Spoiler-free review

Dealing with death and destruction is never easy on a small scale. On the massive scale Thanos caused, it’s even harder. Especially if you were the people who failed to prevent it.

The beginning of Avengers:Endgame shows our Infinity War surviving heroes dealing with that failure in their own way just 23 days after the Snap. This makes Endgame a bit slow at the start though continues the emotional wallop we all felt at the end of Infinity War making it feel like a true continuation.

Five years later, things are even worse as not just Earth, but the entire universe, struggles to make sense of losing 50% of all living things. But then Scott Lang as Ant-Man brings hope to the Avengers and the middle of the movie is the quest to make that plan happen and bring back those that were lost.

The “Time Heist” as Lang coins it takes us through a time travel adventure cleverly weaving nostalgia for the previous MCU movies into the film nicely wrapping up story threads and re-introducing a few characters we didn’t get to see enough of – even giving us a hope of one we thought gone for good.

Of course an epic battle had to happen and the final third of the movie does not disappoint in that regard with the audience openly cheering at several points. In the end we are left with some permanent loses I will not give away as the epic MCU story comes to a close – until the next phase of movies of course.

The interaction between the characters – some of which have never been teamed before – gives Endgame a lot of heart and more character development than most comic book movies provide. There are a lot of twists and turns and so many references to previous movies, if you haven’t done a marathon before you see Endgame, you will miss some I’m sure.

The easy way out would have been for the writers to take us back in time to totally prevent the Snap – but we get a much smarter story than that. We get characters that are affected by the events of all MCU movies that came before – changed and evolved in ways that make the past 10 years of movies seem totally worth the journey.

While Avengers: Endgame concludes the saga of the MCU to date and we suffer a few permanent losses, it manages to give us a sense of hope that there are more adventures to come.