While Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War have been out for quite a while, be aware that here there by spoilers! (Though, let’s be honest here, if you haven’t seen these movies yet, you probably don’t care enough that someone spoils it for you.)
I loved the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Not because I watched as characters I knew and loved effectively died on screen before my eyes, but because it finally introduced consequence to the Marvel movie universe. The Marvel movies by this point had built a reputation: nobody dies. Well, bad guys die—sometimes—and Quicksilver died in Age of Ultron, but those don’t count. Bad guys because they’re supposed to pay for what they’ve done, and Quicksilver because… reasons? Anyway, Marvel movies are notorious for grand battles, epic fights, and very few consequences. Simply put, the audience no longer has an expectation of failure. That is the reason why, in my opinion, Spiderman: Homecoming was fantastic, it was a movie filled with consequences. I was hopeful, however briefly, that Avengers: Infinity War, had finally established some sense of consequence to the movie universe as the heroes had lost in the end. However, I realized before I got home from the theater that the consequence was an illusion. The only heroes that were killed off were ones that had only a movie or two under their belt. All of the heroes that had been in the picture for a while were still alive and kicking. The likelihood of Marvel killing off the freshest batch of heroes seemed unlikely to me, so I was afraid that the consequence would have been undone. That is the preamble to the actual critique of the film.
When I heard that Avengers: Endgame was planning on using time travel, I had a dreadful, foreboding feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Oh, no!” I thought, “They’re going to hit the undo button!” When you make a mistake while on the computer, you hit the undo button, like I did when I accidentally deleted the last three sentences. Magically, the consequences of your actions vanish, and you’re off the hook for your mistakes and actions. This happens in story telling, typically in one of two ways: dream sequences and time travel. Dream sequences are perhaps the worse offender in my book, but time travel can be just as bad. What happens in a dream, is a dream, it doesn’t count for real life; similarly, when you use time travel to undo past mistakes, whatever happened no longer counts. If Marvel used time travel to resolve the conflict they had made in Endgame, they ran the serious risk of telling their audience: “Hey, you remember that movie you loved? That movie never happened!” That’s what I was afraid of, and I have to admit, that’s not what happened. They didn’t just use time travel to cancel out the events of Infinity War. Instead bungled through one of the most convoluted, plot-breaking, and inconsistent time warps I’ve ever seen!
Admittedly, the biggest problem with the film in my opinion was that the writers repeatedly took the easy out; opting for expediency and convenience over drama and plot. Now, I could go into how the first mistake was killing Thanos in the prologue, which eviscerated the story’s antagonist for the majority of the film. Or how they movie-magicked away the most powerful objects in existence, the infinity stones, in the beginning because… reasons? But no, the most glaring offender was how they handled the story comes down to time travel. In short, the time travel model was cowardly confusing and wildly inconsistent. Let’s start with the first!
For those of you that are unfamiliar with how they decided to time travel, Hulk explains how time travel works and basically establishes the movie’s rules on the matter. The rules, however, are very stupid. Basically, the argument is that if you travel to the past, you create a new future, and your current present becomes the past, which cannot be changed by the future. Now give me a second, I’ve got to hang on to something, my head is spinning. So, what Hulk means is that: “Yeah, we can travel to the past, and we can change it, but even if we do our own history won’t be changed. No matter what happens, Thanos won last time.” Admittedly, that’s a reasonable model, but it was explained is such a nonsensical way, it took me a minute to grapple what just happened. That said, narratively speaking, it was a major cop out. When I first saw Iron Man struggling to help, in the back of my mind I was wondering: if they change what happened in the past, what happens to Iron Man’s daughter? Will she have never existed? Is Tony going to have to choose between being a hero and being a father? How can anyone make that choice? Unfortunately, we as an audience will never know; though I think that peril of trying to have your cake and eat it too would have been much more exciting than what we had. Not to mention the moment when Tony would have been forced to make such a terrible choice when he realized that he couldn’t have it all. All of that was undone with a hyper-convoluted explanation of time travel.
Now to the second problem. The movie has no idea how its own rules for time travel work. That, simply put, is not something you have the allowance of doing with time travel. I tell people that when it comes to writing a story with time travel, there are two things that must happen: first, you must determine your rules for time travel, and second you must never—ever—break those rules. The moment a story breaks the rules for time travel, the story becomes fraught with irreconcilable plot holes and contradictions. Even doing the, “Ah, ha! In reality, no one truly knew how time travel worked, and it was actually…” routine is generally a terrible idea. Once the rules have time travel have been compromised, the audience can’t believe anything you tell them—nothing is certain anymore. That’s what happened on three separate occasions in the film, and really it’s just because it was clumsily handled.
The first time this happens is when Hulk finds out that taking the stones will make alternate timelines. Hulk seems genuinely surprised by this thought, which means they didn’t know that this was a possibility—or worse, they didn’t care until they got called out on it. More important, however, is that Hulk’s promise “return them gently used” flies in the face of the whole can’t change the future by changing the past thing. Not because they can’t change their own timeline, but because Hulk literally just said they can’t change “the present, which is now the past, because the past is the new future.” (Hang on, feeling dizzy again!) Hulk convinces the ancient one that they’ll put the stones back to where and when they found them, meaning it was like they were never gone; but according to Hulk’s own rules that’s not true. Instead, they’ll have made several distinct timelines, which permanently, will live in a world where their magic rocks disappeared from existence. Going back in time and just putting the stones back wouldn’t keep those timelines from existing, just make a new timeline where everything was back to normal.
The second time is when Thanos uses Nebula’s time bracelet to get himself to the heroes’ present (which is the past? Because it’s the future? WHY IS THIS SO CONFUSING?!). Now, completely overlooking the fact that Thanos magicked his way through time travel, because he may have had Nebula’s bracelet but he did not have a way of shrinking his ship to a sub-quantum level—or at least if their was, it wasn’t shared with the audience. When Thanos shows up in the present, he immediately starts making plans to wreck stuff, but here’s the thing: Thanos was incapable of coming to that timeline! According to Hulk’s theory, the heroes return to their past in order to get to the present. Which means from Thanos’ perspective, he’s traveling to the future, but it’s also established that removing the infinity stones creates an alternate timeline, which means if Thanos did travel to the future, he’d travel to his future, which is not where the heroes are. Which means that Thanos is chrono-locked out of any potential timeline where he’d engage in the epic fight at the climax of the film, because he doesn’t have a past that takes him back to the present, which is the future, because his past is only past-past, not future-past. (Now, where’s that motion sickness bag?)
Finally, the third time they forgot their own rules is really the nail in the time travel coffin: the one that makes the rest of the film completely pointless! At the end of the film, Captain America bows out so he can live with his love interest in the past instead of returning to the present. Now, ignoring the fact that this makes Captain America a complete hypocrite from the grievance meeting in the beginning of the film, this is also very, very, stupid. The reason why is because Cap’n stays in the past, and then is in the park just out of frame. This is to give a happy ending and let him pass the torch to the Falcon—after all, he did spend a lifetime with the love of his life, and who could ask for more than that? But the problem with this, again, is “you can’t change the present by changing the past” rule that was established earlier in the film. But Cap’n went to the past, stayed there, and popped back up in the present . That means only one of two things could be true, either the rule is false—in which case, why not go “kill baby Thanos?”—or Captain America is the worst hero in the Marvel universe. The only way it works for Captain America to go back in time, and appear in the present, is that at some point a future—actual future, not past-future—Captain Rogers went back in time and lived a secret life with Peggy Carter. Which means that the Marvel universe had a Cap’n living in the shadows that not only knew every major terrible event that happened for the next half century—including Thanos snapping his fingers on half the population of everywhere—he did nothing to stop any of it. Now, one could argue about the whole “yeah, but he would have messed up the timeline,” but the timeline is bogus! Even if this Cap’n became president, stopped 9/11, or released his own hit TV sitcom, it wouldn’t have changed his past one iota. That means, either they can change the past and Captain America was afraid of altering the course of events and so opted instead to suffering quietly, or the movies’ rules of time travel were obeyed, and they simply had some alternate-future Captain Rogers who’s always been around, knew what was going to happen, and let them suffer through it because he didn’t want to bother. Now, there were ways the writers could have given Cap’n his out while respecting their rules. They could have had him reappear as an old man after he returned the infinity stones—having lived a whole alternate life—to say his farewell, or else not have him show up altogether; they could have even had hulk begin dismantling the machine while the others watched in confused shock, only to say “He wanted it this way.” Instead, they decided to just be lazy and say “Hey, this is a clever way to write-off Captain America.” Except in their cleverness, they made some of the biggest plot-melting holes of all time.
All in all, the movie left a lot to be desired—and I actually enjoyed it! (Imagine what someone who hated the film would say!) It was a cinematic event to be sure. After all, it was a massive culmination of numerous movies. Still, time travel is a tricky plot device; it’s kind of like fire. Respect the rules on how to use it, and it is an incredible tool. Ignore those rules, and you can easily destroy the very thing you’re trying to build.