Photo property of Marvel Studios
“I am Iron Man.”
When Robert Downey, Jr. said those words 11 years ago, it was the beginning of a cinematic universe that none of us could comprehend at the time. Even when Samuel L. Jackson appeared on screen at the end of the credits to reveal the presence of The Avengers, nobody knew what was coming.
With the release of Avengers: Endgame this week, Marvel has achieved a true wonder in the arena of long-form storytelling. One that is not likely to be replicated any time in the near future.
I want to talk about Endgame. I want to talk about all the incredible moments that will make fans stand up and cheer or want to weep. Both exist. And perhaps in a couple weeks I’ll delve into a more spoiler-unfriendly review.
This isn’t a review so much as it is a letter of appreciation.
If you want a mini-review, let me tell you this. Endgame is, in many ways, a typical Marvel movie. The action is crisp, the comedic moments are hilarious, the serious moments have ample gravity. Saying that Endgame is a “typical Marvel movie” in no way undercuts the greatness of the thing, first off.
However, there is nothing typical about this movie. It is truly fantastic. What the Russo Brothers and company have done is taken a saga that is 21 movies long, spanning more than a decade off-screen and countless eons in the films’ chronology, and turned in a fitting conclusion. That accomplishment alone should be celebrated.
Not to mention the fact that Marvel took a gamble on Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man, something they desperately did not want to do, and it paid off in a huge way. Make no mistake. Each of the Avenger movies is an extension of Iron Man’s and Tony Stark’s story. The other key characters get plenty of development, but he is easily the key protagonist of each one. You could argue that the Captain America movies are, in many ways, Avenger movies that focus on Captain America. But that’s for another time.
In the coming days and weeks, there will certainly be articles put out about the “mistakes” and the “continuity errors” present in Endgame. For instance, Tony Stark placed a large array of solar panels at his home under a grove of shade trees. That seems…stupid. We could nitpick these types of errors all we want, but that’s not what movies are for.
Movies are for telling stories, and somehow Endgame managed to tell one story while concluding a thousand more and perhaps spawning a few along the way.
Over the last few years, ever since Marvel started dominating the box office and everyone else wanted to get a little piece of the cinematic universe pie, people have started to complain and pontificate about “franchise fatigue.” They’re just waiting for the bubble to burst and for audiences to get tired of seeing the same stories about the same characters over and over and over again.
The most common comparison that I’ve seen these types of articles make is with westerns. In the first half of the twentieth century, Westerns were all the rage. From radio plays to TV shows to the silver screen, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and their ilk were all you would see. Then one day, somewhere around the mid 1950s, audiences stopped caring about westerns as much.
You’d still see westerns, of course, and even some of John Wayne’s best like The Searchers and True Grit came after that time, but the culture had changed. People needed something more.
In all fairness, these articles aren’t entirely wrong. And it does feel like the hero genre isn’t as much of a sure thing as it once would have been. You can look at the DC universe’s film slate to see as much, with the relative failure of Justice League and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. After Justice League grossed $100 MIL less than the movie that was supposed to bolster it, and opened about $70 MIL below Dawn of Justice, the warning cries were heard worldwide.
What bothers me is how some writers are yearning for superhero movies to fail. They just can’t wait to see Marvel’s smirk erased.
What these entities fail to realize is that Marvel isn’t releasing the same movie over and over again. They’re releasing episodes in one very long story that had it’s season finale this week.
“Hear me out. We have these six priceless stones that we could…we could sell online for $90, or…or…we could make movies about them and make a little bit more.” (Photo from Etsy)
In some ways, you could even call this ending a series finale, because there is no way that Marvel will be what it has been. They will keep releasing movies, and they certainly have the next installment of their plan in place, but the Infinity Stone saga was an experiment in film that we are likely to never see again.
Marvel had been putting the groundwork for this event in place long before they knew it would be successful. Had Iron-Man failed at the box office, or had there been any other significant misfire early on in the process, I imagine we would have seen the whole MCU handled very differently.
But it didn’t. Even though Iron Man came in about $200 MIL (same link as above) short of The Dark Knight, with both being released in the same summer, the first domino had fallen perfectly on cue. Over the next 11 years, Marvel would tell a one-of-a-kind story, and I don’t know if anyone can truly top that.
Except for, of course, the original pop culture phenomenon: Star Wars.
How strange is it that 2019 will see the conclusion of both the Infinity Stone saga and the Skywalker saga? Of course, the Skywalker saga predates Marvel’s movies by three decades. And will end with just nine entries compared to the 22 that Marvel invested.
Yet, both will attempt to wrap up a far-sweeping story this year that can only exist through the rarity of long-form storytelling.
Comic books may well be the only medium where this type of story is so frequently explored. There are always massive story arcs and strange crossover events in the world of comic books. In novels and plays and movies, though, we tend to lean towards the singular entry.
That’s why artists like August Wilson are so heavily revered, because they tackle the challenge of tying multiple narratives together to create one overarching story. Wilson was the first playwright to complete a 10-play cycle about the Twentieth Century in American history. You’ve probably heard of Fences, the most famous entry in this cycle, but they have almost all been universally accepted as masterworks.
Then you have the incomparable Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, a work of art so lengthy that Brandon Sanderson had to complete it after Jordan’s death.
While Wilson’s cycle does feature 10 distinct narratives, with very few overlapping characters, the story he tells is of African Americans in the US throughout the century. And that’s exactly why long-form storytelling is so powerful.
See, when a series of any notoriety comes out, it obviously takes several years for fans to experience the whole thing. When it all comes to an end, they aren’t the same people they were when it started.
Think about people who started reading the Harry Potter books as kids, only for the last one to come out in 2007. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in 2007, the prime audience was no longer children. After all, this seventh book featured some gruesome deaths and some horrific scenes. Even though children today read it, like my niece who just barely turned 10, the intended audience for that book was someone who might have been 10 years old when The Sorcerer’s Stone came out in 1997.
Those are some truly formative years, and these series we fall in love with make up a huge part of them.
In literature, we talk about something called “the historicity of text,” meaning that every text is a product of the time it is written in. How does the contemporary culture shape a work?
I’m not as interested in how the grand political culture shaped Marvel. What I’m interested in is how we were all individually shaped by this series.
When Iron Man came out, I remember going to see it with my friends in college for someone’s birthday. I immediately fell in love with that movie. I’m pretty sure I made my dad go see it with me after finals.
Flash forward a few years, and The Avengers comes out when I’m working at the Baptist Collegiate Ministry at Georgia State University. That movie was, in many ways, the culmination of one of the most important years of my life. And it was a great night to wrap up a year with some wonderful people I had come to know and love and minister to.
“Now why would you wear a Batman shirt to see The Avengers?”
I went to the movie with a bunch of my GSU students, and I wore a Batman t-shirt just to annoy them.
Then a few years later, when The Age of Ultron came out, I was married and teaching an adult Sunday School class. This was well before children were on the table. It was just the two of us and our friend group we could drop everything and go do something with. So we did.
And I was still wearing that Batman shirt.
Then a year ago, I had to leave my wife at home with our child so I could go see a comic book movie on opening night with a friend. And last night, the same friend and I got together to see the conclusion to a saga that will certainly define pop culture for this decade.
Almost 11 years to the day after we went to see Iron Man to celebrate his birthday, and a year after we saw Spider-Man turn to dust, my friend Rylan and I sat together in a different theatre in Athens to see Avengers: Endgame.
What makes long-form storytelling so amazing is how it contextualizes our own lives. No two people experience a story the same way. They all hit us at different points in our life, and our own unique experiences play into how we view them. That effect is experienced in an immense multiplication when we experience one story over the span of several years.
Not only do we experience that story at one point in our life, but that story, the way it intersects with each moment in our life, one after the other, serves to show us a snapshot of our selves and preserve it in time.
I would argue that I was the perfect age for this series. I was a 19- or 20-year old college guy when Iron Man hit the scene, and now I’m 30 with a child at home for the emotional zenith of this series. The way Marvel’s movies have grown with me perfectly mirrors the way Harry Potter fans grew with their series.
(Yes, I did read Harry Potter, but I kinda waited until the summer of 2007 and read all six previous books in the span of a month before Deathly Hallows came out, so I didn’t have nearly the same type of experience with that series. If anything, that’s how I know how meaningful the span of a series can be.)
In the same way that the TV show Community came out at the tail end of my college career, causing me to live through the nostalgia of college while going through it, the MCU has been a vital backdrop to my 20s. Not because these movies define my life, although I do enjoy them. It’s because of how they existed as part of my life and were something to measure the changes of life by.
That’s what makes long-form storytelling so powerful. I understand that some people may be tired of the comic book movie dominance, and I know that non-Marvel fans are going to read this and think I’m an obsessive nerd. And that’s fine.
The fact is, everyone has something that sits in the background of their life that serves this purpose to measure themselves and the way they change by. Everyone experiences the seasons of life, and we all find different ways to contextualize them with the world around us. You may think I’m obsessing over a pitiful series of meaningless popcorn flicks, and maybe I am, but I would encourage you to look at yourself and figure out what is serving that purpose for you.
As much as I’ve enjoyed the Marvel movies, and Endgame truly was one of the best film experiences I’ve ever had, I’m especially thankful for the way that these movies have given me memories with the people I care about and the times in my life that I can’t go back to.
I will never be able to revisit past episodes in my life. I can’t hop in a time machine and say, “Take me back to this night.” However, I can watch a movie that I saw once a long time ago and remember the time I went with my college brothers to see it, or the time I was up at midnight with a bunch of similarly-obsessive GSU students and how we sat at Steak’n Shake until 4am talking about this movie we all just watched together.
Then I can put on an old Batman t-shirt and go to the theatre with my closest friend of the last decade and a half and see how all of these disparate moments in life have coalesced into one beautiful story that I’m fortunate enough to live out.
“Now let’s blow this thing and go home! I’ve got tickets for the 7pm Avengers movie and if I’m not early I’m going to be stuck in the front row.” (Photo property LucasFilm)
That’s what makes the Marvel movies so powerful. That’s why I’ll tear up a little bit when the opening theme to Star Wars comes on this December and I’m there to see it. And when I’m one day sharing the joy of watching Luke Skywalker blow up the Death Star with my children, I’ll remember that time in Ocean Isle, NC that I saw Star Wars for the first time and the people who were there with me. And I’ll smile, because I know that my kids will always remember getting to share a bowl of popcorn and a movie with me.