SPOILER ALERT
Obviously there are going to be some spoilers in here so if you haven't seen the movie and want to, you need to get the frack outta here.
So I finally went to go see Endgame last night because the theater madness has calmed down a bit. I'm sure this was pretty much a global phenomenon but Chiang Mai has maybe 7 theaters and just about every screen was showing only Endgame. I think maybe Hellboy was on 1 or 2 screens but that movie already had poor attendance a few weeks ago, they must be contractually obligated to keep it alive for a certain amount of time because it deffo isn't selling tickets.
Anyway, after the 30 minutes of adverts and what not, the movie began with Jeremy Renner hanging out on a farm and noticing that his kids and wife are not around anymore. It was so non-Avenger-ey that I kind of thought that this was a preview of some upcoming film. I'll commend Marvel for mixing things up and jumping straight into the film rather than doing the MARVEL logo lead in like they normally do.
We then jump over to a damn near emaciated Tony Stark as he drifts into space and gives his monologue to Pepper about how he is going to die soon. I mean there was never any doubt that he was going to get rescued and returned to earth by the overly powerful Captain Marvel.
The next hour or so is a long, drawn out "reunion" of various characters being rounded up around the globe that started to make the kids that were around us get bored and they started to screw around and not even watch the movie. To be fair these kids were Thai and the movie was in English with subtitles so i give props to their parents for keeping them as well-behaved as they did. I have to admit that I was bored during these parts as well with the only entertaining bit (to me) was the visiting of Fat Thor, which is the best character to ever enter the Marvel Universe.
After about 1 and a half hours we got to some real action and while I know this is going to invoke the ire of fanbois I don't like the entire premise of this film. Thanos won, that was actually quite refreshing to me, but then they are going to defeat him by traveling in time. Now if you think about it, there aren't really many other ways that they could have written this. He used the Infinity Stones to wipe out half of all life and other than time travel, the only way that this could possibly be reversed would be to completely invent another super-powerful thing that could negate it. Would that be more ridiculous? I dunno. To me the time-travel thing just kind of changes the entire Marvel Universe and let's just hope the baddies never get a hold of that tech.
I actually knew what was going to happen to Tony Stark at the end because some ass-hat hid the massive spoiler in the comments section of a completely unrelated Instagram post therefore I was not shocked at all when that happened. I guess they will need to fire up the time machine at some point to prevent that from happening too.
I think the only thing that really annoyed me about Endgame was Captain Marvel with her new "I need to speak to the manager" haircut. She is too powerful. She flies right through anything and it gets destroyed... awesome.
The most refreshing moment of the entire film was when Thanos takes the blue stone out of his glove to put in his other hand and smacks the shit out of her.
I can understand why they would make this movie as long as they did. Marvel had a lot of different groups of people to please during this thing and I think they accomplished that. For me, I wanted Thanos to win, but I normally cheer for the bad guys in superhero films. This probably says something about me as a person because I have always been a fan of the "heels" in professional wrestling also.
For me, the film was too long and I yawned quite a lot and even contemplated leaving the theater to have a walk around for a bit because i don't think you need to be as smart as Dr. Strange to realize that the good guys are going to win at the end of an Avengers trilogy. It's worth the price of admission that is for sure but I don't think I am a big enough fan of Marvel to care as much as other people do.
Rating out of the usual scale is.....
I can't give it a wowsers because I don't believe it is that, plus I wouldn't go see it again even if you were paying for it