This fact makes us understand how much the cinema itself has changed and how much these films have made their way into the world cinema scene. Black Panther's many nominations for the last Oscars have knocked down the last frontier, which saw the great cinecomics relegated to the role of great commercial phenomenon punctually ignored by festivals and big awards.
Today it is no longer possible to pretend nothing. Cinecomics, especially Marvel films, are great productions that deserve respect and deserve to play a fundamental role in cinema as a whole.
Few people would have bet on it when the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film was released 10 years ago, the Iron Man, which, although it could bode well, did not have the connotations to be the patient zero of the virtuoso virus that would have been the superhero genre.
10 years later and as many as 22 films after Marvel arrived at the cinema with Avengers: Endgame and to understand the gigantic scope and success of this film you can't help but look back at these 22 films and the story told over 10 years.
It's surprising, embarrassing, to understand how much these films are in fact one huge film. All linked by plots, subplots, characters, style, stories and references in a perfect way. There's no such thing as perfection, we're often told this, we repeat it often but the work done by Kevin Feige and his collaborators borders on perfection and this Endgame is the sum total of what has been elaborated in these years.
Under the same "roof" we find Hulk, Iron Man, Spider Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor, Dr. Strange, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Ant Man, The Galaxy Guardians and all the secondary psudo characters we loved in these years from Bucky to Falcon, from Scarlet Witch to Pym and so on. The villain represented by Thanos is a very strong villain, perhaps the most fearsome ever seen in cinema, precisely because it abandons a spotty style and form to become something deeper, a character in its own way utopian, in its own way animated by strong ideals, in its own way willing to a great sacrifice for a greater good for him.
In the more than 3 hours of shooting we see all the best that cinema could offer.
We have a first part without action but with a lot of dialogue and a lot of attention to the consequences that the events of Infinity War have generated on the skin of the avengers. Their torments, their struggle to accept what happened, their powerlessness to change the course of events. Endgame in the first hour takes the time to reconnect all the characters and resume the story and does so almost immediately giving us an important twist that will only be the first of a long series.
In the second part we get into the action and here the Russo brothers give us massive references to previous movies and powerful winks at comic book fans. The beauty of this operation lies in never inserting Deus Ex Machina, although superheroes in general lend themselves to this solution, and never inserting winking details just for the sake of making them. It's all functional to the plot you want to tell or functional to the evolution of the characters or functional to what we will see in the grand finale.
A long ending of about an hour that in turn is divided into 2 large stages. A phase of overflowing action where, probably, we witness the most iconic scene in the whole Marvel universe and a phase of reflection and tribute to the main characters of the saga in which, more than once, we are moved and jump out of the chair in a tender participation in the destinies of our darlings.
Making a metathetic comparison with what we saw on a different medium like TV we can benefit from the comparison between what happened in Game of Thrones and what happened in Endgame.
In the final season of GOT the screenwriters have rushed everything, renounced to deepen and develop plots and characters, have ruined many of them, have literally bent to their will stories and protagonists, depowering everything we saw and ruining all the good things built in past seasons.
In Endgame the screenwriters were faced with the same challenge: to complete the path of dozens of main characters and the stories of each of them without losing sight of the story as a whole.
Here everything was functional to the characters, their path and their stories. Nothing seemed to be out of place. Nothing was forced. Everything was made to converge gently, without giving up twists and original solutions.
The work done was perhaps even more difficult, not having such dilated times as in a TV series and having dozens and dozens of crucial characters to respect.
This analysis is deliberately spoiler free, it will probably follow a spoilerose analysis to further celebrate the beauty of this saga and this film.
Suffice it to say that in the history of cinema we have had many sagas but never a saga of 22 films that seen one in a row with the other gave the impression of watching a single very long feature film.
To give Marvel credit for at least that is the intellectual duty of every cinema lover.
A wink, this time from the viewer to the creators, would be enough to thank Feige and everyone who has worked on the saga so far:
I Love You 3000
