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

This all comes to ahead where, back on Asgard and completely devoid of the emotional nerve to complete the mission, Rocket slaps him across the face and tells him to “snap out of it”. It’s a gag, and raises a mild titter from the audience, but undoes so much of the franchise’s good work.

To build into the very fabric of your decade long narrative that these heavy emotional blows adversely effect your characters in the same ways they effect the rest of us, and then conveniently decide that, actually, they’re better used for comic relief, damages that entire premise. Take that scene in Iron Man 3 and, instead, imagine Rhodey just slaps Tony and tells him to “snap out of it”.

The counterpoint to this is that, simply, it doesn’t really matter. Thor is not Tony Stark, his story is very, very different, and it makes sense for him to play out this way in the context of the film etc etc. That’s all fair, but it it’s inconsistent.

Themes of duty, abandonment, self-destruction, fear of failure are all handled evenly across different films and different characters. Even the very idea of empire, specifically facing up to the sins of the past, is looked at in the same way in Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Black Panther and Thor Ragnarok. Four of the most different films in the entire franchise, led by heroes telling very different stories.

What makes the MCU so wonderful is how these big ideas hold true across the heroes, across the years, and even across the stars. Marvel set out what values they wanted their movies to have early on and part of what’s made the franchise so interconnected is that they’ve held true to these for 11 years.

I’m sure a lot of people will say that they don’t think how these movies handle mental health is important and, ok, fine, that’s your opinion, but what you can’t dispute is that Marvel thought it was important.

They wove it into multiple films and made it the defining part of their biggest characters entire makeup. It's what drove him to build Ultron, it's what pushed him to fight for the Sokovia Accords, and it's what fuelled the Iron Man addiction that ultimately saved the universe and cost him his life. To Marvel, it mattered.

It was sensitively handled, it was realistically written, it was profoundly affecting, and then, all of a sudden, it was a punchline. Did it work well for Thor in the moment? Probably. Does it work for the MCU as whole? No, and it’s one of a brilliant movie’s biggest missteps.

Fundamentally, and for very obvious reasons, this is a gripe that won’t be shared by the vast majority of the audience. But for everyone who has been applauding the MCU for how it’s bravely tackled these issues head on - when it was under absolutely no obligation to - it’s a stark reminder of how easily it is to forget them.