Avengers: Endgame (Dir Anthony & Joe Russo, 3h 1m)

And so it ends. The Marvel Cinematic Universe will roll on-it's by now far too big, too successful, and too economically viable to stop-Endgame itself is probably cruising over the $1 billion dollar as i write on Sunday afternoon, will likely break all box office records, and prove that comic book movies are now the dominant cultural force in cinema. But the story that began over a decade ago with Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark crawling out of the desert in his cave-made armour, introduced us one by one to the other main members of the Avengers, from Chris Evans' dutiful super-soldier, Captain America, to Chris Hemsworth's lightning spewing thunder god, Thor, ends here.  

Avengers Endgame is a cinematic farewell concert of a movie, getting the band back together, playing the greatest hits, defeating purple cosmic pragmatist, Thanos (Josh Brolin), and then going their separate ways. Do they play all the songs you want them to? Do we get every single moment we could possibly imagine No. But this is a barnstorming final outing for the Avengers, and an epoch-defining piece of cinema-there is popular cinema before Endgame. And there is popular cinema after. Like Thanos himself, it's inevitable.

Picking up shortly after Infinity War, with the surviving heroes recovering-if one can call the loss of everything from close friends to family such-after Thanos, using the Infinity Stones, clicked half of all life out of existence, so all seems lost-even the emergence of a fresh face, Brie Larson's Captain Marvel failing to lift the spirits of our heroes. Against this backdrop, our heroes scattered, and with a timeskip only heightening the degree to which the world, and the Avengers, has not recovered, so the Russos treat the first part of the film as a portrait of grief, with one major character now leading a post-snap recovery group, another now taking solace in a family he is unwilling to abandon, another taking solace in alcohol and overeating, whilst Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), with whom the film starts, has fallen even deeper, and to revenge.

And revenge is the other key theme of Endgame-a hollow shadow of it is found towards the beginning of the film, but it neither brings closure, or indeed, anyone back, and thus, a better plan, one involving the veritable Chekov's armoury that Marvel left us at the end of, of all films, Antman and the Wasp, is brought into play. A plan, somewhat inevitably involving time travel, is hatched, and, in probably the most joyously fanservicey the Marvel films have ever been, ragtag, and enjoyably mismatched in some cases, groups of heroes are dispatched into previous adventures, before, as before, Thanos waits, in the best finale the Marvel universe has concocted to date.

Yet, what Endgame does better than, perhaps any Marvel film to date, is focus on character-this is not to say it's a slowmoving piece-the three hour runtime belies quite how much ground the film covers-but it's been a while since Marvel Universe fleshed out its heroes as people, not just heroes in these ensemble pieces. Thus we get a Thor no longer sure of himself as he was, lonely, alcoholic and lost, an increasingly nostalgic Captain America who still tells others to move on, and a dozen other nicely placed character moments which remind us quite how far our heroes have come, what they have lost, and their determination to get it back. There are too many great moments, and performances in this film to list, but every single one hits its mark dead on, be it comedy, tragedy or subtle nod to the audience, whether this is one of their first Marvel films, or if they've been there since the beginning.

The narrative scale of the adventure is matched perfectly in the film's visual ambition, managing to pull some truly jaw dropping shots out of the bag, whilst even returns to familiar locations are shot neatly through with new ideas and concepts. There's a great sense of narrative and visual storytelling  in the recalls to previous films, both overt and subversive, from the lift fight in Winter Soldier to the Nine Realms of Thor, to neat visual references to certain characters' visual appearance in the comics at present. It may not have any particularly new places to go or new things to unpack, but keeping all of these different styles together is nothing short of miraculous.

If there's one thing to say, it's that making this a double-parter with Infinity War does make it visually restrained to the same pallet, look and ideas-a couple of the newcomers are largely absent from the film, and even Thanos, having hemimated the universe, is given little to do at points, although the return of both at the end pushes the film that little further in visual and emotional tension and, frankly the final hour of this film are nothing short of pure, unadulterated, small-child-swigging-energy-drink -level awesomeness. For a film that lasts as long as the Lord of the Rings instalments, not a moment is wasted, and like Rings, this film and its prequel are era-defining.

In short, Endgame is the ultimate gauntlet, thrown down; with it, the Marvel Cinematic Universe closes a decade long, 22 film run that unarguably changed cinema, and begins another chapter in which, doubtless, yet more iconic heroes and villains will appear on our cinema screens in the years and decade to come. In its wake, we have some of the best films of the last decade, and, at the peak, the very crest of the wave, is Avengers Endgame. In the words of the late, great Stan Lee: Excelsior!

Rating: Must See