Things:

  1. So after Avengers 2, which really struggled to give all its characters a narrative arc, the question was how Avengers 3 could possibly do it with its gigantic enormous mega-cast, right. And so it’s kind of brilliant that they did it by just NOT MAKING IT ABOUT THEM. This is 100% the Thanos movie. It gives Thanos a tragic backstory, a semi-heroic motivation, forces him to make a sacrifice and shows him loving someone in a real way, and even gives him a win at the end.

    I mean, like, sure, in one sense, this is the end of Empire Strikes Back for our heroes, but in another sense, this is the happy ending for the Thanos movie. So it’s simultaneously a giant cliffhanger, and a satisfying conclusion.

  2. So now movie people get to learn about how when comic events get too ultra-mega big deal, they end up getting undone with magic, haha whoo. During the ending, I was like “okay, wow, are they doing this?” and then Black Panther evaporated and I just leaned back like, oh, okay, no, this is a “nobody dies” situation, cool, got it.

  3. Although I guess now all the people who got dusted will not be in the sequel until near the end when they do the retcon, so that’ll thin the cast out for the sequel so that they can have a simpler plot with fewer characters (and a more traditional Avengers setup — the Guardians all evaporated, I think, along with Dr. Strange and the Panther) without having it be implausible that they’re not all helping out.

  4. Overall, this is a very good movie. I would have said it was great up until that big ending when the whole plot got undone — once a movie doesn’t have the courage to have a plot that actually happens, it can’t really rise to the level of greatness, you know? And I mean, I’m not knocking off a lot of points — it’s still really good, and doing a bunch of big shit that gets undone with magic is one of the most comic-booky things this series has done yet (and it’s done a lot of comic-booky stuff). But still.

    But very good is still good! It should have been a giant mess, and it wasn’t, so adjusting for level of difficulty, let’s call it A++.