#Internally I am throwing a fit over larson winning but like it's fine

[james-is-nasqueer]

P4 😎😎😎

[fieldbears]

Washed-Up Stucky MNF/Fic Writer Provides Endgame Opinions

I’m going to try to tackle this linearly, at least to begin with:

I am very much Team Bored With MCU Hawkeye, but I want to give sincere props for the cold open, which I think accomplished several things simultaneously: recapped the consequences of the last film (since, hey, it’s been a fuckin while), set the tone, and began Clint’s narrative arc.

That said, jesus, I’m still irritated by the shoe-horned family to begin with. First they were invented for convenience and narrative stakes, and then their final, ultimate reason for existence was to be temporarily fridged. Take a moment to imagine a world where Clint was the circus runaway loner he was supposed to be, who only had his coworkers as found family, who either responded to The Snap by throwing himself harder into his teamwork work OR went rogue because his sense of justice and agency was so fucking destroyed by what happened. He didn’t need a blood family to have the arc he had. And he didn’t even need the arc he had. But this is a bitchfest about a choice made many years ago, not made in this final movie.

The first third of that movie was rough. The whole thing had the narrative flow of “A Series of Related Short Stories Played One After the Other”, but the first third seems to be Failing To Establish the New World and then Clumsily Establishing The Emerging Situation.

The establishing shots and scenes to show the audience what The Snap’s consequences were worldwide were... lacking. It’s dark? No more baseball? People are relying on natural light instead of interior lighting, but this is also happening at Avengers HQ, where they clearly still have power and internet access to work their tech, so... was it just an aesthetic choice? I feel like the film tried to spend time showing us what the consequences were for the average New Yorker, but instead we get a weird Canonly Gay Russo Character who gave a good performance that tells us about the human loss but not about the mechanics of this new world. We get the ‘no baseball’ shot and all we get afterward are ‘people miss the missing people’. But restaurants still exist? Businesses are functioning? (Wouldn’t New York run kind of smoother if it wasn’t overpopulated?) I feel like we were invited to start thinking about how this dystopia works, but were never given answers. (There are so many interpretations of how things could go wrong if certain people just disappeared, and their knowledge/access were suddenly unavailable, and none of it was explored, even briefly, outside of establishing shots.)

The Garden Planet - it’s discovery, the traveling to it, the fight there - lacked emotional grounding in a way I find hard to explain. The audience was excited for Brie Larson being a fucking boss, and the quick execution of the grab-him-and-cut-his-arm-off plan was satisfying, but the twist and subsequent letdown was just a weird beat after a slog to get there, after waiting on a deep letdown beat from the last movie.

Last thing about flow and emotional beats, because I want to move on to character analysis, and this is a huge one for me: Clint’s fight in Tokyo and Steve’s fight with himself were some of the biggest missed opportunities in the entire film.

Not counting the football field brawl at the end, which I don’t count as a real fight scene, these are the two major fight scenes of the entire film and as far as I can tell, there was no effort made to make these showpieces. They went to the trouble of bringing Clint to Bladerunner Central, and pit him against the last bastion of aesthetic-obsessed mafia in the world. The panning camera in the interior as Hawkeye fought goons brushed past lazy fight scenes that only showed who was winning, not the brutality that Clint was supposedly falling into, not the grit of this new awful world, just... shapeless dark bodies getting thrown through windows? And on top of that, they could have made up (or picked from canon) any Big Bad to pit him against outside in the street, and we get an Orientalist sword fight that could have fit in nicely on a CW superhero show, and some of the most unnecessary exposition dialogue I have ever heard. Someone bothered to weave Clint’s arc in earlier, with Rhodey explaining to Natasha that Clint’s gone International and also Worryingly Dark. Why the fuck do we have the ‘I’ll give you anything you want’ line, on the rotten cherry on top of ‘stop being mean to the yakuza, we didn’t start it’? You already covered his motivations with the cold open.

And while Steve’s fight ended in a FABULOUSLY HEARTBREAKING WAY, the fight itself was nothing - you can pick little character details out like how they both ditched their shields almost immediately, and it was funny that Then-Steve mistook Now-Steve for Loki in the first place, but it was still a completely lost opportunity to get one true superhero battle in this three-hour slog. Both Steves could have gotten up and carried out the rest of the narrative after a decent brawl, but instead they fall a great distance after some blocked shots and it... was nothing? Missed opportunity for some cool shit.

Okay, skipping to character assessments now:

Clint’s character has been mishandled from the beginning and this seemed to be the “better late than never” eleventh hour arc. Except the end of the arc is unclear - it made sense for him to fall apart after losing his Shoehorn Family, but how did Natasha’s choice to fall do anything but fridge someone else, with more agency this time? It makes Natasha noble, which she already was, and it made her win against Clint, which I appreciate, but Natasha didn’t need salvation through death and Clint learns nothing by getting them back, just experiences relief.

Bruce. I want to say, first, that I love Hulk in a Cardigan. Cardihulk can stay. I want fanart, I want t-shirts, give me all of it. But Bruce’s explanation of “I scienced it so I could get the best of both worlds” only gives us half of the acceptance that Banner’s character is already working towards. As we saw most explicitly in Ragnarok, the Hulk isn’t just a physical form, he has his own separate consciousness, originally defined by rage but revealed to be more complicated. Bruce merging into Cardihulk seems to have... erased Hulk’s separate consciousness without merging it into himself? If there had been some acknowledgement of a second voice still within him that shot out opinions or demands for certain menu items in the diner, this would have been a much cleaner end to his arc, which has been equally messy between actor and narrative shifts.

Speaking of Ragnarok... it’s time! Are you ready? Have you read articles about the Gambit Gambit too? Are you fucking depressed that a fat suit was used for comedy gags in the year of our lord 2019? Because I was. The Russos seemed to... not struggle with what progress Ragnarok had put onto Bruce and Thor’s characters, but reject it. This movie’s Thor was anxious for laughs, was desperate for easy answers to a a feeling of lost heroism, and it didn’t feel like a familiar character. The time-travel scene with his mother wrapped it up very elegantly, and was well performed, but that scene didn’t need to follow a series of “chunky drunk in sweatpants” jokes to show us that Thor was struggling. Everyone in the film is fucking holding on by their fingernails, but only one is played for cheap laughs.

At least we get the bisexual Asgard lady king we deserved.

Tony got the right death. He got a hero’s death and Pepper’s last lines of “you can rest now” were exactly the right lines to wrap up an arc characterized by fear and a desire to protect and control at any cost. I knew the MCU was never going to really acknowledge that Tony’s The Problem, even with lines like ‘you should have let me do the fascist robot thing, that was gonna work fine’ thrown around pretty much as soon as he touches down on earth again.

I’m not sure if there’s much to say about Natasha. It was fitting that she was running HQ, that she was struggling, that she was rejecting emotional help from Steve but clearly still close with him. Seeing her break down after hearing the report on Clint felt right after, I think, being told by several directors (or making the personal acting choice? idk) to just be as flat and as decolletagey as possible. And again, while I feel like she would be self-sacrificing on that cliffisde if given the opportunity, and that she would win, the narrative choice to place her there and have that be her end didn’t really give her anything she didn’t already have. She had nothing to prove.

I have a hard time really laying out my thoughts on Steve without launching into the pregnant absence of Bucky, but I’m going to try. Chris Evans did a good job being the emotional heart of a really fractured story with a lot of conflicting pieces. Seeing him lead a talk therapy session after The Snap seemed very out of character for him until one realizes that Sam isn’t there to lead it himself. His scene offering help to Natasha was another good scene between them proving that not every m/f relationship has to be sexual to be interesting or add to the plot. His leadership speech during the Stupid Fucking Slow-Mo Heroes’ Walk to the platform was well done and makes me think of what could have been for the MCU, if they’d ever just let them be a cohesive found-family team for twenty minutes and let them fight some doom-bots or something. Fuck. Imagine.

Something weirdly satisfying about the deceitful ‘hail hydra’ line in the elevator. Yes? Yes.

The hammer scene was satisfying to me without being too gratuitous, but I’ll acknowledge that some people weren’t into it. Having paid more attention to Steve’s arc than most, I’ll argue that he earned it several times over.

His ending - that is, the secret life he alludes to but doesn’t explicitly reveal to Sam - is earned too. I’ve read at least one thing saying that Steve’s arc was all about him learning to let go, but that’s... never what Steve does. Not at the end of any arc, of any comic story, does Steve let go. Not of his principles, not of the people he loves, he is always “Thinking... Thinking About Bucky!” and getting in fights he can’t necessarily win. So I don’t think his final ending is ever Learning to Let Go. I think it’s fair that it’s Just Once, Just This One Time, Getting What You Want And Getting To Enjoy It.

And now I’m backtracking to Bucky. I’ve read one article already that theorizes that Steve’s arc, which was highly prioritized, included literally as little direct interaction with Bucky as possible because... the MCU? the Russos? Marvel?...  is aware that Steve/Bucky is the most popular same-sex ship in the MCU. And that’s tiresome as fuck but I think there’s some truth to it. I wonder if, like in Civil War, we’ll hear later from the actors that a lot of contextual one-on-one scenes were shot and then mysteriously cut from the final edit.

I will say that in my head, Bucky is relaxed when Steve goes back in time for the final time, and lets Sam goes to talk with Steve one-on-one at the bench, because Bucky is not worried if Steve will come back, and does not feel a need to check on Steve on the bench. Because, like Peggy, Bucky has been getting secret visits too. Maybe as far back as during his time in Wakanda, but certainly since the final fight with Thanos. Bucky was calm because he already knew. He didn’t miss Steve because Steve hadn’t given him an opportunity to do so.

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