The biggest let down with Endgame was not Fat Thor. (Spoilers)

[Beaddle]

The fat Thor gag didn’t bother me for a second. Endgame’s biggest let down was time travel. Time Travel plot devices are a battered over used trope in fiction. Endgame went on to deliver one of the most cliche use of time travel in a film and believe me, I have seen everything time travel, right down to the ridiculousness of Hot Tube Time Machine, chick flicks romance like The Time Traveller’s Wife, science fiction movies that range from Star Trek:The Voyage home to De Ja Vu, The Days of future Past and Dragon Ball Z:The history of Trunks anime comic movies to straight on wizard fantasy like Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Endgame's has one of the cheapest time travel stories ever. The movie broke the rules of how to tell a good time travel story. Time travel plot devices are supposed to be constant in a movie about time. It’s the other main character that doesn’t speak dialogue but remains the most important character. Writers don’t introduce time travel in one act, make it work completely and get rid of it in the same act. Endgame is Disney’s juvenile science fiction writing at the very worst. Time travel plot devices are meant to be more effective in the final moments of the movie’s story, raising the stakes in time travel films. We the audience or reader must believe that the protagonists in the story are aware that time can slip from their hands even in the final moments. Time travel movies are not meant to have a fixed ending either due to ripple effects. Writers tend to create doubts in the readers mind, making them wonder if the protagonists did change the past or create an alternate reality.

Away from the dismal time travel plot and fat Thor, the final moments of Endgame should have gotten scrapped to avoid any call backs to Loki from Avengers 1. It’s the cliche of all cliches tropes. Don’t writers have another trope they can use for Avengers movies than a Villain who brings armies from another dimension for the Avengers to fight.The movie should have had the final act focus more on the time travel element than treating it as a one off arc in the second act of the movie. What would have been more predictable than using time travel to bring everyone back to fight Thanos? We called it after Infinity War and marvel did that exactly.

The other biggest let down of Endgame was trying to set up what looks like a dystopian movie without it not wanting to be a dystopian movie five years after Infinity War. It felt as if Marvel was holding back on fully embracing the link between time travel stories and dystopian stories. Marvel did not want the audience to believe our Avengers are now in a bleak world of shambles, I am convinced Marvel came up with the fat thor gag to ease the idea of dystopianility in Endgame, Bruce Banner as a happy professor,Tony Stark living a normal family life. Great time travel stories comes from the need of the protagonists realization of a world that has no choice but to be free from bleakness, not a world the protagonists become too comfortable in their present situation. The only person who is utterly affected with the events of Infinity war was Hawkeye. Endgame may have been a fan service love letter ending to the series but Endgame was too juvenile for what it was trying to take on or failed to embrace, gut wrenching dystopian time travel movies.

[AJBopp]

Just wanna point some things I always thought were obvious.

There are no rules about time travel stories. The whole point of a good story is to create its own little reality for you to escape into. If it bugs someone that a story used time travel is a way that didn't meet their expectations, that's on them, not the movie. "Time travel plot devices are supposed to be...." "Writers don’t introduce time travel in one act, make it work completely and get rid of it in the same act" "Time travel plot devices are meant to be" "Time travel movies are not meant to have" are all examples of a a mindset not prepared to enjoy a fantasy story for what it is, unless it's a retread of something they saw before. In reality, the best stories, especially the fantasy ones, don't work that way.

And fat Thor was dismal apparently, but it's never explained why. I wonder if there's really a reason for this beyond "it's not what was expected"

I wonder what would have been an improved third act if there hadn't been thousands of "killable" adversaries for 50 Avengers to battle with. This scene was the one thing everyone in the world wanted to see. Had been waiting years to see.

All of the remaining Avengers were coping with a dystopian world except Tony and Bruce (and we can't be sure about Bruce, but I'll go with that part we actually see on screen). How is it possible to miss this?

[80sbaby]

I'm going to agree with AJBopp...it seems your issues come from preconceived notions about time travel (which the film specifically tells you NOT to do) and missing a few things in regards to their bleak present.

I'm also not sure if you know what "cliche" means?

[Jokerz79]

I actually found Endgames use of time travel the most sound I ever saw in a film and I love time travel movies they're fun but they all run into Paradox problems when changing history.

Outside of Dr. Who which has two main rules to time travel to avoid paradoxes one Fix Points in time moments which if changed the ramifications are too vast for the timeline to handle and thus can't be changed and two you can't change events you already know the outcome of.

The idea if you change history it creates a separate parallel timeline to your own is really good way to explain away paradoxes.

[Calighoula]

I wonder what would have been an improved third act if there hadn't been thousands of "killable" adversaries for 50 Avengers to battle with. This scene was the one thing everyone in the world wanted to see. Had been waiting years to see.

What would have improved the third act is actually having Hulk do something apart from recreating the cover to Secret Wars #4 for 15 seconds.

[Scott Taylor]

All throughout the Avengers and related movies they've been very careful on exactly how the Hulk is used. By necessity, because he could ruin any storyline potentially with very little effort.

Overall I have been disappointed with the various starts and stops with the Hulk, with little to no explanation. He went from raging Hulk to intelligent raging Hulk to Professor Hulk. Somewhere in the middle had this romantic thing with Natalie. Those movies just bumbled all over the place with him. But it was like all the MCU movies, the actor had enough charisma to pull it off and make it enjoyable anyhow.

[Calighoula]

All throughout the Avengers and related movies they've been very careful on exactly how the Hulk is used. By necessity, because he could ruin any storyline potentially with very little effort.

Overall I have been disappointed with the various starts and stops with the Hulk, with little to no explanation. He went from raging Hulk to intelligent raging Hulk to Professor Hulk. Somewhere in the middle had this romantic thing with Natalie. Those movies just bumbled all over the place with him. But it was like all the MCU movies, the actor had enough charisma to pull it off and make it enjoyable anyhow.

That forced invisible romance with Natasha was so silly. I think very few people found that viable. At this point, I don't care if they recast Ruffalo. It's been downhill for him since the first Avengers.

[ChrisIII]

As a Hulk fan I'm a bit dissapointed with how the MCU Hulk turned out. While certainly he's fun, he's really far from the comics Hulk, and Rufallo's Banner really has none of the inner turmoil of the comic's character (Even without the father/mental illness aspect to his origin introduced in the 80s, Hulk was always a bit angsty, even compared to other down-on-their-luck heroes like Spidey). I guess after the more serious approach utilized in the Ang Lee and Norton films they figured a serious Hulk wouldn't work out, and of course there's the rights issues with Universal which I guess prevent a solo Hulk.

[Powerboy]

The fat Thor gag didn’t bother me for a second. Endgame’s biggest let down was time travel. Time Travel plot devices are a battered over used trope in fiction. Endgame went on to deliver one of the most cliche use of time travel in a film and believe me, I have seen everything time travel, right down to the ridiculousness of Hot Tube Time Machine, chick flicks romance like The Time Traveller’s Wife, science fiction movies that range from Star Trek:The Voyage home to De Ja Vu, The Days of future Past and Dragon Ball Z:The history of Trunks anime comic movies to straight on wizard fantasy like Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Endgame's has one of the cheapest time travel stories ever. The movie broke the rules of how to tell a good time travel story. Time travel plot devices are supposed to be constant in a movie about time. It’s the other main character that doesn’t speak dialogue but remains the most important character. Writers don’t introduce time travel in one act, make it work completely and get rid of it in the same act. Endgame is Disney’s juvenile science fiction writing at the very worst. Time travel plot devices are meant to be more effective in the final moments of the movie’s story, raising the stakes in time travel films. We the audience or reader must believe that the protagonists in the story are aware that time can slip from their hands even in the final moments. Time travel movies are not meant to have a fixed ending either due to ripple effects. Writers tend to create doubts in the readers mind, making them wonder if the protagonists did change the past or create an alternate reality.

Away from the dismal time travel plot and fat Thor, the final moments of Endgame should have gotten scrapped to avoid any call backs to Loki from Avengers 1. It’s the cliche of all cliches tropes. Don’t writers have another trope they can use for Avengers movies than a Villain who brings armies from another dimension for the Avengers to fight.The movie should have had the final act focus more on the time travel element than treating it as a one off arc in the second act of the movie. What would have been more predictable than using time travel to bring everyone back to fight Thanos? We called it after Infinity War and marvel did that exactly.

The other biggest let down of Endgame was trying to set up what looks like a dystopian movie without it not wanting to be a dystopian movie five years after Infinity War. It felt as if Marvel was holding back on fully embracing the link between time travel stories and dystopian stories. Marvel did not want the audience to believe our Avengers are now in a bleak world of shambles, I am convinced Marvel came up with the fat thor gag to ease the idea of dystopianility in Endgame, Bruce Banner as a happy professor,Tony Stark living a normal family life. Great time travel stories comes from the need of the protagonists realization of a world that has no choice but to be free from bleakness, not a world the protagonists become too comfortable in their present situation. The only person who is utterly affected with the events of Infinity war was Hawkeye. Endgame may have been a fan service love letter ending to the series but Endgame was too juvenile for what it was trying to take on or failed to embrace, gut wrenching dystopian time travel movies.

Actually, my pet peeve is people who use the word "trope" especially over and over. By definition, everything in a story is a trope.

I'm sure we can nickpick the continuity of how time travel works just as we can in Star Trek. I also get it if the story just didn't work for you but it mostly worked for me quite nicely *as a story* and I say that as someone who thought some of the time travel results were questionable.

[Cyke]

Actually, my pet peeve is people who use the word "trope" especially over and over. By definition, everything in a story is a trope.

Just to support this statement, an analogy helped me out early on to understand what the word "Trope" meant. Consider a story as any material -- liquid, gas, solid, whatever. Whether it be a desk or ketchup or oxygen, the one thing they all have in common is that they're comprised and bound by molecules. Different compositions of molecules, but molecules nonetheless. The story is the material, but tropes are the molecular bonds. And tropes evolve based on what the writer knows over their vast knowledge and experience; after all, every writer writes (and must write) what they know.

Even if you're trying to avoid a trope, it's still in acknowledgement of the trope's existence, too. Trying to avoid a cliche still means using a trope in some way -- an aversion, subversion, avoidance, etc. Avoiding a trope typically means seeing warning signs. You know you're trying to create ketchup and not marinara sauce; you know what it takes to create one and not the other, and hopefully you know how to prevent your ketchup from turning into any other sauce.

So tropes are the building blocks of stories. No story, no matter how original, is without tropes. Stories themselves came from poems and anecdotes and history, but the first tropes were often repeated by oral storytellers seeking to create new stories out of the ones they had heard when those stories were passed down.

I'm sure we can nickpick the continuity of how time travel works just as we can in Star Trek. I also get it if the story just didn't work for you but it mostly worked for me quite nicely *as a story* and I say that as someone who thought some of the time travel results were questionable.

Also, this is an an almost meta example of trope aversion, but still requiring the knowledge of said-trope. The writers explicitly said that time travel in the movie wouldn't work like it does in Star Trek, so they sought to avoid the time travel tropes found there (and as they point out, not unique to Star Trek either). But the fact that the writers had the characters use Star Trek, BTTF, and others as references put on full display the awareness of that trope. In order for the writers to avoid those tropes, they had to know about them in the first place.