviews of anything. Yeah, he's been on my show many times like we were talking about.
00:05:44
Speaker
He's always been very good, very insightful, and he gets a lot of stuff. And yeah, he can write it all out too. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we had him on my Japan on Film podcast. We talked about Shin Godzilla.
00:05:58
Speaker
But unfortunately, literally it was funny the way it happened because I had actually just finished watching the end credits of Avengers Endgame with all the main actors and their signatures in the Star Trek fashion.
Theatrical Experience and Marvel's Evolution
00:06:15
Speaker
And like almost to the minute, then I get a message from Mark on our group chat saying that he's not feeling well and he couldn't make it to do this recording. Oh well.
00:06:27
Speaker
But we got you on and we had you on before to talk about Infinity War. So this is a good follow up and you're no slouch yourself. As you've talked about your show, you host a really good show on your own and doing all the Avengers issues, which is gonna be a massive undertaking to not only read them, but also do podcast reviews of them. So hats off to you for that.
00:06:52
Speaker
Well, it's interesting to read comics from the 1960s to the 2020s. It's a very different experience than reading comics. But because I mean, those are even before my time, you know, and it's it's it's remarkable to see how much Marvel Comics change between the mid 60s and the mid 70s is this dramatic change. So yeah, it is.
00:07:14
Speaker
It was funny I remember reading some a while back and just noting how contrived a lot of stuff is like just and just how and just some of the weird leaps they would make to go from point A to point B in the story.
00:07:32
Speaker
Yeah, they couldn't really get away with that by the 70s. It's a different world. And of course, I guess that every decade or so, they completely change and they don't look anything today like they did in the 70s. Right. But we're here to talk about Avengers Endgame. So let's go back to when this movie came out. I remember the, and I got to hand it to Marvel for the lead up to this movie, the promotion, because
00:07:59
Speaker
They had they did not let anything slip about what was going to be in this movie. All we know, like all the trailers we had only used footage from like the first 20 minutes of the film.
00:08:12
Speaker
Nothing else. And so we went into it. All we knew is that you'd have the team. Tony was lost in space. You had the rest of the team getting onto the Benatar to go fight Thanos. And that's pretty much the only thing we knew going into this movie.
00:08:31
Speaker
That's right. Well, and think about 2019 real quick. I mean, I think it's going to go down as one of those amazing pop culture years because you had Avengers Endgame ending the MCU saga. But you also had the last Star Wars movie in the nine movies and you had the end of Game of Thrones and you had the beginning of the Mandalorian. I mean, 2019 is an amazing. Also, you had a we got Crisis on Infinite Earths on the CW as well.
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, just amazing. People are going to look back decades from now and be like, man, 2019, wow. And it was right before COVID. I always say, if in-game had been delayed by a year, it had gone straight to video. And what a disappointment that would have been. Imagine that. Yeah.
Endgame's Complex Narrative and Character Arcs
00:09:16
Speaker
So what was it like for you watching this in the theater? Well, I mean,
00:09:24
Speaker
Nothing was going to top seeing the first Avengers movie in 2012 because I had never dreamed I would see, you know, I didn't think in my lifetime I would see it, but, but, um, and they'd been, you know, obviously setting Thanos up from, from way back, you know, from his little post-credit moments, you know, and I guess Guardians of the Galaxy or whatever. But, but yeah, I mean, seeing, I think that really seeing them take
00:09:52
Speaker
these characters, this property, and do something so profoundly powerful and intelligent
00:10:00
Speaker
with it after growing up watching the Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man and Hulk TV show and you know we clung to those things because they were what we had but you know people that didn't like comics thought this was the dumbest stuff there ever was and I think you watch Avengers Endgame that is as sophisticated of a story as sophisticated as a use of emotions and character interaction everything as you're going to find in any movie
00:10:26
Speaker
So utterly impressed, blown away, absolutely just couldn't believe it. I think for me it actually tops seeing the first Avengers movie in theaters because I had a unique experience because the first Avengers movie did not come out in Japan the same time it came out everybody else. It came out here like three months later or something like that.
00:10:49
Speaker
So I had already had it spoiled going in. I had already heard about the Thanos reveal and I was so desperate to see it at that point that I ended up seeing a bootleg and which was terrible quality. So I had seen it on my TV at home on this terrible cam version of it where the audio was
00:11:11
Speaker
really kind of, you know, not the best to say the least. And so going to see it in the theater was still awesome, but it didn't have that, I missed out on having that, you know, that first theater experience really seeing the Avengers on the big screen. But this, seeing this on the big screen was probably the closest thing that could come to that.
00:11:36
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, I mean, and the things that's so amazing too is it goes from the really, really small scale of like Tony Stark talking to the helmet or Clint looking for his kids to the biggest superhero war that's ever even been thought of. And I mean, it's just, I mean, it's,
00:11:57
Speaker
It's almost the Lord of the Rings is about the only thing you can really compare it to in terms of the scope and the way it telescopes out from the very small to the humongous. It's absolutely, there's not much like it. And one of the things too is just you're talking about the emotions, the characters, all that too. And one of the great things about this movie is it
00:12:25
Speaker
It does so much, and whenever a movie has so many plates in the air, inevitably something is gonna crash and fall. But they managed to keep all these plates spinning the entire time. They managed to give a satisfying conclusion to a decade's worth of movies. And never once does anything
00:12:53
Speaker
fall, right? They stick the landing on pretty much every single point that they wanted to hit. And Derek had said that if you had wanted to
00:13:06
Speaker
stop watching the MCU after this movie. You could, like you could just say, okay, this is it. I'm done. I'm putting these movies on the shelf. And that's the end of the MCU for me. Thankfully, they're not doing that. But you really could see this as a complete closed closing the book and stepping away. Yeah, oh, absolutely. I mean, and
00:13:28
Speaker
And I'm 99% sure it wasn't planned until well into that run, too. I think that none of this was planned in phase one. And in phase two, they had a general idea where they were going and started kind of shaping things in that way. I think that's part of why phase two was
00:13:50
Speaker
in some ways not as good as one or three other than Winter Soldier. But yeah, by the time you get to phase three and they knew exactly what they were doing, they had all, everybody was rowing in the same direction and it was all leading to this. So this really is like the big climactic chapter. Yeah, this is the, you know, again, if this was Lord of the Rings, this is the big, you know, Gondor thing. If you want to have more Hobbit adventures, you can go do that. But this is Lord, this is Return of the King, you know? This is defeating Sauron and
00:14:19
Speaker
Saving Middle Earth basically metaphor and and what she said about them not have I'm 100% certain that they didn't have this plan because just knowing from Some people I've talked to who know some people that that is how Marvel how Marvel works They they don't have everything planned out They've got they but they are really good at making you think that they have everything planned right? They do a really good job of
00:14:45
Speaker
of painting that illusion that this has all been planned out from the start, when really it wasn't.
00:14:53
Speaker
you know, whether you like the Marvel movies or you hate them or whatever your opinions of them, I mean, you gotta hand it to them for having that kind of consistency to keep it going through, you know, over 20 movies and over 10 years and still managing to look like it's all, it was all planned out that way. There's a moment in, I guess, Infinity War, yeah,
00:15:20
Speaker
where you can kind of see that come together in one little instant. And that's where Thanos gets the cube, the cosmic cube or the pteseract, we want to call it. And then he crushes it and gets an infinity stone out. It's like that one, that one little moment is saying, yeah, in the first movie, we didn't know
00:15:40
Speaker
that we needed an infinity stone so it was a cosmic cube but now we need it to be a we need to be an infinity stone so hey look it's infinity stone there you go right you just you just basically retconned the first movie by one little action i thought that was that was really funny to me
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. That was one of the best scenes of it. Because you always wondered, well, how come it's a cube, but then you've got the reality stone is liquid and trying to figure out all that. So I did like that they had done that and shown that this was just the container is not necessarily what the stone is itself.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess the first one that was actually just a stone was in Guardians of the Galaxy, the power stone that was inside the orb, right? I think, no, the Mind Stone in the first Avengers movie. Although we didn't know that was the Mind Stone at the time. There you go, that's right.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah, it was just a staff with us. But yeah, yeah, it's like that's why I'm saying is it's it's they've done such a good job of kind of shuffling it all around and obfuscating it a little bit that it's sometimes hard to know what they were thinking when but Yeah, but they put it together for sure. So now you'd made a post a few days before this after you had rewatched the movie talking about you know, how you you know having watched it again and comparing it to
00:17:08
Speaker
how you felt the first time you watched it. And you had told people that you were going to leave them suspense into how you felt about it now. So I'm going to give you your time now to talk about how you felt about it on this latest rewatch. All right, good. Because this is the only prepackaged kind of thought that I have coming in. And that is when I did a countdown of ranking the Marvel movies,
00:17:37
Speaker
a couple of years ago, and I ended up putting in-game, I think, second and Infinity War first. And a number of people commented and said, yeah, I'm glad you put Infinity War first. I like it better, whatever, whatever.
00:17:51
Speaker
And at the time, I think what was leaning me toward Infinity War was that it has that 20 minute opening sequence with Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and Dr. Strange and Wong and Spider-Man that is just peak MCU, right?
00:18:10
Speaker
There's funny dialogue. There's cool action. There's characters that we like interacting for the first time in some cases. That is just it doesn't get much better than that. And I and then when I think about in game, I tend to think about like the last 30 minutes, which is well, not the not the emotional last few minutes, but the big battle, you know, the gigantic battle that just goes on and on. And to me, that battle
00:18:37
Speaker
while incredibly well done. I mean, it's like, I could just see Kevin Feige and the Russo brothers like ringmasters orchestrating like it's a circus, all the different groups. And you know, you've got this giant battle and yet you've got individual little things they, you know, here's the women, which was cool, you know, here's the flying people.
00:18:56
Speaker
here's the people in armor you know they they here's the the africa the wakanda people you know they they do a good job of having a giant melee but yet giving you individual moments so it's very well done but when it's over you're just kind of like oh giant battle you know your head is swimming and i think that what happens is that kind of swamped
00:19:19
Speaker
my memories of the first hour of it and I forgot just how resonant the quiet stuff is leading up to that and so when I went back and watched it this time
00:19:33
Speaker
The stuff with Tony Stark and his little girl, the stuff with Clint Barton and his family. I'd forgotten the very beginning is Hawkeye with his children and his wife. I'm like, whoa, where did this come from? I forgot this was even in the movie. Not even like the stuff where he's grown in.
00:19:55
Speaker
Ronan yeah, but even before that I mean the stuff where Natasha is just sort of worn down from trying to run the Avengers by herself or you know Basically by herself for five years, you know The stuff with Tony on the ship playing football with Nebula all of that I mean that all just kind of gets swamped by that giant action ending and I was glad to go back and watch it again and be thinking There's just so much stuff here. That's so good and it's stuff
00:20:26
Speaker
that couldn't have been done without all the other movies setting it all up. Right. I mean, this would have had to be a six hour long movie if they'd had to set everything up before infinity. I mean, well, it would have been a six hour movie. It had to be a night. It had to be, again, it had to be the extended version of Lord of the Rings because you'd need three hours of setting all that up to then do infinity war and then do end game. And instead we got it all set up in like 20 movies. Right. So, so it,
00:20:57
Speaker
it does an almost unbelievably good job of taking all the threads that had been laid out for so many movies and not just resolving them, but making you suffer over them before they resolve them. It's so emotional. So that was the thing that I had kind of lost in the heat of that ending, I think. Yeah. Um,
00:21:24
Speaker
So according to my letterbox account, I've seen this movie, or I've at least logged this movie eight times. Wow, okay. I'm sure it's probably a little, I'm probably sure like there's an extra time or two that I forgot to log it in. So I'm pretty sure, about 10 hours I've sat and watched this movie through start to finish.
Character Spotlights: Ant-Man and Captain Marvel
00:21:44
Speaker
And that's of course not counting the times when I've gone back to see certain scenes like, you know, the Avengers Assemble moment or, you know,
00:21:53
Speaker
or Cap getting Thor's hammer or whatever it is. So that's not counting those moments, but one of the things that I realized watching it this last time, and it's very similar to what you were saying, is I remember coming out of the theater, all I could think about was that epic battle scene at the end, right? And that's all everybody was talking about.
00:22:18
Speaker
Now, when I rewatch it, that battle scene is still amazing, but there's a kind of sameness to it. It doesn't have that same resonance that it has that very first time. Right.
00:22:34
Speaker
everything up to that, especially like you said, that first hour, I am just, every single time, I am just glued to my seat, staring at the screen. I don't even know where my phone is or anything like that. I'm just completely fixated on it. That first hour is such a masterclass in telling you in very, it tells you very quickly,
00:23:00
Speaker
what happened to these characters without over explaining every anything, right? You just get these very brief instances, these very brief moments of them. And it tells you all you need to know about what had happened over the past five years. And it's just such a great way to set up the characters and tells you so much about them in very short order.
00:23:28
Speaker
It really does. And you know, the thing that we ought to, I'll have to mention too, I mentioned several examples just in terms of emotional relationships and all, but after you get that kind of epilogue to Infinity War where they kill Thanos and then it goes five years later, it suddenly becomes the Ant-Man movie for a little while. And that, that was unexpected to me. I didn't expect Scott Lang to suddenly take over this movie for like 20 minutes or whatever, but it really works. And
00:23:55
Speaker
all the part where he's wandering around with his wagon, looking for his family, hoping his daughter wasn't taken away and all that. I could see a movie studio saying, cut all that out. Let's just get to the superhero stuff. But they let this movie breathe. They let it take its time.
00:24:17
Speaker
I mean, I'm so glad it's as long as it is because it needed all that patient time to let Scott figure out what's going on so that we figure out what's going on, right? And then start to figure out, well, what can I do about it? And that's when he goes to the Avengers and talks to the Natasha. So it really was remarkable that they were able to get
00:24:48
Speaker
so much out of Ant-Man. I never would have thought that. And it was such a neat little bait and switch because in all the previews, right, they always
00:25:04
Speaker
focused heavily on that stinger with Thor and Captain Marvel. The end of Infinity War, the post-credits scene is Nick Fury's pager calling Captain Marvel. And then at the end of Captain Marvel, she goes and she meets the Avengers. And then you watch this movie, and you're going into it thinking, oh, Captain Marvel's here. She's going to save the day. And it's Ant-Man and a rat who saved the responsible for it. That rat saved half the universe. Yeah, that's amazing. The rat was Mephisto.
00:25:34
Speaker
It has to be. Yeah, he needed more people to bedevil. And I want to mention Carol, too. That's a very good point. I mean, I'm a huge Captain Marvel fan, obviously, huge Carol Danvers fan. And I was very excited that that she got to do something in this. And I think that probably of all the major characters, she gets the least time and the least attention. But she's treated very respectfully and very well. She rescues Tony and Nebula, you know, which is awesome. And she's very impressive. I liked that.
00:26:04
Speaker
I like that she came across very confident and strong because you could tell that some time had passed for her, too, since her movie. Well, in fact, a lot of time has passed since her movie, to be honest, you know, like 20 years or something and not just quite a lot of time.
00:26:25
Speaker
I don't know that, I don't know that I, well, we know this, we know that she was supposed to be in Infinity War and they took her out because they thought it was just too much. So I'm curious if they took her out of more of this movie too, because it felt like she was kind of minimized to just a couple of scenes and then she just becomes like a blaster that blows up the spaceship and everything. So I wasn't sure how much she really was gonna get to do.
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah, I was wondering about that because I had heard about her having some part in Infinity War. I wonder if it was maybe just that scene where she meets with the Avengers. Maybe they just took that out and moved it to Captain Marvel. I don't know. But even like she was originally planned to be introduced back in Age of Ultron. Oh, yeah.
00:27:13
Speaker
And so it, and then they, I think it was Ike Perlmutter who still had creative control at the time nixed that because he thought, you know, women can't be superheroes basically. And then, and he's gone now. So, well, he's gone from the movie division at least. He's still stuck in the comics, but that's another thing. But, and I'm not sure, I wonder if it was just because there's so much happening in this movie and,
00:27:44
Speaker
There's so much to play with with the characters who have been around because one of the neat little things I noticed after at the end of Infinity War was all the original Avengers from the first movie are still alive at the end. So they're setting it up where it's, oh, the original event, we're getting the whole band back together to come and save the day. So it was really their story.
00:28:12
Speaker
I guess that's probably why they kind of thought we'll minimize Carol's role because we know that she's going to be a big player going forward. So this is going to be the last story of Tony and Cap and Natasha. And then we're going to pass the baton over to Carol and Dr. Strange and have them run with it going forward. Yeah.
00:28:35
Speaker
There's no question. I mean, when people started disappearing at the end of Infinity War, as soon as I realized what was happening, I'm like, okay, I know who's not going to disappear. Spider-Man kind of surprised me because I thought they want to get more mileage out of somebody's popular team. I really was surprised. It had enormous emotional power, but it also had surprise because I figured that
00:28:57
Speaker
Again, I thought Spider-Man would be one that would hang around. Black Panther surprised me, too. I figured, again, he'd be one to hang around. But I was not remotely surprised that we got Thor, Black Widow, Iron Man, Captain America Hulk, you know, because, yeah, you're right. Infinity War was the everybody movie.
Exploring Thor and Nebula's Journeys
00:29:15
Speaker
an end game as big as it ends up being at the end really is about the core original Avengers just who just happened to somehow be the ones to survive the snap right just happened to get those seven or eight of them yeah and rocket which that was the other one by the way i was like i would have i would have expected spidey instead of rocket and i want to i would like to talk to kevin faggy and the russo's and say
00:29:41
Speaker
What made you decide to go with Rocket instead of Peter? Because that was just an odd choice to me, but all the others made perfect sense.
00:29:48
Speaker
I thought Rocket actually made sense to me when you consider the ending of Guardians 2, because he had gotten to this point where he had kind of gotten over his own bullshit and he accepted his part in the family, like the Yadu's funeral scene, which is still one of the best scenes that the MCU has ever done. And where he's has this great emotional moment where he's talking to Quill and
00:30:17
Speaker
And he says, oh, and Jan, then the old ravagers come and they give Jan do the proper send off. And Rocket just says, you know, you know, they came for him, even though, you know, he was, he was mean to them. And Quill says, Oh, yeah, of course. And Rocket says, you know, even though he stole batteries he didn't need, which is referencing what Rocket had done in the beginning of the movie and that
00:30:36
Speaker
Cause that was the end of, that was the, that was like the culmination of Rocket's big emotional arc. So him finally accepting that he's got this family and he doesn't have to be, he doesn't have to shut himself off from them. And then taking that away from him and then putting him in with this new group. I think that was kind of, so that's why that made sense to me because it's such a, if it was someone like, you know, Quill or Drax,
00:31:06
Speaker
they have admitted that kind of emotional connection before so it wouldn't have been as much of a shock for them but it works for Rocket especially because then we get that great scene when him and Thor and Asgard and you know he you know he basically reads Thor the riot act right he smacks him and he says like he's like look you know get your shit together because i need you to help me get my family back
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, and it was cool to see him put in the position. I mean, you know, three movies earlier even, who would have thought it would be Rocket trying to get Thor in shape? I mean, that's just such a reversal of everything we would have expected, right?
00:31:49
Speaker
careless, wacky, you know, funny, sardonic, whatever. And Thor is the, you know, I'm going to be king of Asgard. And they had completely reversed by the time of this movie. And it really, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. And I guess, yeah, it's interesting how, because I agree with you that Rocket in that way does make more sense than Peter.
00:32:10
Speaker
But it's interesting, I think you could make that case for a few of the others, and yet they still managed to make the core Avengers work. Like, I think that like a really good example of that is Hulk. If he hadn't become smart Hulk, as my captions kept saying it, they might say smart Hulk. I'm like, okay, I can have that on the caption. If he hadn't become smart Hulk,
00:32:30
Speaker
I would just assume him not even be one of the ones that didn't get dusted because he would have just been running around wanting to hit things. But as smart Hulk, it made for a really interesting character dealing with all this stuff as another scientist along with Tony and everything.
00:32:49
Speaker
Yeah, so they found ways, they gave Natasha her kind of disillusionment and world weariness. They did things to each of the main characters. They gave Tony a daughter, right? And they did things to each of them that made them more interesting after the five years than they would have been before the five years, which I thought was very impressive.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah, I thought that they did a really good job with that. And one of the ones that really surprised me is Rocket wasn't as much of a surprise for me. I figured they were going to have someone from the Guardians, and Rocket made the most sense to me. But what surprised me a lot was Nebula.
00:33:31
Speaker
and her role in this movie. And it's just, it goes show how well they've written her in this movie. Because I'll admit, I'm not a big fan of the cosmic Marvel stuff. And Nebula, as a character in the comics, I'd read some stuff with her, but never anything that really impressed me enough to where I thought she was terribly interesting to me personally. But in these movies,
00:34:00
Speaker
The first movie, the first Guardians, you know, she wasn't anything special to me, but the second Guardians, when they really started to build her up and they gave Karen Gillan a lot more to work with. And then you go from that to this and Infinity War II, and then you get to this part and just seeing the way that her character grows and how well she interacts with all of them. And she's got some really profound moments, like when she's on the Benatar with,
00:34:29
Speaker
with Tony in the beginning or that great scene when she's with Rody on Morag and he sees her kind of burn her cybernetic arms, she can get the stone. And she's just like, I wasn't always like that. And they share the fact, they kind of had this moment of bonding over that they both lost aspects of their original bodies. That's right.
00:34:55
Speaker
You know that's interesting about Nebula. I'm glad that you mentioned her just because she really I think is the stealth MVP character in a way of this story. I think she's the character they changed the most from the comics. I would say to the point that she almost becomes
00:35:15
Speaker
a tool that the Russos used, they took her in such a different direction that she could be used
00:35:30
Speaker
to do certain plot things and character things in these movies, and especially in this one, because she's very important in this movie. She's in a lot of it and in Twice, right? She's two different characters in this movie and plays an important part in resolving everything.
00:35:50
Speaker
You know, if you step back and say, OK, I'm a I'm a Marvel Comics fan and I look at this movie, I'm like, where did she come from? Who is she supposed to be? Where did where? Because I recognize everybody else, but I wouldn't even know who she was supposed to be. Like if I hadn't seen movies before this and you sat me down having read Marvel Comics and said, what do you think about that blue lady? I'd be like, I don't know who that is. I have no idea who that is. Right. And so I feel like they kind of engineered her to be
00:36:17
Speaker
like a tool they could use to advance the story but still have a good person you know character you know story as well and that's that's pretty remarkable of an achievement I think yeah uh now I want to talk about some of the the characters and uh where they take them and what they've done with them in this movie uh what were some of the ones that really kind of stood out to you as being
00:36:42
Speaker
kind of really impressive or maybe not so impressive.
Steve Rogers and Tony Stark: Parallel Arcs
00:36:47
Speaker
For me, I thought Tony is probably the, I loved what they did with him in this movie and how they brought back the idea of his kind of selfishness, but in a different kind of selfishness. I thought this was a really interesting way to,
00:37:10
Speaker
They basically restate that old debate from the first Avengers movie where Cap and Tony are arguing about, and Cap says, don't stop pretending you're a hero. You're not the type who'll crawl across the wire and let the other guy walk over you.
00:37:31
Speaker
And then Tony says, you know, I think I just cut the wire instead. And then, you know, that culminates with Tony willing to sacrifice himself with the nuke. That gets replayed in this movie, but in a different context. I thought it was a really smart way for them to kind of replay that debate, but reframe it so that it felt completely fresh.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, Iron Man has always been my favorite character. You can see a couple of them behind me. It was a hard movie to watch for me in a way because
00:38:05
Speaker
Tony had such weight upon him and I totally understood why having a little daughter, he's not going to want to change things. But on the other hand, I think he would, it would have eaten them alive knowing he might could have and didn't. So he was wrestling with just this enormous pressure of I want to protect my daughter more than anything else in the universe, but I've got billions of people I could try to save. So that's just this remarkable, enormous thing. And then, um,
00:38:35
Speaker
At the beginning, he's almost dead and he argues with him. He clashes with Cap. He's so upset. He's like, I tried to protect the earth and you people stopped me basically because you didn't like how I was doing it. He faces just so many challenges and issues all the way through the movie.
00:38:55
Speaker
And of course, I hated seeing him, you know, die at the end, but it came to feel like, like you just said, you know, there was what he had to deal with in the first Avengers movie. There's what he had to deal with here. There's been other stuff along the way. It's felt like
00:39:12
Speaker
a big part of the of the infinity saga, a big part of it has been here's Tony Stark. He's wacky and funny, but he's like you said, he's selfish and self centered and full of himself. And we've got to put him through this obstacle course of movies to make him prove that at heart,
00:39:35
Speaker
And again, there's the heart with Tony, right? That heart, he really is a hero. And it's like at the end, he's like, what have I got to do to prove it to you people? I just got to sacrifice my own life. I mean, he more than anybody else, I think he
00:39:51
Speaker
has to endure trial after trial after trial to demonstrate his worthiness. And going into this movie, I expected, I think everybody, it was the worst kept secret that Iron Man was going to die at the end of this movie. I mean, everybody went in, expect that. In fact, I think a lot of people went into Infinity War, that scene when he's fighting Thanos.
00:40:14
Speaker
And Thanos stabs him like, oh, this is it. This is when, you know, Robert Downey Jr. bows out. This is when Iron Man Tony Stark dies. And I was a little bit surprised that he didn't actually end up dying in that movie for real. And then so then we get to this movie, I'm like, OK, without a doubt, by the end of this movie, he's going to die.
00:40:36
Speaker
Well, that being said, like they did such an incredible way of handling that execution of this plot point that everybody knew was coming. And yet they still managed to do it in a way that felt both satisfying, emotional, and kind of surprising too, at the same time.
Natasha Romanoff's Sacrifice and Emotional Bonds
00:41:01
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I guess I figured he was going to die. Maybe I was just in denial because it was Iron Man. But the one I 100% expected was going to die was Captain America. I knew that Chris Evans didn't want to do these anymore. And I mean, to me, the person that's going to sacrifice himself to Thanos to save everybody is going to be Cap. And so when he actually
00:41:26
Speaker
didn't die and Tony did and he's going to go back in time. I'm like, huh, that surprises me. And then, you know, you find out what you find out. And I'm like, okay, okay. So instead of killing him like they did Tony, they found a different way to kind of remove him from the chessboard. And so I was kind of jealous in a way because I'm like, so Tony just dies. Captain America
00:41:48
Speaker
basically dies almost in our time, but it's, but after living an entire life of happiness with a beautiful woman, Oh, how terrible. You know? So I think Tony kind of got the short end of the deal. One of the things I liked about that too is they had,
00:42:04
Speaker
Again, there's this whole dynamic between Tony and Steve that plays out in interesting ways, whereas Tony's been the selfish one and he's the least likely to make that self-sacrifice, whereas he's the one who's most likely to, he's the one, all he wants is to stay with his wife and his daughter and be with his family.
00:42:25
Speaker
And then in the end, he's the one who makes that selfless sacrifice. Whereas Steve has always been the one about giving of yourself, like he says at the end of Age of Ultron,
00:42:38
Speaker
The guy who wanted a family, a wife and all that stuff went in the ice 70 years ago when some other guy came out. It seemed like he had resigned himself to the fact that he was never gonna have those things. And he was going to just give himself over to this life as an Avenger, as a superhero, whatever. And you kind of see that disillusionment in him at the beginning of this movie when
00:43:08
Speaker
you know, he tells, he's, you know, he's working, he's counseling other people. He's still, he's not Captain America necessarily anymore, but he's still giving of himself. And like that scene with Natasha, when, when he said, when he tells her you have to get a life and she says you first, that's very telling. And, and just, and when they're, they're getting on the ship to go and he's looking at the picture of Peggy and, and
00:43:34
Speaker
And he says, this has to work because if it doesn't, I don't know what I'm going to do. All of that was very well, a way of saying like he doesn't know how to do anything else but be Captain America. And yet at the end, Steve is the one who makes arguably the more selfish decision. Whereas he decides to go back and to live a life with Peggy.
00:44:02
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Well, I think that probably there was nothing else more debated after this movie came out than what Captain America did. I can excuse it in a technical sense in that the movie comes right out and says time travel works differently in this movie.
00:44:23
Speaker
than in other movies and they literally mention other time travel movies which I was very impressed that they just went all out that every movie we know of about time travel happened in the MCU and they've seen them or at least I guess Scott has or whoever but anyway so that was funny to me because that I mean that's if you're going to change the way that time time travel works from how it has in every other movie
00:44:47
Speaker
There's no better way to do it than saying you know all these other movies were not doing that was pretty good so but yeah i understood what he did i mean you know who's not going to be tempted. If you get to go back in time he goes back in time he returns all the gems to their rightful owners and then he's probably like about to hit the button or whatever he's like.
00:45:08
Speaker
I wonder what Peggy's doing right now. And he just never gets around to hitting the return button or whatever, you know, he just never does. And I could totally see that, right? I mean, there are places back in my past that if I could go back to, I might very well be tempted to be like, I might just hang around here, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was, that was really, I do want to talk about the time travel aspect, but we're still on the character point. We want to talk about some of the more
00:45:33
Speaker
Um, what did you think of what they did to Thor? That was probably the biggest, the biggest change, the most unexpected character development is I think what they did with Thor. And I thought it was interesting because it's, on the one hand, it does provide some moments of comic relief. On the other hand,
00:45:56
Speaker
And I think this, I think, Heavenforth is a much better actor, I think, than he's given credit for because he plays it on the surface. It seems like he's playing it for laughs, but you look, you watch this movie more and more, you realize there's, the guy's really going through some shit here. Yes. Oh, absolutely. A hundred percent. Yeah. No, I, that's who I was going to say when you first mentioned the topic. I'm like, well, Thor, because
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I like that it doesn't, the movie doesn't start with him like that. We have the Thor who's just been through the battle in Wakanda and is still buff, you know, and has Stormbreaker or whatever, and is still wanting a shot at Thanos. And he gets it and it doesn't change anything. And he, you can just see that
00:46:46
Speaker
The next time we see Thor, your first thought is to laugh. Like, oh gosh, what has he done to himself? He's just become a, he's lying around the house drinking beer and watching TV with the aliens, which is pretty funny. But like you say, you barely scratch beneath the surface at all.
00:47:05
Speaker
And you realize he is in such pain. He is in depression. He is clinically depressed. He's miserable. And he's doing all these things to try to dull that pain that he's in because he feels like he failed.
00:47:19
Speaker
I mean, he feels like he failed in his big job in life and his people are dead and half the universe is dead and he could have done something about it and he failed and he's just self-medicating is all he's doing at that point, you know, and so It's it takes quite a lot to get him back on to the and in rocket rocket about kills himself trying to get him just Part way back on the right road, you know, which gives you those great scenes in Asgard and everything. So yeah
00:47:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's really remarkable. And I think you're exactly right too, that Hemsworth is a really good actor. And I think he's a better actor than the material he gets in the first two Thor movies. I like the first two Thor movies, but he doesn't have a lot to do with that except be kind of big and noble. And you know, he said he didn't want to do any more Thor, if that's what it was going to be. And that's why they brought in Waititi to say, all right, let's shake it up and give you something fun to do. And he's like, Oh,
00:48:19
Speaker
Now I'm interested in playing Thor again and then again in this movie. So I do like that they kept making it interesting for Chris Hemsworth and not letting him get bored again. That was a big part of it I think. Yeah and I think too like everybody I think will talk about this movie and in relation to all the movies that came before
00:48:41
Speaker
Most people will focus on Steve and Tony because on the surface, it seems like their stories are the most impactful. Their stories have the most dramatic, or their stories both actually have an ending. Thor's doesn't end in this movie, right? He continues on. But he's got some really interesting character progression throughout these movies too, because he starts off being the arrogance, you know,
00:49:08
Speaker
Debbie God who I can do anything I'm going to be king of Asgard and you know and I'm so badass and all that and then it gets and then in and he is more of that in Avengers as well and you know he falls in love with Jane Foster he's like look at me I'm Thor you know.
00:49:24
Speaker
I'm a little bit humbled, but now I got this cool Earth girlfriend and all that. And everything seems to be working out very well. And just little by little, they start taking pieces away. First, Jane is gone. And then Asgard is gone. His mom, too. His mom is gone. Little by little, they just keep chipping away at him. Odin? Yeah. Oh, and the warrior's three. Yeah, I mean, he's just something up for number. And then so much so that he finally becomes, he fulfills his destiny, becomes king of Asgard.
00:49:54
Speaker
it's Asgard get first thing happens is Asgard has to be destroyed and now and then half its population gets wiped out and now they're they go from living in this you know sci-fi Kirby ass golden city to living on a derelict spaceship in the middle of floating out the stars to living in some town in you know in Scandinavia right yeah
Hulk, War Machine, and Time Travel Theories
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing. And you know, you made me think of something else too, real quick. When we watched Iron Man 2 the first time, Iron Man 2, who could have guessed that the two, I guess, yeah, Rhodey, but the two main superheroes in that movie, Iron Man and Black Widow would be the two that end up sacrificing their lives to defeat Thanos. Could not have seen that coming a million miles away. And yet there they are, the two main ones in Iron Man 2. So
00:50:45
Speaker
Yeah, and because that because it made me think about Natasha, she's the other one I would mention is that she gets because you know, you got the sense that, you know, you know, I mean, there's Hemsworth, obviously Thor, but in a real way, I think the big three of the MCU movies have been Captain America Iron Man and Black Widow in some ways, even more than Thor. Yeah, and they each wanted to quit doing them. And they each get kind of a
00:51:14
Speaker
a curtain call, you know, Tony sacrifices to save everybody. Kat gets to go back in time and basically dies of old age, presumably. And Black Widow has to sacrifice herself too, just like Tony to make everything happen. And so, and I think that they'd set that up with her being kind of at the end of a rope. I mean, I don't know where she would have gone or what she could have done.
00:51:39
Speaker
if that hadn't happened to her, it's almost like when it comes to her through the red skull or whatever, that somebody's got to die, you could see that she's going to look at Clint and say, you've got a family, a wife, children, regardless of what you've done, you are needed. And she's like, I'm kind of done.
00:52:02
Speaker
I hate that. I hate it because I loved her. I never cared about Black Widow in the comics. She's a great example of a character that was so much different and better in the movies.
00:52:13
Speaker
But yet I could see that logic that she kind of had just run her race and was worn out and world weary and is like, you know what, I'll do it, you know. And obviously, Clinton didn't want her to, but it made logical story sense, I thought. Yeah. So I'm guessing you're pretty much on board with her sacrifice then, based on what you said there.
00:52:34
Speaker
Well, I mean, I don't like it, but I understood is what I'm saying, I guess. I understand that they set it up to the point that it makes logical sense, even if it's tragic and terrible. Yeah. I agree with you. I know her death was really controversial. I know I saw a lot of people complaining about that. I thought it made a lot of sense for her character and where she had come from, especially
00:53:00
Speaker
in the context of her relationship with Clint because the only reason she becomes an Avenger in the first place is because Clint takes a shot at this person who was damaged and who had done bad things and sees potential in them to be better and gives them that second chance. That's the only reason she gets to, like she says to Steve at the beginning, you know, before I had nothing, now I have this, you know. And so
00:53:30
Speaker
when she sacrifices herself at the end so that Clint can go back and Clint says, the things I've done. And he says, I don't deserve this. And she says, well, you know what? You didn't give up on me. I didn't deserve a second chance, but you still gave me one. She's giving that second chance back to him that he gave her. I thought that was a really nice way of closing that circle on that relationship.
00:53:53
Speaker
Yeah, it is one of the more interesting relationships. It's too bad that we never really got the chance to do more with the two of them together. They got little bits here and there, but they never really got because he's not in the Black Widow movie.
00:54:09
Speaker
and she's not really, she's not in the Hawkeye TV show and they just, it's like they always missed each other. We know that they had adventures together. I'm almost to the point of, you know, I really enjoyed the Black Widow movie. I thought it was a great like action movie and everything and a funny action movie, but it's not the movie I think we all expected in a way. And I almost feel like they need to go back and get younger actors and go back and give us the Hawkeye and Black Widow Marvel team up movie.
00:54:38
Speaker
from like 20 years ago or something. Well, that's actually what I thought we were going to get when they announced Black Widow after. Because, you know, at the end of Endgame, we find out, oh, you know, Natasha is dead. And I figured, oh, so Black Widow, it's we're going to go see the Budapest stuff now. We're going to see. Exactly. And I thought that's what we're going to get, because you're right. They they keep having these little brushes in the Avengers movies. They have these little brushes in in Civil War.
00:55:07
Speaker
But in Winter Soldier, which is arguably half a Black Widow movie too, Clint was originally supposed to have a small role in that, but they ended up cutting it out because they felt it wasn't a big enough role to justify bringing him in for that. And then, like you said, in Black Widow, Clint doesn't appear at all except for
00:55:32
Speaker
his photo at the end when, you know, Yelena gets tasked with killing him. And then she doesn't, and Natasha, no, no appearance of Natasha, no flashback or anything to Budapest. So yeah, it was, that was, I think probably the, one of the biggest disappointments of the MCU was we never got to really see them interact. That being said though, I think it, it says a lot that you'd almost be forgiven for
00:55:59
Speaker
forgetting that we've never seen them interact because both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner, they play their chemistry together. You believe that they've been friends for a long time.
00:56:13
Speaker
That's what I was gonna say real quick is yeah, I mean, I was gonna say that thinking about it, that's the one relationship that is sort of resolved. This movie is all about resolving relationships in a lot of ways. That's the one relationship that is resolved that we never really got to experience. We are repeatedly told that they have this relationship. Over and over, the movies have been telling us that they have this relationship, but we never really see it. We see Tony and Steve.
00:56:41
Speaker
We see Banner and Natasha to a large degree. We see a bunch of different pairings, but we never really see them the way that we're supposed to. And so I think that that's one thing that maybe is missing and hurts that
00:56:58
Speaker
the death of Natasha scene is that it's still kind of intellectual rather than emotional. We're still kind of going, Oh yeah, they're, they're buddies. I remember that now. They told us that they were buddies, but we never got to experience it. It's like if, uh, you know, it's like if at the end when iron man and captain America dealing with their stuff and kind of coming to a resolution and we'd never seen them together hardly, it wouldn't, it wouldn't have the same emotional impact. So that's too bad. It really is. It's like, I think it's a, one of the few missed opportunities in these movies.
00:57:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Now about the other main characters, then we also have Hulk and we have Ant-Man. Ant-Man I thought was, like we mentioned, it's really cool that they give him so much to do in this movie. And I did think it's kind of funny that it's only been five hours for him because
00:57:50
Speaker
For Paul Rudd, he would look the same even if five years had passed. But with that aside, I watched this movie. This movie came out before my daughter was born, almost two years before she was born. And now watching it now that I have a daughter, I connect so much more with Scott and with Tony in this movie than I did when I first saw it.
00:58:20
Speaker
Me too. Same here. Mine's 14, but yes, I totally get it right. I was, yeah, she was there with me in the theater when I saw it. I'm just sitting there going, oh, $20 now, you know, so yeah, a hundred percent, but.
00:58:31
Speaker
You know the thing, by the way, that surprised me, we get so much Ant-Man, we get almost no Wasp. I think in an Avengers saga of four Avengers movies, you'd think the Wasp as a founder who's probably been in more issues of the comic than any other character, maybe. That was a team leader, too. Yeah, and we would get two minutes. She doesn't get two seconds barely. So that surprised me that the Wasp was such an afterthought in this whole, you know, at least Black Panther got a lot to do in the first movie, not as much in this one.
00:59:01
Speaker
But yeah. It's kind of funny. Of the founding Avengers, both Hank Pym and Jan, they only appear at Tony's funeral. We get their successors. We get Scott and Hope, mostly Scott. Hank and Jan, we only get them at that funeral scene, and that's it.
00:59:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's where the MCU is just different and we have to accept it and all. Well, we never, we never got Marvell. I had to deal with that too. So, you know, yeah. We got a Marvell, just not the same one. Yeah. Well, that's, you're right. No, yes. We just didn't get, we didn't get the guy in the tight suit flying around zapping people with the nega bands and stuff, but the photon blast, but we, but we did get, I'm Marvell. That's true.
00:59:45
Speaker
What about Hulk? One of the things I thought was really cool about Infinity War was this idea that, and I think we talked about this when you came on to talk about that movie, is the idea that this is the first time Hulk is scared of something. Yes.
01:00:02
Speaker
And I was expecting, I was a little bit disappointed. I mean, I understand why, because they got so much else going on in this movie, but I was still a little bit disappointed that we didn't get to see a little bit more of that aspect of it and like how they dealt with that. Yeah, that's true. It's like in the first movie, it was all about
01:00:24
Speaker
him being scared. And in this movie, it's all about him being intelligent, really because it worked better for the plot that he'd be intelligent, I think. And so, you know, when I think about it, what surprises me is that, like if you had asked me after the first movie to write the second one, and how would I approach Hulk? You need intelligent Bruce Banner all the way through this movie.
01:00:55
Speaker
I don't know that you need Hulk all the way through this second movie. And so I would have predicted that they would keep him as Banner and he's using his brain as Banner and he's afraid to go back to being Hulk because that almost attracts danger to him. And he doesn't want to have to go through that again. So to have him be Hulk would be smart.
01:01:15
Speaker
I mean, it was an interesting choice, but I'm still not sure I completely under. It was kind of fun. I mean, there's the autograph, the kids autograph scene that's kind of cute. I'm just not sure why they made that choice. I mean, I just, I don't understand it because like I said, I think that continuing that same character arc where he's
01:01:35
Speaker
afraid and therefore is staying in the banner body just so he doesn't attract villains and attract Thanos or whatever else. That was more, that would make more consistent sense. So where do you think they were going with him having being the intelligent Hulk? Cause I'm not sure. Um, I think it's like you said, I think it was just mainly for, for plot purposes and because you know, you need to have, cause you notice once Tony comes back,
01:02:02
Speaker
you know, Bruce kind of steps in the background a little bit and Tony kind of, Bruce's main contributions in this movie are in that period of time when Tony's refusing to work with them, he helps them get set up with the time machine. And then at the end, when he's the one who snaps for everybody to come back. But, and also the conversation with the ancient one too, but you could easily have just regular Bruce Banner do that. But it's,
01:02:32
Speaker
You know what, I think, again, there's so much going on in this movie that I understand why they did it. If I had had the time to do this, especially if you were doing this as a comic book, you would have a whole lot more space to do it. I would have had a subplot where, like you said,
01:02:52
Speaker
The Hulk's still not coming out. Banner's afraid of bringing the Hulk out again. He's having to use his brains. I would have brought back Doc Sampson from the Incredible Hulk movie. I would have brought him back and had Bruce counseling, working with him, and then slowly integrating these pieces together. And then at the end, you haven't become Smart Hulk.
01:03:17
Speaker
in just in time to be the one who's gonna put on the gauntlet. I think that would have worked. That would have been a very good arc for that movie. Of course, I don't think you really have the time to do that though. Exactly. I was gonna say that's the one constraint is now you've got a four-hour movie, so I understand it. But, and again, you know, it also highlights, I guess one thing it does successfully do is it highlights it's been five years and a lot of stuff has changed. Yeah.
01:03:43
Speaker
So you think somewhere in there, this all changed. Somewhere in there, he dealt with the fear, and he became Hulk again, and he got his brains. And that's a whole other movie that we may never see. But there's a whole other movie there. There's also another scene that was cut out that showed Hulk rescuing people from a burning building or something, and then he gets the call from Steve to go meet them.
01:04:04
Speaker
And it's kind of picked up, you get the same idea from the kids coming and wanting to take his picture, which I thought was kind of interesting and basically a 180 from the comics, whereas Hulk seems to be like the biggest hero in the world now.
01:04:19
Speaker
Well, he's, it just occurred to me, I started to say he's like he's become a professional wrestler where he's saying like, say your prayers, take your vitamins, kids. I'm like, oh, he's Hulk Hogan. They kind of stole Hulk Hogan back from Hulk Hogan. So that's kind of cool. That's a good point. Yeah. I never even thought about that. I didn't either. It'll just then. Yeah. You made me think of it. And then of course there's Rhodey too. We don't get a whole lot of, I think one of the biggest tragedies of these films is that
01:04:48
Speaker
You know, Don Cheadle doesn't get a whole lot to do as Rhodey, and he's arguably, you know, one of the best, if not the best actor out of all of them.
01:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, he's been a problematic character in terms of what to do with him all along because he was introduced as Tony's straight-laced guy that tries to keep him on the right track when he's being wacky Tony. Then once that kind of changed, it's like, okay, now he's the other Iron Man guy.
01:05:19
Speaker
what do you do with him and then he became the guy that oh he's paralyzed or whatever and they've just done a bunch of different things with him to try to keep him interesting but I'm not sure there it's just not very consistent it's it like you say it is kind of a it's disappointing for Don Cheadle who's who's awesome but um but yeah it's uh it's unfortunate that he was just a character that I think
01:05:41
Speaker
was never really going to go anywhere in this story. And we and he never really does. I mean, at least we're getting we're getting the Armor Wars series on Disney Plus, and he's going to be the star of that. So good. Okay, I wasn't sure that. Yeah, good. So yeah, hopefully that'll will finally get to see Don Cheadle really kind of stretch work. I want to talk about the time travel aspect, because one of the things I thought was really cool about this, and
01:06:06
Speaker
I love time travel movies, but every time I watch them, there's always that little part of me that's like, wait a minute. This does not make sense. Or like, like Back to the Future. Back to the Future is a great example because when, you know, Marty comes back and everything has changed and now his, you know, his family is living this perfect life. Every time I watch that, I'm just like,
01:06:27
Speaker
it's Marty now has these memories of a time that no longer exists. And the rest of his family know a Marty that doesn't exist in this timeline. So it's just, it's kind of actually a kind of a tragic ending, actually, because his entire world has been erased. Crap world. That's not so bad. I guess. Yeah, I guess. But but still, it's but it's just one or like the Terminator two, right? Obviously with the
01:06:55
Speaker
whole idea of no fate but what we make but then again well it kind of it there it got fate still plays a big role in everything though too and the whole idea of the the grandfather paradox where you know Kyle Reese comes back in time to father his his hero right and so you got so the time travel movies they they often do not make sense and I thought this movie was
01:07:21
Speaker
probably the only time when the time travel rules actually work, and they actually do make sense because what they did and this was also a deep cut as a Marvel fan I think you probably would have appreciated this too was
01:07:34
Speaker
they brought back Mark Gruenwald's rules for time travel. And they use that in this movie. They never call it that specific. It would have been cool if they called it like the Gruenwald paradox or something like that. But that that would have. Yeah. Yeah. It was interesting how they tried to explain it. And I'm still not sure I completely thought maybe you grasp it better than I'm sure you grasp it better than I did. But but but
01:07:56
Speaker
Yeah, the whole idea that, well, I mean, the whole kind of, it explains it like if your future becomes your past and this, that, and the other. And I'm just like, okay, at that point I said, let's just do it. And I'm going to trust you that you thought this through. And it does make sense to somebody because I'm lost. And I've watched it now three times and I'm still not sure I completely understand. But I do understand that they're saying,
01:08:24
Speaker
It doesn't rewrite history. It just, it seems like it lets you change some things and not change others. And that was the main thing Tony wanted. He wanted to bring people back without changing what he had. So they were, I felt like they were under the constraints when writing this movie of we want to be able to change some things from the past, but not change others that happen after that point.
01:08:53
Speaker
And yeah, we are kind of all programmed from all of the stuff we've read and watched and over the years that you can't do. It's one or the other. So it was interesting to me. I think this is the first time travel story I've ever experienced in any media where
01:09:13
Speaker
you could do both at the same time. You could kind of have your cake and go back in time and eat it too or something, you know what I mean? And I'm still not sure how that works, but it led to good outcomes. So I'm fine. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to complain.
01:09:30
Speaker
So I will say Hulk's explanation is so nonsensical. It doesn't make, it's just, it's ridiculous. I hate it every time I watch this movie and I hear him give that explanation. Cause it doesn't make any sense. It just confuses everybody. Yeah. Nobody understands that. And, but what it basically is, is if you change something, it creates a new timeline. It creates a variant timeline. So that's basically what it is. And so,
01:09:58
Speaker
And I think people get people get hung up on the ancient one conversation. I think there's a lot of misinterpretation of what the ancient one is actually saying. Like she says, you know, she says, if you take the time stone away, then it creates this new, darker reality.
01:10:15
Speaker
She's not saying that the Infinity Stones control the timeline. She's saying that without the Time Stone here, Dr. Strange can't stop Dormammu like he did in the first movie.
01:10:28
Speaker
So then we're gonna be overrun by Dormammu in that reality. And so that's why Bruce has that idea of, you know, we take the stones and then we bring them right back to where we left them from. So before the change occurs, you erase the need of the change. So there's no branching in that way. So that's how it works basically. So by the end of this movie, there are a few new timelines that are created, you know, basically by accident. There's the timeline where
01:10:59
Speaker
Loki steals the Tesseract and now, and that goes into the Loki. And then, well, we don't know what's happening there because they get taken by the TVA and all that. There's also another timeline where presumably there might be something with when Thor goes to Asgard because he takes Mjolnir. He has that chat with his mom. So that could potentially change some stuff.
01:11:31
Speaker
Same thing with Tony talking to his dad. That could potentially change some stuff. Obviously the one where Thanos comes from, right? That's a completely different reality now because Thanos is no longer around. So that now has the entire reality where the Avengers never have to worry about Thanos gathering all the stones now.
01:11:52
Speaker
And then also we have the one that Steve creates at the end when he goes back in time to be with Peggy, that presumably I think creates another branch timeline where he's with Peggy. Because for one of my biggest complaints, one of my biggest things that I felt when I've seen people talking about the ending is the idea of Steve Rogers going back in time and living a life with Peggy, but
01:12:19
Speaker
being her like secret husband for decades and like not interacting with the world at all, ignoring
01:12:28
Speaker
all the knowledge he has of the future, as much as I understand the whole idea of, well, Steve's making the selfish decision, it's the parallel to Tony and all that stuff. I get all that, but still just fundamentally as part of Steve's character, like he says in civil war, I can't ignore a situation when it's pointed south. I can't imagine that any version of Steve Rogers would
01:12:57
Speaker
go back in time would be with Peggy and never tell her, hey, by the way, Hydra's infiltrated your organization from the start. I can't imagine he'd say, oh, you know, my best friend Bucky is, you know, being brainwashed by Hydra and being, and he's gonna have like decades worth of post-traumatic stress now because of it by the time he gets deprogrammed. And he's also gonna kill, you know, Tony's parents.
01:13:24
Speaker
who Howard Stark is also one of my best friends. So I can't, or even basic stuff like the Kennedy assassination or 9-11, I can't see Steve ignoring all of that. No matter what the time travel rules are, I can't see him saying like, I'm just gonna live a life and be hidden until the time when I have to come and give Sam the shield. So my theory is that he's used his knowledge and this is another timeline where
01:13:53
Speaker
things have happened differently. Maybe him and Peggy and Howard found shield instead and a lot of other stuff. Cause at the end, he brings Sam a shield that has a different design and cause his shield was destroyed by Thanos. Well, but I figured he got it when he was back in time and brought it forward with him. But that would create another branch line timeline too. I see. All right. Here, here's my answer. I can sum it up very simply.
01:14:23
Speaker
Everything works if Steve never appears again after he goes back to take the stones because that would mean the timeline where he does all this stuff with Peggy and all that is a separate timeline.
01:14:37
Speaker
What messes it all up for me is that he's there on the bench at the end because that means he's been in that universe all along, which means that everything he did in his life after he went back in time happened in our MCU universe, which doesn't make any sense because it didn't happen. So yeah, this is, this is a problem. The bench scene is definitely a problem. And if you take that out, it all else works. It does. You're right. It all works.
01:15:07
Speaker
Or if, you know, instead of coming back, right, just the shield appears or something on the tunnel or something like that would be inserted it some way. Yeah, yeah. But you're
Epic Final Battle and Iconic Moments
01:15:17
Speaker
right. That is a problem because he doesn't come back through the tunnel, which is it does create that issue. Now, one thing I I there's a way you can do it because if he works in this new reality and he's like,
01:15:32
Speaker
He knows that the quantum realm exists and it can be used for time travel. So when he ends up, if he's the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., if he found S.H.I.E.L.D. with Peggy and Howard, then he's eventually going to get to a point where he meets Michael Douglas's Hank Pym, going to be able to explain stuff. And so there is a way you can work. And I think
01:15:53
Speaker
but it does still have that, then it's the question of how he ends up navigating to that specific timeline without a quantum tunnel. So there's still some issues with it. It's not a perfect solution. I think it even shows in the fact that you've got the screenwriters and the director both disagree on this. Like the directors have said, yes, Steve went to a new timeline where he lived his life out with Peggy. Maybe he had some adventures there. Whereas the screenwriters said, oh, no, no, he's been in the main timeline all along.
01:16:22
Speaker
All along, yeah. I think the answer really is they wanted Steve to get to do it and they said the hell with it. I think that's really it. But what I want now is for Kang to come along and just blow it all up. You people can't do this and just take care of it, man.
01:16:43
Speaker
Well, I said that there are some comic books, or if we were going to have tie-in comics, the MCU, kind of like we're getting the Batman 89 comic and all that kind of stuff. If we had something like that in the MCU, some stuff I would like to see is, one, the time between Civil War and Infinity War. What did Cap's Secret Avengers get up to during that time?
01:17:08
Speaker
the five year gap in an end game, right? What happened to, what did the team do during that time? And also what you get a lot of mileage of is what did Steve do in this alternate timeline? Yeah. Yeah. And I also would like to know what, what Captain Marvel did between 1994 and 2018, 19. Yeah. So I mean, presumably we could get, presumably we could get some of that because then she's still doing movies though.
01:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, the Marvels is coming out. I have a bad feeling though, and I don't know this for sure, but I have a really dreaded bad feeling that when they changed it from Captain Marvel 2 to the Marvels, I'm afraid she's going to be minimized and it's going to be more about Kamala and
01:17:54
Speaker
and Monica and that's fine. They're great, but I'm a huge Carol fan. I want more Captain Marvel. So I'm probably going to be disappointed, but at least we're getting something. So yeah, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they do with that. I thought that was a curious choice when they, when they made that announcement. So, I mean, I hope it, I mean, maybe it's just going to be like a kind of a small team up movie and then we'll still be able to get more Captain Marvel stuff in addition to that.
01:18:18
Speaker
You'll hear me screaming from the theater where you are if the second one ends with her handing over the mantle or something to one of them. Because again, I love Monica. I love Kamala. They're great. I want them to do their thing and let Carol do her thing. And if this ends with, OK, I've been Captain Marvel for two and a half movies and now you guys take it, I'm going to be like, come on, because I want more of her. She's my second favorite character.
01:18:48
Speaker
But I also picked up on a little bit of a plot inconsistency to this last time watching it is because in Infinity War, Dr. Strange is asking Tony if he can fly the ship back to Earth. But in this movie, he's able to open a portal easily to go back from Titan to Earth. Yeah, yeah. That's just another example of one of those little inconsistencies just so we could have the moment we comes through.
01:19:14
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Again, I think there's a lot in Endgame where they said it would be cool if and then they just say, let's figure out a way to make it happen. So yeah, there's a lot more fantasy to it. Then then we it looks like a superhero science fiction story, but there's an awful lot of sort of space fantasy woven into it. And that's Yeah, when you when you put Thor in it, you immediately are starting to even when you even when you say, Oh, no, he's science Thor, right? It's still science fantasy Thor. I mean, come right in. But yeah, there's a lot of that in it for sure.
01:19:44
Speaker
But you know, that's one of the great things about the Marvel Universe, though, is that it can be a lot of different genres at the same time. Yes. There's, you know, there's there's almost no other.
01:19:53
Speaker
fictional realm, where you can have almost every kind of story happening in the same, I mean, DC, obviously, but other, you know, but we're different kind of stories all happening in the same universe and overlapping. And that's one of the things that makes it really cool. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Marvel movies continue to be successful, is they're not all the same thing. They're all very different, and yet still in the same universe. Yeah, we had, I think, and even though DC came first, Marvel's really the one that
01:20:21
Speaker
created the shared continuity as we think. DC had some stuff, but it was more like, it's like when two TV shows crossover type of thing. It wasn't so interconnected like Stan and Jack did it when they started doing Marvel.
01:20:38
Speaker
None of them were even living in the same city. They were all in different fictional cities. They'd get together at the Justice League or something. Yeah, Marvel came up with the idea we all live in the same world, even though we're doing very different things. And that's just a great, great idea. Yeah. Yeah. So then let's talk about the big final battle, because one of the best things about this is we had the Trinity at the beginning, right? You had Cap, Thor, and Iron Man, the big three, going up against Thanos. The choreography. That's what I was talking about before. The choreography of the battle.
01:21:08
Speaker
featuring different little groups all the way through it is genius because it's never just a, I mean, the whole thing is a melee, but yet it focuses very narrowly piece by piece by piece. That's what I was, yeah, that was impressive.
01:21:26
Speaker
And they also, I like the little callbacks they had to like, for example, Black Panthers showing up in front of Hawkeye and saying like, Clint, give it to me, right? Whereas back in civil war, you know, he introduced himself, I'm Clint and Black Panthers says, I don't care. So I like the little callbacks here. And one of my favorite moments of the seed is, and a lot of people, you know, talked about
01:21:48
Speaker
Brie Larson being wooden in this movie, which I didn't think because one of my favorite moments is when she comes down and she meets Spider-Man, and he's just like, also he's like, I'm Peter Parker. And she just kind of smells like, hey, Peter Parker, you got something for me? That was great.
01:22:02
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I think she's great because, I mean, we'll realize for one thing that she filmed this before she filmed her own movie. So this is the first time she's played that character in real life. And so what she was going for, I think is by this point, I am a supremely confident and powerful character. And she's, she's, she's not wooden. She's just,
01:22:28
Speaker
confident and knows what she's about. Agreed. And so she's not having to play a range of emotions at that point. You go back to her own movie and it's very different because that's when she's just kind of starting out and everything. So they just didn't give her enough material in this movie to allow Brie Larson to do the range of acting that she can do. Yeah, yeah, agreed.
01:22:53
Speaker
And we didn't get one of the moments that I thought we would get, which was just like in Age of Ultron, I had expected the moment from Ultron Unlimited when Thor and the rest of the Avengers appear before Ultron and Thor says we would have words with thee.
01:23:08
Speaker
I was expecting that in Age of Ultron, didn't get it, and I was disappointed. And I was expecting in this movie, we'd have the scene from Infinity Gauntlet when Cap's like the last man standing, he goes up to Thanos, and he says, you know, as long as one man stands up to you, you'll never obtain victory. And we don't get that exact line, but we get basically that scene.
01:23:30
Speaker
We do. Where Cap is the only one left standing, he tightens the shield, or like the little shard that's left of the shield, and he just starts marching up to fight off an entire army on his own. I thought that was great. Yeah, and with the hammer and everything too at one point, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I kept having trouble.
01:23:53
Speaker
With my whole life, I feel like I fought the battle of Captain America's shield cannot be casually destroyed by some supervillain. If there's one thing we can cling to in the Marvel Universe, it's that Captain America's shield does not get destroyed. It represents America. You can't destroy America, right? You can't destroy the shield.
01:24:13
Speaker
Thanos shatters it, but I reconciled myself with that by saying he has the reality stone. So he didn't just break it with the power stone. He also changed reality to where the power stone could break it. This is before he gets the gauntlet though. Oh, was it? Yeah, yeah.
01:24:37
Speaker
Sorry to break your fantasy. Well, you can't do it. It didn't happen then. I didn't say it. Can't break the shield. But what was your reaction when you saw a cap get the hammer, though? You know, it's one of those things where, again, my brain just thinks this way. I had like a bang, bang, bang. I went, oh, that's really cool. And then I thought, it's like in
01:25:03
Speaker
wasn't there in like an Avengers JLA crossover? There was something like that, but with Superman. And that was my second thought. And then my third thought was they didn't plan this back in the age of Ultron or whatever. But I think one of the things that the screenwriters and the Russos are so good at, we talked about this a little bit already, one of the things that they are so good at is finding things in the earlier movies and finding ways to make you think it's been planned all along.
01:25:32
Speaker
I guarantee they were not planning to have Captain America pick up that hammer and take it into battle a couple of movies later. But when you watch this movie, you feel like it was planned all along and they've been building it to this point. And that's really impressive.
01:25:49
Speaker
One of the things that impresses me the most about everybody involved in creating this movie is how seamlessly they kind of retrofitted it onto what was already there as if it was always supposed to be that way. My reading of the Hammer scene in Age of Ultron, because you see it move, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you see it move and you see Thor go like, oh shit.
01:26:13
Speaker
And then Cap goes like, I can't do it. So my little head cannon is that Cap could pick it up, but he saw Thor and he's like, I'm going to let him have it. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think the Russos had that same idea because in this movie, when Cap gets the hammer, Thor just says, I knew it.
01:26:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But he doesn't say it in a bad way. He's like, I knew it. He's like, I'm happy about it, which is cool. So good for good for Thor. Good for his, I think it's cause I think part of it is cause he got the shock out of his system when vision had it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm glad he, he,
01:26:47
Speaker
He had that character growth that he could be happy about it and happy for Steve and happy for the situation. I've always thought, look, there's no way that Thor as a character is more worthy than Steve Rogers. Who would have thought that?
01:27:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Never would have thought that. I mean, and if you go back to the first Thor movie, he's like the least worthy other than maybe Loki of, I mean, I could have seen Sif pick it up before Thor in the first movie. So, I mean, the, the, the worthiness enchantment in the comics and in the movies, it's always just been whoever we want to pick up the hammer is worthy. It's always been that way. Absolutely. Um,
01:27:31
Speaker
What do you think of we finally got the classic line to Avengers? Yeah, we were just talking that with Jim Yelton. I've had so many shows over the years with my good buddy Jim Yelton, where he's like, he's always saying like, I can't wait for them. They finally do. He was so mad. They didn't do it at the end of Age of Ultron, I think maybe. He's like, Oh, they had the chance and they didn't do it. He's like, they'd better be saving it up for some really big moment. And then they finally did do it. And
01:27:57
Speaker
I guess they really did save it for the right moment. I can't imagine any moment bigger than that. I mean, you got like, what, a hundred Avengers there. It really did look like, I can't imagine there's ever gonna be another moment where you're gonna have that many characters and that many characters that we know and care about all on the screen together. I think this really may be the watershed after this. We got a lot smaller movies for a long time. When would you ever try to do something like this again, right?
01:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, because I was thinking about it as we were in the lead up to this episode.
Post-Endgame Speculations and Future Storylines
01:28:32
Speaker
And I've been thinking about the past few days. Because one of the things I wanted to ask you is, where do you think they go from here? Because I don't think, unless you do something like Secret Wars, and I mean like the Jonathan Hickman Secret Wars, I can't imagine a way that you get bigger than this. Yeah, no. It took 11 years, basically, to get to this point.
01:28:55
Speaker
And, and that's when they were going in that direction, you know, eventually I, now I don't feel like they're even trying to go in that direction. And I don't think that they should. So I, yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like you just kind of leave it alone for a while. I don't, I don't know how you.
01:29:11
Speaker
I don't know how you do anything. I mean, DC could do it. They could do, you know, Crisis on Infinite Earth or something like that. They could do like a big, you know, DCU version, a big, big screen version of that or something. But I don't see how Marvel, I don't know what Marvel has that they could try to do anything like this again. I don't know. Yeah. Like I can say, the Secret Wars is the only thing I could think of that's really kind of, because then you're not only dealing with
01:29:35
Speaker
one reality you're dealing with all the realities. So that's the only thing I can think of that has this kind of a scale.
01:29:42
Speaker
Well, the original, the original Secret Wars, at least it lets you bring in the Fantastic Four and the X-Men and have everybody kind of together. But it's such a basic story. It's not, it's not an emotional story. You know, it's just, it's more like a, they could do it all in one movie, basically. It wouldn't have the same emotional resonance that this had, so. Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. The, not the first Secret Wars, the, I'm not sure if you ever read the one that Hickman did a few years back.
01:30:10
Speaker
No, I don't know. So that was basically the battle world is just like these collection of different realities. You've got characters from different realities. And it's been this long buildup of stuff from his Avengers run, where you had different universes colliding with each other. So it was one of the big, if you read Hickman's Avengers,
01:30:39
Speaker
It's really epic in scope, which was a welcome change after Bendis' stuff. But one of the downsides is it was almost very light on character work. The characters were very kind of generic in it, I felt. It didn't have that kind of real personal touch. If the MCU could do something like that, where they could have something that kind of scope, but I think then they could probably do that. But that's the only thing I could think of that would be,
01:31:07
Speaker
that would top this, that would go bigger than this. Otherwise, I think you're right. I think that they should not try for a while. They should just focus on building up and building into these other areas, right? So now we've got Shang-Chi coming in where they introduce the Eternals. We're gonna be introducing Blade. We're gonna go into horror stuff. We're gonna see more multiverse stuff with Dr. Strange. So I'm okay with them
01:31:35
Speaker
not having any sort of big overarching plan for a while and just kind of having fun with these different weird concepts. Because now we've established the Marvel Universe, we've established how everything works. Now it's time to get weird with it. Now it's time to play with it. Yeah, I think you're right. The only thing that could really for me
01:31:55
Speaker
bring in a lot of characters if they did some kind of alternate reality where they're different. Instead of uniting everybody the way that we know them at the big battle in Endgame, instead you kind of bring together different versions from different multiverses. A Kang story could kind of work like that for one thing. I was kind of hopeful that if they did do another big
01:32:16
Speaker
not even as big as Infinity War because Thanos is, that would be the way to do it. The other one that's famous in Avengers history is the Korvac story, but I feel like a lot of this kind of covered a lot of the Korvac story, not precisely, but
01:32:35
Speaker
in a general sense. If you try to do the Korvak story now, people will be like, well, this is just too much like the Infinity saga. I think so too, yeah. I mean, you could do some other stuff, but not have it like these big overarching plans. So you could have, I mean, I'd be cool with this if you do some, you know, big movie events. Like if you did Galactus with the Fantastic Four coming in, if you did something with Kang, or if you did the Kree-Skrull War, I think all of those are different things you could play with.
01:33:04
Speaker
without it being like part of the pinnacle of an 11 year plan. And you don't have to bring everybody together for it. Right. And that allows us to still have like
01:33:17
Speaker
you know, Avengers level threat, where you bring the band back together for those types of things. But then we can also focus on this other stuff, like the stuff happened on the TV shows, right? Like just you and I were talking on tour last night about moon nights, right? And how, and just that kind of stuff. Like it's, it's, they're playing around with the mythology now. And I think that's, that's where the, I think they got the right idea now, where now they could just have some fun with it. They don't have this plan that they're locked into it.
01:33:47
Speaker
Well, right. And it takes us back to phase one again, where you're just having individual characters, you're getting to know them. And yeah, in a few years, once we know all these new characters, um, if you then want to have some kind of event and bring them together, but even then, like we were saying, I don't think it'd be as big as, as in, I don't think for a long time. Yeah. No, no.
01:34:08
Speaker
Uh, so kind of wrap this up, uh, where do you think they'll be going from here as far as with the Avengers themselves, or where would you like the Avengers to go from here? Like, as far as like team members or composition or anything like that?
01:34:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I think that I kind of see a two-track deal for me. I want to see the remaining kind of second class of Avengers now that the seniors have graduated to heaven or wherever they went, right?
01:34:38
Speaker
I'd like to see that second class of Avengers kind of, I don't know if we're going to, but I'd like to see them have their own stories for a couple of movies with, you know, well, I guess we've lost Black Panther now too, which wasn't even planned. But yeah, you know, the ones that are left like Rhodey and Wanda and the Falcon and Winter Soldier, those I'd like to see and the new and well, yeah, I'd like to see them. And I'd like to see kind of a young Avengers where we get
01:35:04
Speaker
this third kind of class, which is, you know, the people from Captain America, I mean, from Falcon and the Winter Soldier, like Patriot and the Yelena from Black Widow and the kids from WandaVision, right? I mean, we've got a whole nother. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'd like to see them now. And we've got the vision back.
01:35:30
Speaker
Hopefully. We're on the way. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'd like to see them kind of do something with an older group and something with a younger group. And neither one of them has to be universe-shaking stories, but just give us some fun, you know, bring in the Zodiac or bring in some other cool Avengers villain, you know, and let's go forward with that. That'd be cool. Yeah. I'd like to see some of these other characters because
01:35:57
Speaker
Shang-Chi kind of establishes that now that seems like Bruce and Carol are kind of like the core of this new Avengers now. And I think that'd be kind of cool to see because he's always
01:36:13
Speaker
Bruce in the MCU is interesting because, especially when you compare it to the comics, because Hulk was a member of the Avengers early on, but then he just kind of went off on his own. And then he'd never joined the team until the Hickman era, I think was when he finally actually officially joined the team.
01:36:29
Speaker
And so he was never very integral to the Avengers in the comics, but he's been a much bigger player in it. And now seeing him kind of step up in the wake of Cap and Tony being gone, and Thor presumably too, because he goes off with the Guardians at the end of this movie. So it could be really interesting to see what they do with that.
01:36:53
Speaker
Yeah,
Marvel's Global Impact and Fan Engagement
01:36:54
Speaker
sure. There's enough characters left that you can still do a couple of teams worth of stuff. And they've certainly set a lot of it up. So I don't know if they'll ever actually do it. And of course, don't forget the pet avengers, too. Yeah. Well, we've already got Lucky and Hawkeye. So he got that one of them down. Oh, that's right. Yeah, we got one there. And unfortunately, Red Wing is a little rocket instead of an actual bird. Although the guy who did
01:37:23
Speaker
Spellman who did the Falcon and Winter Soldier. He said that if there was a, he said that one of the things that he wanted to do in the series, but they didn't have time because they had to cut the episodes down, is he wanted to introduce an actual Red Wing as an actual Red Wing. So they might, and he's going to be doing the Captain America 4. So we might see, we might have him end up introducing the real Red Wing.
01:37:46
Speaker
Nice. Very good. Okay. We're on our way and we saw the frog Thor in the Loki show. So yeah, yeah, we're on our way to pit Avengers. How exciting. Okay. Uh, anything else we should say about, uh, end game? I, you know, I think that they knew what they, what they had. And I, you know, you mentioned the ending credits part where they do the signatures and everything. And it reminded me of the end of return of the King.
01:38:12
Speaker
And I thought, man, they know that this is something that's going to stand up for decades and just be huge. And they treated it as a prestige production, you know what I mean, all the way to the end.
01:38:28
Speaker
And even with the multiple epilogues like Return of the King, there are a lot of parallels with that movie that you see here. And so yeah, I think this is something that's going to stand up for a very long time. And I think it's up there with the original Star Wars trilogy. It's up there with Lord of the Rings. After watching the first Iron Man movie in 2008, I was excited we had a good Iron Man movie.
01:38:53
Speaker
But I never would have dreamed that I would put these in a category with those titans of pop culture. And I think they are. I think they stand out. Well, every semester when I have my students talk a little bit about themselves, and almost invariably I get students who say that they love Marvel movies. And this is here in Japan, right? And so many people, these things are worldwide phenomena now.
01:39:23
Speaker
back when I was growing up, if you like superheroes after the age of 10, you just did not talk about it, right? Oh, I believe me. I was there, I know. Yeah, but now it's this massive worldwide phenomenon and everybody knows these characters, right? And not just knows about them in like, you know,
01:39:45
Speaker
like our parents knew about Superman type of way. It's like knows about them and actually likes them and watches the movies and is really invested in these characters. I don't think any of us really expected something like that to ever happen in our lifetimes. Oh, no, no. Again, we grew up watching the Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man and Bill Bixby Hulk and some really terrible other ones and you know,
01:40:12
Speaker
to go from that to this, but we always knew it was possible. And this is what's funny to me is people always say, well, it's because of the special effects. And I'm like, well, that's true to a point, right? Up to a point, it's true that they could do these because they can make them look good and not silly.
01:40:29
Speaker
But what gives these movies power is not the special effects. It's the writing. It's the acting. It's the characters. It's the emotion. And that's what had to be brought over from the comics because, you know, I can't tell you how many times as a kid that I would try to convince people I'm like,
01:40:47
Speaker
you know, I would be reading a comic like, oh, that's dumb. I'm like, no, the stuff on TV they do with it is dumb. Read this, read the actual comic. And nobody would, of course, you know, so they just thought it was all stupid. But we've gotten to a point now where the movies are as smart or smarter than the comics. And that's what I never thought I would see. Yeah, yeah. And people are acknowledging that they're smart. And like, and you're right, it's that's one of the things that drove me nuts. And because you see these
01:41:16
Speaker
Like we were talking about, when people walked out of this movie, what was the one line everybody was quoting? It wasn't Avengers Assemble. It was, I love you 3000. That was what everybody kept going back to because that was such an emotional line, especially when he repeats it to her at the end.
01:41:38
Speaker
I get chills just thinking about it. I cry every time I watch that scene. And I've seen this movie almost like a dozen times close to it. I've got the poster back here somewhere of it with the gauntlet and it says, I love you 3000.
01:41:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's yeah, these it's it's really opened up and it's amazing. I'm so happy that I've that I've been able to see this happen my lifetime and that's you know, and my kids are gonna grow up in a world where you know, superheroes are cool. I think that's awesome. That's I would have killed for that as a kid. Oh gosh. Yeah, and never would have thought never would have thought yeah, and it is a combination of it's a combination of making them look effective with the effects but putting the
01:42:20
Speaker
putting the intelligence into it, that was always there in the comics. I mean, you go back and read the stuff that this story was based on and it's not dumb. It's not silly. It's brilliant stuff. The Starlin, you know, all the Starlin stuff and everything and all the shooter stuff. Yeah. So it's just, they finally caught up to it in every way, not just in a visual way. And that's so satisfying. Yeah. And another thing too is when you compare this to Infinity War, they both do very,
01:42:49
Speaker
They're both fanservice movies. They're both rewards for people who have invested all this time. But they both do it in different ways, right? In Infinity War, part of what makes Infinity War so great is like you talked about. It's that joy of seeing all these characters meet for the first time.
01:43:06
Speaker
It's that, you know, Oh, what's going to happen when, when Tony meets, you know, dr. Strange, how are, how, how's Thor going to interact with the guardians of the galaxy? That's the stuff we came to see it for this one. It's so it's all about the seeing these new pairings together. This one it's all about, you know,
01:43:26
Speaker
Hey, remember that time when Cat almost picked up Thor's hammer? Well, guess what he's going to do with this one, right? It's all these nice little callbacks. So they both give you something new, but they also give you fanservice in different ways. I think it's a really cool way to do that. You're absolutely right. I hadn't thought about that, but you're absolutely right.
01:43:50
Speaker
Okay, all right, so I think we've pretty much talked about everything we're gonna talk about with Endgame. So Van, why don't you tell people where they can find you?
01:43:59
Speaker
Yeah. My main show that you might be interested in, well, the website, www.avengersassemble.net. I've had avengersassemble.net since 1995, believe it or not. What, 27 years? Good. Great. That's crazy. And so you can go there and see all of the Avengers. We post the YouTube videos there every week or two. I'm up to like issue number 11 now, but there's a few others too that we've, that we've covered.
01:44:24
Speaker
And otherwise, www.plexico.net, just to find links to everything I do. I've written the Sentinels novels, and I have the White Rocket podcast, and we even have a James Bond podcast. We do a whole lot of stuff. So yeah, come on over to plexico.net. Okay, great. Van, thanks again for coming back on. It's your third time on the show now. And hopefully, maybe next time we get, we can work it out and we can get Mark come on with you too. Yeah, it would be great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's always fun.
01:44:52
Speaker
Yeah, always. All right, so that does it for this episode of Superhero Cinephiles. 100 episodes, guys. Thank you so much for sticking with the show so long. Thank you for encouraging me to keep it going after we lost Derek. I'm really glad that
01:45:07
Speaker
People are still enjoying it, people are still listening, and managed to get some really interesting perspectives now with the new format, and that's gonna keep going forward. Got some new guests lined up for upcoming episodes too. Superherocinephiles.com is the website, SuperCinemapod on Twitter and Instagram, and we are SuperheroCinephiles on Facebook. Please make sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, anywhere you get your podcasts,
01:45:34
Speaker
And that does it for now. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
01:45:55
Speaker
or make a one-time donation through PayPal, both of which can be found at our website, SuperheroCinephiles.com. If you buy or rent any movies through the Amazon links at our site, it helps support the show. Please be sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:46:29
Speaker
Thank you for listening and as always good night. Good evening. God bless.