It’s fitting to look back at Endgame five years to the day since it released in theaters. I remember that day like it was yesterday. My excitement was through the roof, I saw it at an 8am showing, and when I walked out of that theater, teary-eyed and grateful to be a Marvel fan, I knew I had experienced a movie theater experience that I would never forget. Today, I want to look back at my initial review of Endgame. Enjoy!
FIVE YEARS AGO
Six hours ago Avengers: Endgame ended. As the credits started rolling and I walked out of that theater I had to contain my composure and not break down balling as I left the theater. Yes, I was crying a waterfall of tears…literally. My eyes were so red from all of the crying I was doing that, according to my wonderful sister, they were about the same color as my red lipstick. No joking.
This movie got to my emotions so many times but literally the last scene, well, it was quite a doozy.
Avengers: Endgame is definitely a beautiful homage to all of the Marvel films that have come before in the MCU. If you’re not familiar with some of the movies in the MCU, Endgame is going to leave you baffled and a slight bit confused because there’s SO much going on. I mean, it was fan service at its finest.
Throughout the movie I found myself laughing, cheering, clapping, but most of all crying. There was a certain portion of the film that was so jaw-droppingly fantastic that I literally cried for I think two-three minutes straight. It was that awesome.
Because there were so many fantastic surprises in the film I will be dropping my spoiler-filled review tomorrow because I am bursting at the seams with excitement about certain things in the movie that I definitely want to share with you.
But until then I’ll leave it at this. Avengers: Endgame is a satisfying finale to a fantastic story. Was it perfect? No. It had its various flaws that’ll shine a little brighter with more viewings, but I will also say it is far from disappointing. The movie was pretty good, but its second half pushed the film over the top to awesome land.
I’m giving this movie 95 out of 100 and 4.5 out of 5 stars. Like I said before, it’s not a perfect movie but it hit all of the marks and definitely sits in my top five list for movies in the MCU.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a spectacular day.
Annlyel Online 
Good to see you around these parts again!
Ah, Endgame. I don’t know that I’ve ever gone back and rewatched it since, but it definitely was the climax of everything the MCU aimed to do over a decade. The poetic explanation of why Strange gave away the time stone after seeing the possible futures, instead of simply using it on Thanos the way he had used it on Dormammu to make sure they simply got the gauntlet from him then — because Tony had to be the one both to engineer the undoing of the snap and finish Thanos in the end — plus the artistic license of not making Thanos’ defeat anticlimactic before the snap itself? Interesting, if perhaps one of the bigger plot questions of the movie.
That said, this is definitely the point at which the energy began to drain away from the MCU as a whole. It simply hasn’t been the same since, and the pandemic raising the risk profile of high budget movies put a further hurting on this sort of blockbuster along with the simple fact that people started to get superhero fatigue about this point. The original cast started finding ways to have their characters die their way out of future movies — Downey and Johansson here, Evans having his own bittersweet ending getting to relive Cap’s whole life that he missed when he had the chance, Hiddleston finding his way onto Loki’s temporal and arboreal throne, Olson in the multiverse, Bettany possibly never really being the same after this, Hopkins in Ragnarok, and so on.
Maybe Marvel recovering the rights to the Fantastic Four and X-Men will help, but about the only good villain they have left in the pipe that could measure up to Thanos is Doctor Doom… and after so many failures to get Doom right on Warner’s part, the pressure is definitely on. (Johnathan Majors’ misadventures don’t help, although Kang was a bit of a disappointment anyway, even after HWR set up the table so well.) This movie may simply be where peak MCU ended, and they’ve definitely been more than a little shaky picking it back up from here. I was emotional at the end of it all, too… and it’s possible we’ll never get back to that point in this subject matter.
I personally haven’t gone to a Marvel movie sub a theater since Spiderverse 2, although the pace of their releases has dramatically dropped. I didn’t watch whatever the Hawkeye sequel was on Disney+, either. (I don’t even remember what it was called.) I might watch Deadpool and Wolverine, but I’ve definitely felt the superhero fatigue myself. I will aspirationally watch Fantastic Four, most likely, simply on the hope that someone will finally get Doom right in a movie. I didn’t watch Marvels, and kind of regretted Quantumania and Eternals.
In so many ways, this was just where “peak Marvel” ended. And as I once did so many times, I’ve practically written a blog post of my own in your comments section. 🫠
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