10 Most Confusing Scenes In MCU History
2. Hulk Explains Time Travel - Avengers: Endgame
Time travel can be a dangerous tool to use in storytelling, as it opens the door up to a plethora of potential plot holes, rule breaks, and things that simply don’t make sense. The rules have to be clearly specified, and the theory behind them watertight.
This is what was attempted in Avengers: Endgame, but in all honesty, it essentially just confused issues further. Rhodey, Scott, and Clint believed time travel to be like in the movies, Back to the Future among others was referenced, but Hulk disagreed.
He said that going back into the past can't change the future. Instead it creates a whole new branch of time in which the present is now your past, and the new past you’ve gone to is your present. You can’t now change the future which is your new past. Anybody still following? Thought not.
You can see where the writers were trying to go with this, but the explanation from Dr. Banner just wasn’t a very good one. There must have been a better way to portray the rules of time travel in the MCU, but what was the point when they were only going to be broken anyway…