The movie begins where I thought it would, in the aftermath of Thanos’s snap from Infinity War, but it doesn’t do as much with this aftermath as I thought it would. From the trailers, it seems like this is going to be a major part of the movie, as the trailers show us Captain America and Black Widow seeing the return of Ant-Man, they show us Tony Stark recording a “final message” for Pepper Potts, and it seems to all the world like there’s going to be a lot of this in the movie. But there really isn’t. I struggle to say that that’s a bad part of the movie, but it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. We don’t, for example, get anything with the Avengers meeting Captain Marvel. Instead, the post credit scene in Captain Marvel – which seemed to be a teaser for Endgame in much the same way Marvel have done in the past – was everything we got with her meeting the Avengers. We also don’t explore the idea that Rocket has been left on Earth alone, presumably unaware that the rest of the Guardians, who he last saw in space, are gone. I can’t help but feel like the movie missed out on something here when it comes to Rocket’s development and his journey of finding out all his friends have died, but then this movie isn’t really about Rocket’s journey as much as it is a movie about the original six Avengers, so I suppose that’s why these parts (if they were even filmed) were left on the cutting room floor.
Before we get to any of that, however, we do see – in the very beginning of the film – a quick pre-Decimation (what the snap is apparently called) moment with Hawkeye and his family. He’s under house arrest, as discussed in other films – Infinity War and Ant-Man & The Wasp – and he’s having a picnic with his family. He’s teaching his daughter how to use a bow and arrow, and his wife is laying out the food. Clint goes to retrieve one of the arrows that his daughter has shot into the target and when he turns around she’s gone. So is his wife and other kids. Everyone has just vanished, and what we see – but Clint doesn’t notice – is that there is random dust in the air around where they were standing. It’s a great moment to kick the film off and show Hawkeye’s loss, and it’s very reminiscent of the Ant-Man & The Wasp post-credit scene where Scott is trying to talk to them over the radio but all we, as the audience, see is dust floating slowly to the ground. A very cool reintroduction to Hawkeye, with more to come on that later.
Next thing we know we’re in space, where Tony is recording his heartfelt message for Pepper. His oxygen is running out. Nebula and he got the ship working again, and she was able to help heal him a little after Thanos almost killed him in Infinity War, but now the ship has broken again, they have no power left, no oxygen left, and Tony is on the verge of death. He says his goodbyes to Pepper and then falls asleep, and Nebula carries him to the front of the ship and sits him in a seat. It’s very sweet actually, and I think it shows how Nebula has come along in the short-time since the snap. It shows she’s a different person now than she’s been in the past, and she’s actually caring for this human. Just as Tony’s on the verge of death however there’s a blinding light which wakes him from his slumber. It turns out most of the theories about how they’d get home were wrong (although I was right, so score one for me). It wasn’t Rocket who rescued them, but Captain Marvel. How did she find the ship? It’s never explained.
Again, I struggle to say that’s a particularly bad thing, but it’s another thing this film chooses not to bother to explain. You can make up your own explanation for it – mine being that she’s gone to Earth after the snap and Fury’s device to call her, found the Avengers and Rocket, and Rocket has told her his friends may still be out there, so she’s tracked down the ship the same way Rocket would have, with some kind of locator. But it’s not explained to us specifically, and Carol simply shows up and brings Tony and Nebula back to Earth, where – for the first time since Civil War – Tony and Steve get to talk again. This is the first truly great part of the film again, because they’ve both very clearly lost, they’re both very clearly still emotional over it, but they both handle it in incredibly different ways. Steve is stoic and sad but strong. Tony is an emotional wreck, screaming at Steve for abandoning him and the others, blaming everyone including himself for failing (and for Peter Parker’s death, which has hit him hard), and then refusing to go with the others with their plan to track down Thanos. It doesn’t help that he collapses from the injuries he suffered in Infinity War and the near-death experience in space, but even if he hadn’t he makes it clear here that he wants nothing to do with them. This is an amazing scene, and it sets up Tony’s arc in the rest of the film perfectly.
So, with Tony lying in a hospital bed, the other remaining Avengers, Nebula, Rocket and Captain Marvel all get back onto the Guardians’ ship and fly off to another location in space. This location is a second location that a “snap” has occurred. The same energies that emanated from Earth when Thanos snapped his fingers have happened again on this planet. How do they know this? Again, it’s never explained, but I’m willing to let that go because they have Rocket Racoon and Captain Marvel on the team now and a little time since the snap to deal with all of this, and between Carol’s extensive Kree training and access to Kree technology and Rocket Racoon being able to make anything out of anything, as we’ve seen in the Guardians films, it’s entirely possible they’ve put together this inter-galactic space tracking/monitoring technology in a short time, after all I’m sure the Kree have something similar.
This next scene with them finding Thanos is brilliant as well. They find Thanos as a wreck of a being. He’s not nearly the supreme Titan that he was. He’s clearly hurt, and it seems like he’s hurt from his snap from Infinity War at first. They engage him in a fight, and with the incredibly-confident Captain Marvel (who tells the others the difference between them fighting him before and now is simply that they have her now, showing how confident she’s become) on their side they beat the hell out of Thanos, they get him down, they grab the gauntlet on his hand… but there’s a problem. The stones aren’t there. According to Thanos, they never will be again. He’s destroyed them. That’s what the second snap was that they detected. He used the stones to destroy the stones, since his work is done. How can they ever set things right now? Well, they can’t. How can they believe him? Nebula tells them that her ‘father’ is many things but he’s not a liar. That seems to work. Even if it didn’t, however, it quickly becomes moot when Thor – also grieving for his mistake in Infinity War – takes Thanos’s advice to him from that movie and with one swing of Stormbreaker he decapitates Thanos. The mad Titan is dead, but the Avengers have definitely lost, and there’s no going back now.
That was a great introduction to the film, if a little short and lacking in the detail of exactly how these things came to be, and definitely lacking in character moments and interactions we’re used to in these films and, quite honestly, that I was looking forward to. I’d have loved to see more of Rocket and how he dealt with the fact that he’s the only surviving Guardian. They were his family after all and now they’re all gone. I’d also have loved to see more with Carol interacting with the team, and how they dealt with her game-changing power levels, but again this didn’t happen. In a movie this long, with so much to cover, it’s understandable it wasn’t in the film, but I still feel a little bit like we missed out on something here. For the first time ever, I almost wish this could have been Part 2 of 3, so we could have gotten more time to explore all of this.
However, after this we get to the “real” film. This, if anything, was more of a ‘clean up’ exercise after Infinity War. It was to put Infinity War to bed and set the stakes of what can and can’t happen now. The “real” film begins next, and it begins with a jump five years into the future…