Re: Avengers: Endgame (April 26th, 2019)
God dammit Jye, I just went from being mildly disappointed in this movie to “***** I can’t watch it again!!”
Damn you!! LOL!!
Don’t worry JAWS I got your back, Khev will not be pleased with this Cap focussed editorial
Let’s start with the most important issue: It’s pretty out of character for Captain America to just bail on his job, and it’s especially out of character for him to bail on his job like this. Going to the past to retire with Peggy would mean that he has to sit by while all sorts of bad things happen that he knows will happen. He gets a front row seat to Hydra taking over SHIELD and fomenting all sorts of evil. He lives the good life while Bucky (Sebastian Stan) is being used and abused as the Winter Soldier for 70 years.
With great power comes great responsibility, and Cap chose to spend the vast majority of his life simply not taking responsibility? Also, remember that whole “I’m with you to the end of the line” thing between him and Bucky? Guess that wasn’t real. Cap, at about 39 years old if you subtract his time in the ice, just gave up and chilled out until he was too old to help out anymore. This is just not something that the Steve Rogers that we’ve gotten to know over the past eight years would do. And it’s insulting to the character not just to put him out to pasture like this, but to have it be his choice.
And on top of all that, this scene doesn’t make sense because of the way he showed up again at the end. According to the rules of time travel set up by “Avengers: Endgame” itself, Cap going back to the past and getting with Peggy would create a divergent timeline and he would no longer be a part of the universe of the movies. Which would mean that in order to return to the present day timeline of “Endgame” he would have to use his time travel device.
If Cap showed up on the time travel platform as an old guy, this scene could be playing by the movie’s own rules. But since he was just hanging out on a bench when they noticed him, it seems to be implying that he simply lived out his life and showed up at the right moment. He’s certainly not wearing the time travel device in that scene.
And since Cap is probably too old-fashioned to engage in polyamory, his marrying Peggy would probably mean that she never married the man that she married in the main timeline, and the kids she had with that guy never existed. So Steve accidentally went back in time and erased Peggy’s children from history. That also doesn’t really seem like a very Steve Rogers thing to do.
I’ve heard the argument that Steve might have actually been Peggy’s unnamed husband that was mentioned in “Winter Soldier” this whole time, and that also doesn’t fit with the rules set by the film. When our heroes travel to the past in “Endgame,” they are creating new versions of events rather than doing stuff that was happening in the background of previous films that we didn’t know about. It doesn’t follow that the quantum mechanics of the MCU as demonstrated in the rest of this film would be different only for Cap.
On top of all that, let’s get even more nit-picky by noting that when Cap left to return the Infinity Stones to where the Avengers took them, he went only with the literal stones. Which is pretty problematic because he would need to return them in their original forms, not as crystals. So the Space Stone would need to be the Tesseract cube. The Mind Stone would need to be in the Scepter. The Reality Stone would have to be a liquid that he would have to inject back into Jane Foster (?!?!) somehow. The Power Stone would be in its orb shell.
I can’t even begin to guess how one would return the Soul Stone to its place on Vormir. But the Time Stone, at least, he could just hand over to the Ancient One as is. And don’t even get me started on the logistics of returning the stones at the exact moment they were taken, as Hulk instructs him, without any help from anyone.
So, yeah, this whole thing is a super-weird mess. It doesn’t fit at all for Cap as a human being, and it doesn’t fit with the time travel rules, and it really just doesn’t seem all that well thought out, opting for emotional fan service at the expense of any kind of narrative coherence. They should have just killed off “Captain America” in the final battle in “Avengers: Endgame” instead. It would have, at least, spared me the pain of having to try to parse all this stuff.
God dammit Jye, I just went from being mildly disappointed in this movie to “***** I can’t watch it again!!”
Damn you!! LOL!!
