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There are moments of Endgame that I like quite a bit. The movie's playfulness with Marvel history is fun. The principle arcs for Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are satisfying and just the right amount of poignant. Paul Rudd's Ant-Man gets some pretty good audience-surrogate befuddlement humor. And while the movie is (somehow) both too sprawling and too rushed to have many moments of intimate character interactions of the kind we might get in Guardians of the Galaxy or even the first Ant-Man movie, the cast here is pretty much universally at the top of their respective games and sells some emotional moments that, on paper, feel very slight (particularly kudos to the original Avengers crew of Downey Jr., Johansson, Ruffalo, Evans, and Renner, who get about 90% of the screentime here). But all the things I like get completely buried beneath the lumbering, three-hour behemoth of the actual movie. It's of course possible to make a good movie at this length, but the way this movie ambles forward in its inscrutable, segmented structure makes that runtime just draaaagggg. It's a lot to swallow at once, lacking a consistent forward momentum and cross-cutting to death all of its most interesting sequences—would it have been too much to just let one of these setpieces play out uninterrupted without constantly checking in on every other character in the movie every two minutes? Can't we just get to these people's stories in a minute once this scene finishes? The central "Time Heist" sequence suffers most from this, which is a real shame because otherwise, that's my favorite part of the movie. I guess another way of saying this is that there is a lot of cool stuff here but so little artistry in stitching it all together that it becomes a tedious slog in execution. And about that execution: I like how kooky this movie is willing to get—time travel is invented in the space of a few hours by two separate characters—and it's nice to see the film drop the whole charade of scientific plausibility that the early Marvel movies indulged in. But for a movie that's supposed to be the dramatic culmination of all the franchise's conflicts and arcs, there's a lot of half-baked hand-waving away of those conflicts with, as Thor calls it, "space magic." Like how, for instance, in the space of about thirty seconds, Bruce Banner explains that he now uses Science to be himself and the Hulk at the same time without losing control; I mean, isn't that the whole thing about Bruce Banner? The Jekyll/Hyde conflict between the brain and the brawn? Ten years of this MCU character, and he just magically fixes his core personal conflict offscreen? Endgame has a dozen such moments. Don't even get me started on how Ant-Man gets out of the quantum realm. In a way, this movie is a microcosm for how I feel about the project of the MCU as a whole: lots of potential, some exhilarating moments, and a handful of endearing characters, but ultimately too structurally fractured and easily plotted and inconsistent in its engagement with its own most interesting ideas to make a compelling whole. Maybe Endgame was doomed with me from the start, since my enthusiasm for the MCU had mostly dried up by the time this movie rolled around; but I'd like to think that there was a version of this movie that I would have enjoyed a lot—alas, one undercut at every turn by the movie that Marvel apparently wanted to make. Grade: C
Pretty delightful overall. It has a lot of tonal problems—the movie lurches from some seriously melancholy stuff to goofy hijinks in the span of a cut, oftentimes with the characters shifting emotional tenor alongside the tone, which is pretty jarring, especially when the last act of the movie dials up the sadness and the hijinks at the same time. But the hijinks are very funny, and the sad stuff is legitimately affecting, so it's hard to complain too much. The performances are uniformly perfect, too; it would be easy to say that the onscreen chemistry between Feldstein and Dever carries the show, and they're both very good, but honestly, just focusing on them would be a disservice to the entire cast, among whom there's not a bum note even when some pretty cartoony characters are asked to pivot into emotional stakes and there's basically nothing but the performance to sell that turn. Hey, and Olivia Wilde, director: also good! In fact, there are some moments here that are positively sublime (I'm thinking in particular of an underwater pool scene that just soars); other parts feel somewhat cinematically pedestrian, which makes me look forward to a movie (her next?) when Wilde is able to make the stylistic touches this movie showcases more of a consistent aesthetic than merely a flourish. Again, hard to complain too much when what we got is still good. Plus, the teens in this movie listen to LCD Soundsystem and all the other music cool 28-year-old dads are into, which I thought was very considerate of them. Grade: B+
People have knocked this movie as derivative, but I dunno, "Inherent Vice for the internet age" seems like a fresh enough variation to me, not to mention a vital one. The movie's surreally timeless setting, in which it is seemingly every year between 1980 and now, combined with the conspiracy-theory-addled mind of a sexist male makes this movie feel almost like a personification of the internet itself, its glibly nostalgic leanings (Nintendo Power, of all damn things, plays a pivotal role in the plot), its pervasive sexism/male dominance, and its epistemological knots making it feel uncannily of a piece with what I feel every day when I log in to Facebook. I wish that the movie had a more trenchant critique of its protagonist's sexism, because that seems like one of the more urgent internet-era toxins out there, and the movie is definitely too long. But I found the movie compelling regardless. If Inherent Vice posits that the hippie movement failed because its culture of drugs broke down any sort of functional concept of shared reality, then Under the Silver Lake says the same about the endless, context-free information the internet gives us. When you know everything, how can you know anything? And when you know both everything and nothing, how can you not be a deluded prick? Grade: B+
One of the more bizarre elements of modern life is the way that the moon landing has become just historical background noise, just tacitly accepted as fact in the same mundane way that we acknowledge any figure in a textbook. So though it seems an obvious thing to do, it's no small achievement that Apollo 11 renders the moonshot with exactly the appropriate level of awe, turning a montage of archival footage into a justly gobsmacked expression of wonder at what is arguably the greatest technological and political feat of all time. More incredibly, the movie manages this nearly mythic depiction of the Apollo 11 mission through an obsession with the process that got us there. You get the famous "One small step for man" stuff, sure, but that's a relatively small moment set against dozens of minutes of NASA technicians feverishly running through tests and figures; we spend more time watching and listening to Neil Armstrong, et al, prepare coordinates and measure velocities on the approach to the moon than we do watch them on the actual moon, and even when on the moon, there are surprisingly long stretches devoted to small technicalities like the hassle of an astronaut trying to put an object in his suit's exterior pocket. It's myth-making through meticulous specificity, and it's edge-of-your-seat riveting. I could quibble with some of the showy musical choices (I would have rathered no music whatsoever), but what are quibbles when we made it to THE MOON?? Grade: A-
I really like how the traditional sci-fi/noir trappings interact with the more overt "Godard" touches like the abstract montages that occasionally pepper the movie. I don't know that outside of its aesthetic ambitions that the movie is doing anything super philosophically interesting, though, which is a shame, since that's like the whole thing about dystopian sci-fi. Like, okay, sure, modern society's emphasis on reason and logic and cold mechanical processes is ultimately antithetical to what human beings actually are, but that seems obvious, right? Maybe it's just that I'm watching this 50+ years after it came out, but that seems like a disappointingly straightforward and obvious idea for Godard. But man, at least this film has style. Grade: B
