The Big Problem With Avengers: Endgame Nobody's Talking About

Avengers Endgame is, undoubtably, a masterpiece of superhero cinema.

I want to front load with that because, if you’re a fan of the film like me, the following won’t make for overly comfortable reading at points. What it achieves in terms character, narrative, fan-service, boundary pushing, emotion, all of that; I said in my review it’s a triumph and in almost all regards it is. The film, taken as a whole, as a body of work, is truly excellent.

But that doesn’t mean it’s without its flaws. There are already questions being asked over continuity issues, plot holes, basic leaps of logic, things like that - perfectly normal issues for any film to have, never mind one of this scale - and these conversations will rumble on for years.

The bottomline is that this is a wondrous if occasionally messy film, and how much most of its problems bother you will depend entirely on who you are. The overwhelming majority don’t care about them, but some do. A statement that’s true of pretty much anything.

However, there is one problem with the film that needs addressed. One that stretches out beyond it’s 3 hour runtime and begins to suffocate some of the best work done in the MCU over the last decade. Specifically, Tony Stark’s incredible psychological arc.

But the problem in Endgame isn’t Tony. His story ends in a way that’s about as perfect as it possibly could have been. A journey that started all of this back in 2008, saw his character hit such impossible highs and lows, comes to an almost poetic conclusion. You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play Cap tells him in the first Avengers movie and… well… you saw all those films.

The journey he embarks upon is, comfortably one of the best things in the entire MCU. From his life-changing beginnings in Iron Man, to his identity crisis in Iron Man 2, his emotional trauma in Iron Man 3, his vision in Age of Ultron and how profoundly that affects him, the sacrifices he makes in Civil War and how personally he’s wounded by its end; by the time we got to Infinity War there was arguably no better developed character in all of cinema.

And the best thing about that development was this overwhelming strength and leadership and responsibility and power, being in constant conflict with his vulnerability. Stark is not presented to us as an extraordinary man, but a very ordinary one doing extraordinary things. This takes a huge toll on him.

There’s a scene in Iron Man 3 which, for me, is amongst the most important in the entire MCU. It’s in Iron Man 3 where Tony and Rhodes are sat in a restaurant, he’s signing a drawing for a child and he just breaks down, he can’t breathe, he runs out of the restaurant gets in his suit, asks Jarvis to check his brain, check his heart, asks if he was poisoned and he’s told no, none of that, he was having an anxiety attack. There’s a pause and he just says… "me?"