I took my two boys out to see Avengers: Endgame. It was a film trip for the boys of the family.
I was very frustrated as latecomers entered wielding their camera-phone torches picking out their (inevitably!) far-end-of-row seats. I know the performance starts with adverts, but how late do you have to be to still not make a movie’s start when the adverts and trailers are 30 minutes in duration?!
Worse still, two such late entrants needed to get past us in a scene important to the early part of the narrative’s development. And then they proceeded to rustle around for the next three hours emptying a ruck sack that seemed to contain every crisp snack taken from the local supermarket’s entire aisle.
Child 1, already alert to my tendency to call out such behaviour, told me not to say anything to the little lad next to me wrestling noisily for many story-critical moments to open his crisp packet. The instruction from my left was repeated when the boy’s father took forever to put away his phone on which he found it necessary to write several messages and light-pollute all around him.
As for Endgame itself. You have to have completed your preparation to see it. Physically and mentally.
My two boys and I stopped drinking 4 hours before the performance started. I had to steel myself for three hours of a very loud sound system, hot auditorium, and snack-munching, packet-rustlers to watch a much-anticipated climax to the Marvel Avengers story-arc. Given this running time broadly equates to my marathon distance personal best, the crossover of approach coming into this movie is not lost on me.
Was it all worth it?
The running time is unnecessarily too long, despite the need to pull the separate narrative threads together. Yes, there are many story points to resolve, but this could still have been done in a shorter running time with a bit of imagination. And there are at least two, possibly, three endings: the battle is done and things have to be hidden, yippee the end; except no, old-guy ending has to also occur.
As I watched the (first ending?) battle-scene climax, I became aware of how many times I have now seen this particular version of a finale in recent films. At least it keeps the effects companies busy.
And the last 20 minutes threw into Stark relief the differences between how the writers and I wanted this particular episode to finish. How dare they? Yet, the focus on the individual remained as little narrative details (one character’s wait and see, I can’t tell you hints) were artfully dropped into the larger battle unfolding around them.
So all in all, it was a Marvellous romp. It was a very clever working through of many outstanding issues within the Marvel universe. The disparate story lines were cleverly interwoven and worked out.
The comedy was nicely judged, the sadnesses sometimes unexpected, poignant and pertinent.
I was struck at how, like in Lord of the Rings, a fellowship had formed with which, because each character was portrayed with their frailties as well as their strengths, the audience can relate and is therefore a part.
The coda also provided a fitting plotline-resolution for one as well as a significant baton-pass for another.
So overall, a needlessly long, imperfect but ultimately satisfying outcome to the Avengers experience, disturbed by selfishnesses so typical of today’s cinema-going public. Child 2 gave it 9 out of 10. Child 1 scored it a perfect 10. I remain convinced of the correctness of my movie-watching strategy that is to go on a weekday morning on those rare days I am not at work when I virtually have the screen to myself.