The Importance of Character - Why Avenger: Endgame succeeds where Avengers Infinity War failed

This post is not even going to try to avoid spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.  If you haven't seen it, don't read any further.  Everything's going below the jump here for that reason.




Readers of my blog know that probably the biggest thing I care about in fiction I read and consume is character.  It may sound silly to say this, but there are more than a few reputed, and even good, works of fiction that don't actually have good, developed characters, focusing more on settings, descriptions, poetry, and ideas instead.  For an example of a book like this, see The Three Body Problem (or even more, its sequels).  But these works are the exception for me, and really in general - good characters can lift poor plots/action scenes/settings etc and make these works worth watching, whereas without them - everything else needs to work absolutely for it to work. 

The Avengers movies are a bit tricky in regards to characters, in that they're not isolated movies - they feature as protagonists mostly characters introduced and developed in other works, so they're not starting from scratch.  The few times the Avengers movies have included brand new characters not introduced elsewhere have been some of their clearest failures - Avengers: Age of Ultron is the clearest example of this, with Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Vision, and Ultron all feeling noticeably lacking in comparison to the rest of the cast, as the movie just doesn't have enough space to devote to those characters to actually make them interesting to the audience, to make the audience care. 

Still, even though we already know most of these characters - presuming you've seen the earlier films - that doesn't mean that the Avengers movies can get away without any character development whatsoever.  What made the original Avengers movie so good was that each of these characters got to develop relationships with one another, showcasing their own personalities and allowing them all to grow in turn.  While the Battle of New York is excellent, the best part of that movie is the time the entire team spends on the Helicarrier, interacting with one another, which is what makes the end of the movie payoff.  Having room to breathe is a big deal even in superhero movies, and while lacking it doesn't necessarily prevent a film from character development (see Mad Max: Fury Road, for character development without much time to breathe!), it helps quite a lot.

Avengers: Infinity War....basically doesn't have any of that character development - and certainly doesn't have room to breathe.  Part of that is the movie having to shoe-horn in so many damn characters into the movie, but even taking that into account the movie fails.  The movie could've tried to deal with its character multitude by splitting them into individual groups - and IT DOES THIS - but it then doesn't take advantage of that to really develop anyone.  For example, Doctor Strange joins up with the Avengers for the first time, and well...he's just sort of there already.  Black Panther and crew join in for the finale, and they're just there for the action (this is very likely due to this movie I believe filming before or simultaneously with the movie where those characters were first developed).  Thanos' minions are totally interchangeable and forgettable, while Thanos himself is just kind of laughable: the movie tries to claim he loved Gamora, and it's just like "really???"

And the beginning of Endgame made me worry we were heading again in that same direction, with Captain Marvel just appearing and being accepted as part of the team in about 5 seconds just....because; Nebula forming a friendship with Tony offscreen and then being accepted similarly, etc.  But the movie is instead clearing up the board in its first 30 minutes to try and get to a point where it CAN develop its characters, and then it proceeds to do so.  Now it definitely has less characters to develop than the prior movie, but using the past sequences, it manages to provide tension AND moments to breathe at the same time, from Tony's time with his father, to Steve seeing Peggy's office, to Ant-Man in general, to Clint and Natasha going for the soul stone, hell even with Rhodey and Nebula forming a bond based upon their prosthetic limbs!  And so when we get to the big fan-servicey action finale, I had reasons to care about these people and was once again reminded why I wanted to see them all prevail, and why I was impacted by who would survive.  By contrast, Infinity War is a mess, with a finale where I wanted to yell at the characters for being so stupid at times, resulting in their failure. 

Does every bit of character-work in Endgame work?  No, definitely not - again, Captain Marvel is just sort of there, for example, and Thor's arc is I guess supposed to be a combination of funny and dramatic but seems kind of lazy, as if they wanted to do a grieving arc but couldn't decide if they wanted to play it for laughs or drama and wound up combining the two.  Clint's plot worked...but would've been more successful if he wasn't totally absent from the last movie, and again, Thanos is a lousy villain.  But most of it does work (Robert Downey Jr in particular is brilliant playing Tony Stark as an absolute mess, which I can't imagine another actor doing as well), and the effort to try reminded me of why I cared to sit through a 3 hour movie.   It ties everything together. 

It's still an overstuffed movie that leans a bit too hard on fanservice, but the renewed focus on character development makes it a worthy successor to the original Avengers film, and reminded me why I enjoyed the MCU.  I hope Marvel learns the right lesson from this - more isn't always better, unless you can really give the more the time it deserves.  Endgame does, and I loved it for it.