First to the finish line

I’m going to a critics screening of Avengers: Endgame tonight. On the world’s third largest IMAX screen, or so it claims.

Jealous?

It’s a measure of how far the MCU has come with me in recent years that I am anticipating this with nearly the same fervor as I would a new Star Wars movie. I don’t think I would have gone to a midnight screening – especially not when the movie is three hours long – but it feels as momentous an occasion in many ways.

For one, the previous film left off with one of the great cliffhangers in modern movie history, even if the stakes were made to seem greater then we knew them to actually be. Even if you know that much of the loss from the previous film will be reversed, you don’t know how, and you don’t know what new loss may replace it.

And that’s really the key thing here. You could accuse Marvel of takesies-backsies when it inevitably revives Spider-Man, Black Panther et al from the dead, but it absolutely will replace some of those dead with heroes who can’t be revived. At least one of arguably the two most central figures in the MCU will croak in this film, and they ain’t coming back, so the film carries with it the same kind of foreboding as if you went into a Star Wars movie knowing for sure that either Luke Skywalker or Han Solo would die.

Now, Captain America is not Luke Skywalker and Iron Man is not Han Solo (though that would certainly be the correct way to align the characters according to their personalities and traits). Let’s not get carried away here. But I do find the most recent chapter in Steve and Tony’s very long saga to be more satisfying than the most recent chapter of Han and Luke’s very long saga, preferring Avengers: Infinity War to Star Wars: The Last Jedi. For which Han Solo wasn’t around anyway, which may be one of the reasons it was not as good as its predecessor.

So tonight is a pretty big night, and not just because the screen is big and the running time is big. It’s genuinely a big moment in the history of modern film mythology. You could argue whether superheroes should lay claim to such a moment, but the fact is, they do. Kevin Feige and company have spent well over a decade ensuring there would be full audience investment in this moment, and they’ve earned their moment in the sun.

Will it be a satisfying ending to this phase of the MCU?

I’ll be among the first to know … but I’ll heed #Don’tSpoilTheEndgame and keep my mouth shut until sometime next week.