Using the Pym tech combined with Tony’s brilliance, the Avengers go back in time. I’m not going to go through this like the movie does, showing the events of different sets of characters unfolding at the same time by jumping from scene to scene, I’ll just cover what happens to each set. Let’s begin with the team of Bruce Banner/Hulk, Ant-Man, Captain America and Iron Man. They go back to 2012, to the Battle of New York no less, and we get to relive some great moments from Avengers. We see the moment where they’re all united in a circle again, we see the moment where Loki surrenders after Hulk picks him up and smashes him on the floor repeatedly, and there are some great memories here. It’s fitting they did this in this film as well, as this film is all about bringing everything we’ve seen to a close, and what better way to do that than to pay tribute to this franchise’s best film (arguably). They split up however to get the things they need: Hulk goes to the house where Tony and Bruce met Dr Strange in Infinity War, the others head to Avengers Tower where the Tesseract and the Staff both are.
Hulk arrives to find Doctor Strange, only to find not him but The Ancient One, who demonstrates a fantastic knowledge of future events – and indeed shows us possibly that everything she put Strange through in his own film was a test that she knew he’d pass, but that had to happen to give him a better understanding of his own destiny as Sorcerer Supreme – but also that Dr Stephen Strange isn’t there, he’s at a hospital uptown. He’s still a surgeon at this point. Hulk says that that’s fine, he didn’t come for Strange but rather for what the Ancient One has around her neck – the time stone – and she does to him what she did to Strange in his own film and knocks his astral form out of his body. Now we see Bruce, not Hulk Bruce, talking with her. He tells her what’s going to happen, and why they need the stone. She explains he can’t have it because if she gives it to him then he’ll be able to save his timeline, but hers will be destroyed because it’ll be missing one of the Infinity Stones from it, and they’re key to holding all the timelines together. Bruce ends up convincing her by asking if that was true then why did Strange give the stone up? She realises Strange knew something she didn’t, and she agrees to give Bruce/Hulk the stone on one condition: he not only return THIS stone but ALL the stones to the exact point in time they were taken. With his stone secured, Hulk returns back to the moment he left.
Steve, Tony and Scott on the other hand have a bit more of an adventure. They’re dealing with their old selves, and hatch a plan. Steve splits from the others and gets an elevator down with a lot of the guys from Captain America: Winter Soldier. It’s a great scene, and for a moment I thought we were going to get a call-back to that film where Steve takes them all out in a fight in the elevator, but he doesn’t do that. He insists that the secretary put him in charge of the staff that they’re taking, and when they’re unconvinced he leans over and whispers “Hail Hydra”. That’s enough for them to be convinced Steve is, in fact, one of them, and they give him the box containing the staff. Steve’s plan has gone perfectly. However, while he’s on his way out he hits a slight snag… he runs into Captain America. This version of Cap is convinced that Steve is in fact Loki disguised as him and they have a great fight, which the past version of Steve is winning before Steve whispers “Bucky is still alive”, distracting the alternate version of himself so that he can get away with the staff and thus the mind gem. This whole scene is great, and it has a brilliant moment where the alternative Steve, with all the confidence that he used to have, claims he can “do this all day”, and our version of Steve rolls his eyes and mutters “yeah, yeah”. It’s brilliant, and it’s such a wonderful reminder of how far Steve Rogers has come and how much he’s evolved over the years.
Meanwhile, the alternative Tony has the Tesseract all locked up, and Scott and our Tony need to steal if from him. Tony is dressed as a cop in full riot gear, while Scott shrinks down, sneaks inside alternative Tony’s arc-reactor on his chest and pulls a bit of it loose, causing alternative-Tony to have a heart attack and allowing our Tony to steal the briefcase. The perfect crime once again, right? Except this is where it goes wrong. In a very funny moment we didn’t see in Avengers, all the Avengers take the elevator down with Loki but Hulk won’t fit, so Hulk has to take the stairs. When he gets to the bottom of the stairs, upset that he’s had to walk down all those stairs, he smashes the door at the bottom open, which smashes into our Tony with the briefcase, and knocks him out. The case then slips to the worst possible person: Loki. Loki reaches down, still in cuffs and still with the guard over his mouth from way back in Avengers, picks up the Tesseract, summons a portal and steps through it. And, just like that, they lose one of the gems.
It’s not all lost however because Tony convinces Steve there’s another place they can get the gem from. Scott, however, reminds them that they both need Pym particles to get home, so they agree to go to one place in time where there is both Pym particles AND the Tesseract. At this point, Scott goes back to the moment he left, while Tony and Steve go back to another point in time: 1970, to the base we saw in Captain America: Winter Soldier, an early home of SHIELD, where Hank Pym is working in his lab, Peggy Carter is busy running the place, and Howard Stark is fretting over the fact that his wife is about to give birth. This scene has some great moments too, with Tony claiming his name is “Howard Potts” and having a whole conversation with Howard Stark about fatherhood and how it changes you, getting a genuinely great moment with his dad, while Steve sees Peggy again (but she doesn’t see him), before he manages to trick Hank into leaving his lab so he can steal some Pym particles. With the Tesseract in hand, and refreshed Pym particles allowing them to get home, Steve and Tony jump back to the point at which they left.
That’s three stones down, and three to go. Next up then we’ll discuss Thor and Rocket, and their quest to get the reality gem. To do this they go to one place in time they know it’ll be, not to the Collector (which I would have thought would make more sense), but rather Asgard back when the reality gem was still in the form of the aether, and plan to extract the aether out of Jane Foster. I don’t think Natalie Portman has any new scenes in this film, I think they just reused old ones for her footage, but one person does: Rene Russo, who is once again Frigga. She’s the only Asgardian that they interact with in this moment, but she recognises Thor even though he’s trying to hide – how could she not? He’s her son and he’s clearly in pain – and she helps him come to terms with his failure, while also reminding him that she never wanted him to be the man that Odin wanted him to be, she just wanted him to be whoever he wanted to be. That is a great moment for Thor, and it helps him a lot with his reaction to everything. It’s almost like a little weight is lifted off his shoulders as he comes to terms with the fact that he doesn’t have to be Odin’s replacement, he can just be Thor. In one of my favourite moments in the whole film, while Rocket is running from Asgardians with the aether in a tube, Thor summons Mjolnir to his side again (after all, it’s not been destroyed yet) and proudly mutters that he’s “still worthy”, even despite everything. He then gets Stormbreaker AND Mjolnir, plus Rocket and the aether, and they all return to the point at which they left.
Last two now, and that’s the group of War Machine, Nebula, Black Widow and Hawkeye. They all go back to Morag, which for fans who don’t remember is the planet that Star-Lord had that superb dancing moment on in Guardians of the Galaxy. While Black Widow and Hawkeye take the ship (which was also shrunk with Pym particles, but does raise the question that can something which has already been shrunk be shrunk even more to go through the Quantum Realm? Apparently, the answer is yes) to head off to Vormir to retrieve the soul stone. Nebula and War Machine lie in wait for Star-Lord, and when he arrives and they see him singing and dancing to his music, although they obviously can’t hear the music, they determine he’s clearly an idiot and knock him out. Nebula then steals his tools and they break into the place where the orb was hidden, steal it, and leave in a pretty by the numbers heist. War Machine returns to the place that he left with the orb in hand, but Nebula doesn’t. Before she can, she’s knocked unconscious by some feedback. We’ll get to that, however, as that’s the concluding act of the film, not this “time heist” act we’re talking about now.
That leaves us just with Hawkeye and Black Widow then, who arrive on Vormir and, just as Thanos and Gamora did, encounter the Red Skull. The significance of who he is, unfortunately, is lost on them both, just as it was lost on Thanos and Gamora. No pay off then for this, which was disappointing, and one of a few reasons that this is my least favourite part of the whole film. If you were going to include Red Skull as the guardian of one of the stones, why have it end with absolutely no pay off? He had no effect on anything in the end. He was just there for the sake of making a cameo. It was very, very disappointing to me, but not nearly as disappointing as what happened next. What happened next was Black Widow and Hawkeye being told the same thing that Thanos was told: there must be a sacrifice to get the soul gem. They then fight with each other, each determined that the other has more to live for than they do, which ultimately ends with Hawkeye thinking he’s about to atone for all the killing he’s done since Infinity War by sacrificing himself only for Natasha to sacrifice herself instead and save his life. Clint then wakes up with the Soul Gem in hand just as Thanos did.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked the interaction between the two of them. They’re always great when they’re together, and have been in every Avengers film. However, for me this whole scene was just… disappointing. It’s one of the few things I can say I didn’t like about the film. I still got choked up when Natasha sacrificed herself, but it wasn’t at all what it could have been. For Natasha is was a fitting ending. She literally had nothing in her life but SHIELD, the mission and Clint, so to save Clint’s life while also fulfilling the mission was a good ending for her character, but it also just felt rushed and unimaginative. Plus, it was never explained WHY the Soul Stone needed this sacrifice (which bugged me in Infinity War as well), why the Red Skull was even there at all (that had no significance at all beyond the fact it gave the fans a cool cameo in Infinity War we weren’t expecting), and Natasha’s death was just… done. None of her friends really got time to mourn her, Clint was upset sure but he got back on the horse quickly enough and went back to save his family from the snap, and none of that Vormir stuff had any real significance to the story at all. All it was, it turns out, was a way to shock us by killing off Gamora and then to do the exact same thing again by killing off Natasha. That, to me, was bad story telling here… but it’s hard to stay mad about it given it’s the only bit of bad story telling in the whole film (bar the stuff they didn’t bother explaining).
Anyway, with four truly brilliant time-heights for the reality stone, mind stone, time stone and space stone all wrapped up, with a pretty mediocre one for the power stone (which went on to be amazing afterwards) and with a second soul stone reveal being a disappointment, we return back to the present now to save the world, undo the snap and make everything right with the world… sort of.