For the FIRST EVER! edition of Fourteen Favourite Shots I decided to do Avengers Endgame.
…which is in many ways a very ugly movie. I’M SORRY! But when I was screencapping it it felt like, so many scenes have this weird grey filter over them? Why?
However since I’m enhancing all the colours I suppose that doesn’t matter much.I still found it much harder than I expected to get a whole 14 shots I really loved though.
But! I do really love how the scenes on Vormir are lit. And that shot of Gamora on the top right is possibly my favourite shot of her ever – this tiny figure facing down the whole world.
I also totally love how there are two shots in here of a man staring at the woman he loves from the wrong side of a timeline.
On this day last year, Avengers: Endgame came out. I saw it in a theater with a bunch of other cheering fans, a situation I’ve never really been in before, and it was so much fun.
Loki got the biggest cheer of all (there was one group of dudes who seemed to be big Loki fans), I cheered for Gamora because heck if Loki’s getting a cheer she gets one too, everyone went nuts when Cap caught the hammer, when the Black Panther crew appeared and at “Assemble!”
I know not everyone likes cheering in a cinema, but it was really honestly quite electrifying for me.
Tony Stark and Nebula sat in the cockpit of the Guardians’ ship hours after The Snap. They were both stunned, unable to communicate even though they sat in the same room.
Nebula was the most affected by the events that transpired. She had lost her sister to Thanos just because she was willing to save her life in that interrogation chamber. Now half the universe was annihilated.
“Are we going to leave this planet or what?” Tony Stark asked, startling Nebula.
“Yea,” she responded. “I’ll help with the controls. I know you people from Earth aren’t familiar with Ravager ships.”
Stark looked at her. “I think I can figure it out. You could say I’m a…mechanic.”
“And I am a machine.”
Stark smirked. “Suit yourself,” he said, indicating the yokes and buttons before him.
She rose from her chair, reached him, then began clicking those same buttons. She gripped…
Gaaah so there was a version of the movie with Nakia in it (even just at the end) and we didn’t get it? >:(
(also fuck yeah Gamora!)
This one’s by Phil Saunders and he said: “It would have been revealed, however, that [Rhodey] was actually piloting it remotely as he was still suffering from PTSD from his crash during the events of Civil War. I liked the character arc of him eventually having to get back in the suit, but we’d already done a similar reveal in Iron Man 3, so it felt like a repeated beat.” Hm I guess, but it wasn’t that similar, I’d have liked a lil more of Rhodey handling his PTSD I guess.
Cool hat, The Ancient One! Something to make all the other girls go “ooh, that’s nice.”
Aw man I can see why they didn’t use Ant Man’s Giant Ants, too much else going on, but a gun being fired off the top of one amuses me.
Alternate Captain Marvel scene. Oh man I gotta buy this book just so I can see those panels properly. (Nakia’s in the background of this one too, when was she cut out of the movie?!)
Aw dang this is a tiny image but that’s meant to be Thanos’s biological family! (I guess they’d have appeared in a flashback or something?)
These weird looking dudes, okay I can see why they were cut out, way too much going on in the final battle without throwing them in as well
ROCKET WEARING A PIECE OF GROOT! Oh man, that’s just too sad. I gotta go lie down.
Number 2 and 3 really sell the epic feel of it all. Number 1 has far too much Iron Man for my liking (he’s in virtually every photo, I definitely remember there were some other people in the movie?!), but eh, aesthetically it’s quite nice.
Disney+ released in the USA today, I hear! But not the UK, we don’t get it til March. And since Disney still does not comprehend how the non-corporate internet works or how fans will react upon deliberately being excluded, I have watched the Endgame deleted scenes on YouTube. Or the ones I’m interested in, anyway. (i.e. the Guardians ones)
It took me til now to realise that Peter and Rocket didn’t actually have a reunion scene in Endgame. Here they have… approx two lines. The fistbump is nice though, assuming that would’ve been CGIed in later.
This I like better, except that everything that’s happened to Gamora is written off and undermined once again. “This one?” Shouldn’t Peter be making somewhat more of a distinction between the Gamora who loved him and is dead and the past version of her? Y’know what I mean, right? Plus how does he even know why and how she’s alive? Is this meant to be before or after the bit where she kicks him in the balls? Oh, I don’t know, but I don’t like it.
I do like the rest of the scene, where everyone bands together. Well done for breaking up Tony’s fight and helping with the plan, Peter, you are treated with more respect in this deleted scene than you were in the whole rest of the movie.
Finally Okoye gets more lines. And Valkyrie seems to approve of Mantis, and I approve of that. (It’s all that confirmed that Valkyrie will shortly be the MCU’s first (finally) LGBT character but I really hope Mantis will be another one.)
Anyway! My problems with these scenes are the same ones I had about the whole of Endgame, a) things that should be serious are played for laughs b) Gamora’s arc is given absolutely no thought whatsoever when the whole story should have been about her and c) Honestly… this whole movie is basically just “Iron Man 4 feat. some other people”. Gah, I try not to be bitter about it, I did have an absolute blast watching Endgame, but MCU-wise the only movies I’m really interested in for the future are GOTG 3 (obviously), Black Widow, Black Panther 2, probably about half of Thor 4 and maybe the third Spider-Man, even though I still can’t connect with him because that particular spider-verse is so far from the one I intitially loved. (Far, far too much Iron Man, again, for starters.) But we’ll see.
God, Disney. I’m being left out of Disney+ and I’m still going to end up making you richer. You owe me.
So it was afewdaysago o’clock that I learned Sean Gunn filmed some scenes for Endgame, and they got cut! I consider this an epic injustice. Look at this green-screen bit from the behind the scenes doc on the DVD. We almost got Peter and Kraglin fighting side-by-side!
And check out his look! He’s got a new fin and looks badass!
Here’s a shot of him aboard a space bike. (The Twitter account that first posted this has mysteriously gone, did the Mouse get them?)
Whether Kraglin was supposed to be besides Peter for the whole scene or on the space bike, I’m not sure. Apparently you can just about make out a space-bike-riding blob in the finished cut of the movie:
So maybe the scene of him on the battlefield was cut early on. I’d have really, really loved to see him there, though. Not only do I like the relationship between Peter and Kraglin and wanna see more of it, if the intention was for Kraglin to be wielding the Yaka Arrow (and he does look a bit like he’s whistling in the top image) that would have meant a part of Yondu was sort of present beside Peter in that battle as well. And that breaks my tiny GOTG-obsessed heart.
This is material ripe for fanfiction! After I’ve finished working on the post-Endgame fic I’m going at the moment, I reckon I’ll give something with Kraglin a whirl. I love that boy (and Sean too, meeting him at ComicCon was a true delight).
There are some things I like about this scene. I love that Peter Quill was one of the first to kneel, even though he didn’t even like Tony, because that’s the sort of person he is.
But. When I first heard about this scene it was in relation to Gamora, so I assumed that maybe it would be a scene abouther. Nope! She still warrants barely a thought in a story that should have been hers. We see her walking away while the other superheroes kneel and that’s something at least, confirmation she actually, y’know, wasn’t dead. (Because, you know, why would the cinematic version of the movie bother to confirm something like a major female character being alive at the end.) But once more Endgame proves that the only character it was really interested in is Tony, Tony, Tony. Gamora, the one who arguably actually kickstarted the whole Infinity Saga, will have to wait until Guardians 3. If that.
Sigh. I really resent Iron Man these days, in so many ways. Black Widow didn’t get a whole battlefield of people who didn’t know her kneeling to her.
So the dust has settled on Avengers: Endgame now, and I’ve had months to turn my problem with it over and over in my head. Really, I think most of my negative feelings are encapsulated in one scene: the one where Thor leaves his people behind and gets aboard ship with the Guardians in the end.
Bear in mind everything that’s happened to these characters at this point. Thor’s lost his brother and spent five years in a haze of bad mental health. Peter’s lost Gamora, thought he got her back, and lost her (in a different way) again. Drax has wanted to kill Thanos since the first movie he was in, Thanos is now dead, and… nothing. Rocket lost all his friends for half a decade and suddenly they’re back. And so on. No-one gets to react to any of this. Like, not anything. Instead they hang around and laugh while Peter and Thor have a pissing contest over who gets to be leader.
Like… that’s it? That’s where you think these characters should be right now? Really?
It’s all the worse because that scene should be about Gamora. She was the cog the whole of Infinity War spun around, hell she was the cog the whole Thanos story spun around, and what happens to her? She gets thrown in a pit, brought back from the past, allowed to fight a little and then more or less forgotten about.
Does Gamora get even a reaction shot when Thanos, her tormentor, the person who’s haunted her and brutalized her for three damn movies, dies at last? No, she does not. Okay, my slightly infuriated thoughts went at the time, perhaps maybe the last scene with the Guardians might be aboutherand where she is and how her friends will start the search for her? Nope! Instead it’s about… Thor. Bad luck.
So yeah. I wanted to stop short of saying “It’s sexist” but I can’t because really none of the important women in Endgame get their due at all, not just Gamora. Captain Marvel got built up and built up, but she’s in the movie for like… five minutes, and we don’t get to learn her thoughts and feelings about anything going on. (She has close friends on Earth, we learned in her solo movie, but she doesn’t even mention them or worry about their fate.) Black Widow gets agency in her sacrifice at least, but then – not unlike Gamora actually – she’s forgotten about. While Tony gets the massive funeral and the tributes, Hawkeye remembers Natasha in one line at the end. Nothing the Avengers did in this film would have been possible without her but she’s not getting any of the accolades.
Nebula is a strange case, because she does get a lot of agency and depth in this movie, but I can’t forgive the scene where she kneels over Thanos – the man who abused her and murdered her sister – and closes his eyes. That makes no sense. It’s bewilderingly out of character and if it was supposed to make her more palatable as a heroine, or something, it doesn’t. The best Nebula line is in the second Guardians movie, I think, when Gamora tells her she could help all the little girls in the world who are suffering like they used to. “I will help them by killing Thanos,” Nebula says, and that’s the line which turns her from a sympathetic villain into (finally) a crusader against injustice and abuse. To have her show a shred of tenderness against her father takes all that away, and it’s so, so baffling to me that apparently the writers couldn’t see that.
Then there’s the women the movie appeared not to have time for, like Okoye. She was prominent on the poster but got maybe two lines in the movie. There was time to follow Hawkeye’s Adventures in Murder but not time to check in on her? Especially since her storyline – let’s assume she was left essentially the leader of a whole, suddenly devastated country since the royal family were dead – would have been really interesting. Come to think of it Natasha falls into this category too, since she was supposed to have a great subplot that ended up on the cutting room floor, because of course it did.
Some of the MCU women who’re bit players in this one – think Valkyrie, Pepper etc – actually do get treated well in the movie, credit where credit’s due. Pepper’s last scene with Tony hit really hard, for example, because it’s played straight. And I mean that sounds ridiculous, of course the death of a major character in one of the biggest franchises of all time is gonna be played straight you’d hope, but there were moments where I wondered, because this movie is so incapable/terrified of believing people would take it seriously. When Thor bids goodbye to his mother and leaves her to die, after the heartfelt I love you’s she tells him to eat a salad because he’s fat now and that’s funny and we’re meant to laugh. When Gamora finds Peter again and no longer knows who he is, which is a tragedy for both of them, she kicks him in the balls and he rolls around in pain making a quip and that’s meant to be funny too. Is it not realistic that Tony’s death might have been interrupted by someone falling over, or a fart joke? Is it weird I’m almost surprised that it wasn’t?
Anyway. Wait, why did I hate Thor for a little bit? Well, I can’t bring myself to hate him really, or even dislike him, he’s an adorable golden retriever of a man. But that scene with him and the Guardians at the end is teasing Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and that is the last chance anyone has to give Gamora her due, to make her story and her constant victimization mean anything. And with that scene, suddenly her importance was pushed to one side to make room for Thor. Who despite his many good qualities is still a white straight able-bodied male superhero, not exactly an underrepresented group. And he’s also one who has three movies bearing his name already, plus major roles in all the Avengers films. Who looked at Thor, looked at Gamora, and decided he not she was the one the audience should have more of? And that Gamora is so unimportant that in the scene where her friends should be discussing how to find her, they are instead trading jokes with him, because the one BIG thing Endgame can’t take seriously is its women?
You’re great and I like you fine, Thor. Honestly. And you didn’t deserve those fat jokes. But you’re done. Now take your hammer, and your snazzy axe thing, and just… go away for a bit.
