As I already said, five years have passed now and we’re in a different place. All the characters have moved on in whatever way they can. Steve is now leading a survivor’s group, one of whom is telling a story about how he went on his first date since the snap and it featured his date crying at one stage and him crying at another. Steve says they all need to move on, and he’s proud of this anonymous survivor for doing so. Meanwhile, Natasha is trying to hold things together as one of the few surviving members of SHIELD. She’s got communication channels with Wakanda – now led by Okoye it seems – and with Captain Marvel in deep space, who informs her that Earth isn’t the only world decimated by these events and she’s got a lot to do, especially with no Nova Corps anymore either. Slightly later on (but I’ll mention it here because it fits well) we also see Tony has moved on. He and Pepper have a young daughter, Morgan, and Tony has moved her to a Hawkeye-like farm house. He’s trying his best to make the best of the devastation and the new world. We also learn what Clint has been up to since the snap. He’s been off in Mexico, and various other places, killing people. Killing drug dealers and terrorists admittedly, but still murdering fools nonetheless, and Natasha clearly isn’t happy about it, but also is in no rush to stop him either. The post-Decimation world has obviously changed them all a lot.
It’s at this point that the next big scene from the trailers occurs. We see Scott Lang – Ant-Man – and the truck he was in during the post-credits scene of his own film, and bam, suddenly he’s back like nothing happened. Only something clearly did happen, and he’s confused as hell what happened in the few hours he was away. Yes, it’s only been a few hours from his perspective since he went into the Quantum Tunnel at the end of Ant-Man & The Wasp, but the world has changed a lot. He gets out of the junk yard/storage area that the truck was in and goes looking around, seeing dozens of old posters everywhere for the missing people, and ultimately finding Cassie still in her house, very much still alive – much to his relief – but weirdly five years older than she was. He then tracks down the Avengers headquarters and at first Steve thinks that the footage they’re watching is old footage, after all Scott Lang is amongst the lost, right? But Scott explains what happened, and that maybe he has the solution: time travel! He’s been stuck in the Quantum Realm for five years, but for him it’s only been five hours. If time works differently there, can they use that to go back in time and change everything?
Presumably for the first time in years, Steve and Natasha have hope again. They immediately go to the only person who can make this Pym technology work – Tony Stark – but has I said already he’s got a kid, he’s moved on, and he tells them he’s done. They lost, and it’s taken him years to move on but he has. He can’t turn back time, because if he did he’d lose his marriage to Pepper, he’d lose his daughter, and he’s unwilling to do that. With Tony out, the team turn to the next best person, Bruce Banner… only Bruce isn’t Bruce anymore. That’s right, Bruce Banner is now permanently The Hulk, but with Bruce’s mind in the Hulk’s body, and it’s awesome. Easily one of my favourite things in the whole film (although I hear others didn’t like it as much), Bruce is now super smart and super powerful. The explanation for this is that he experimented with gamma radiation after the Hulk refused to come out to play in Infinity War, and now they’re in a ‘good place’ having been merged together. Bruce doesn’t want to change things either. It also helps that he’s a celebrity now, and there’s a laugh-out-loud funny moment where kids want to pose with Hulk for a selfie and have no clue who Ant-Man is when Scott introduces himself. There were a lot of giggles in the screening I was in. However, despite Bruce being in a good place, he agrees to help.
We then have the typical Marvel comedy where Bruce tries to handle it without Tony and it doesn’t go so well. He ends up making Scott a teenager, an old-man and a baby while trying to figure out how time travel works, while in his cabin, Tony – unable to let things go, even though part of him clearly wants to – comes up with the breakthrough they need. Tony asks Pepper what he should do. Should he just bury the tech he’s just developed in the lake? She knows he can’t however and tells him to go help the others, which he does. The team then all get back together, after recruiting the missing members, which includes another laugh-out-loud funny moment when Hulk goes to recruit Thor in “New Asgard”, where the surviving Asgardians settled, only to find Thor isn’t so… Thor-like anymore. He’s grown his hair long, has a massive beard, and has gained a lot of weight from drinking himself into a stupor and eating junk food since his failure to kill Thanos, overwhelmed with the guilt of hitting him in the chest and not the head. This is an undeniably funny moment, but it’s also a little weird. Thor clearly has massive PTSD here. He clearly has a ton of guilt over his failure. The movie, however, doesn’t really acknowledge this. Or rather, the characters in the movie don’t acknowledge it. They tell him to “get over it” and expect him to go back to being the old Thor with a snap of their fingers. In Iron Man 3 and Avengers: Age of Ulton, Tony’s PTSD was a major plot point and was treated very seriously. Here, Thor’s PTSD is more dismissed. I guess that’s the difference between Joss Whedon directing a film like this and the Russo’s directing it.
Now the team is all back together again, they come up with a plan. The Infinity Stones have been destroyed in their world, but they’re still available in the past, right? So they split up into smaller teams and decide to use the Pym tech, with Tony’s modifications, to travel back to key moments in their past and retrieve the stones. But there are a few catches here. Bruce explains that time travel in this movie isn’t the same as time travel in pop culture (much to Scott’s dismay, who’s devastated that that means Back to the Future wasn’t scientifically accurate). Bruce explains that they can’t change the past. The past has already happened. Whatever they do now, they can’t alter their own histories. All they can do is alter the future of the timelines that they encounter. What does that mean? Well, I plan to write a whole other blog on what I think that means, but long story short I don’t think that means that they’re time-traveling at all, I think they’re using the Quantum Realm to go to different realities and borrow the stones from there. But, in layman’s terms and for the sake of the movie, let’s call it time travel. And that’s the plan: the second part of the film is going to be about them going back in time and retrieving the stones from different points in their own history. Sound like a good idea? What can possibly go wrong, right?
Well, it wouldn’t be much of a movie if nothing went wrong.