Avengers: Endgame Review - 11 Ups & 4 Downs

6. Starting With A Bang (Again)

Just as Infinity War's opening act was breathlessly begun with the deaths of Loki and Heimdall, Endgame starts from a similarly motivated stand-point to show us where we stand for the rest of the movie.

The opening is a scene chosen precisely to make you feel, strongly, that there are going to be some serious emotional stakes here. It's not the same as that scene in space in Infinity War, but you feel the blows even stronger in this case because of their intimacy and that's pretty much the biggest lesson Marvel seem to have learned since their earliest days.

The beginning also lends itself to Hawkeye's storyline, which is wonderfully compelling right up until he's called into active duty and it's all surprisingly grown-up (particularly for a film of this rating). The new "Ronin" figure is a legitimate badass, whose motivation is as dark as it is utterly convincing and it all satisfyingly pays off the story that was seeded way back in Avengers: Age Of Ultron.

And speaking of great character arcs...