Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: A satisfactory ending to a sprawling epic. Ugh, time travel.

Here we are at the end of a Marvel era. “Avengers: Endgame” is kind of a reset point for the Marvel Universe. Some stories are ending and some are just beginning. The journey to get here has been a lot of fun. Let’s dig into it and see what “Endgame” has to offer.

When last we left our hero, Thanos (Josh Brolin) had used the Infinity Gauntlet to snap half of the universe’s population into non-existence and retired to live out the rest of his existence in peace and harmony. A renegade group of super-powered individuals took exception to this new utopian universe and plots to find Thanos and steal the Infinity Gauntlet from him and reverse what he has done leading once again to the overpopulation of the universe and all the societal ills that go along with it. These “heroes”, as some misguided people call them, selfishly concoct a scheme using time travel that could put the entire universe at risk and will drastically alter the lives of the trillions of people that have been living the new reality for years. All because they think their own sorrow at missing their companions is greater than all the others’ happiness that they have newly discovered.

What’s great about the Marvel universe is that while the stars are superheroes, they are only nominally so. Mostly they’re just vain and self-important and only play well with others when it suits them. Clearly, Thanos isn’t the hero, but wow does it take some major lack of introspection to think that bringing back everyone five years after they were all turned to dust and everyone still alive has lived five years of existence without them is a good idea. And they do this mostly because they want their own people back.

What’s not great about “Endgame” is the time travel. I mean they do a decent enough job as far as time travel plots go, but there are just so many things that don’t make sense and so many questions left about how everything turned out. But that’s time travel. The biggest flaw with the time travel in this movie was how they spent so many lines of dialogue talking about how the vagaries of time travel aren’t at all like they are in the movies (and they mention a bunch of time travel movies that get it wrong) only to make their time travel exactly like those movies.

This was a fun movie and a fitting ending. It will be interesting to see where The Avengers go from here and what new adventures await. At least one baton has already been passed and a few others are left to be received.