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

[Donald]

If you can't change the past, just create an alternate time line, then there is still a time line where half the universe is dead.

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[luprki]

Yes, the Infinity Wars timeline still exist with half of the universe is still dead. Endgame didn’t solve anything, it just gave us a different timeline, a total cop out.

[AJBopp]

Yes, the Infinity Wars timeline still exist with half of the universe is still dead. Endgame didn’t solve anything, it just gave us a different timeline, a total cop out.

That is the primary thing the movie was very explicit about not happening.

[Donald]

That is the primary thing the movie was very explicit about not happening.

If the past can't be changed, how did it not happen?

[WebLurker]

Yes, the Infinity Wars timeline still exist with half of the universe is still dead. Endgame didn’t solve anything, it just gave us a different timeline, a total cop out.

No. While the Decimation time timeline continued to exist, they resurrected everyone killed in the Snap in the present of that timeline. All the different timelines were erased by returning the Stones. Seriously, all this was explained in the movie itself pretty bluntly.

If the past can't be changed, how did it not happen?

When they "went back" in time, they create a parallel timeline and stayed there until they retuned to the present of their own timeline to reassemble the Infinity Gauntlet using alternate reality Infinity Stones. The movie did explain this.

[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.

[80sbaby]

No. While the Decimation time timeline continued to exist, they resurrected everyone killed in the Snap in the present of that timeline. All the different timelines were erased by returning the Stones. Seriously, all this was explained in the movie itself pretty bluntly.



When they "went back" in time, they create a parallel timeline and stayed there until they retuned to the present of their own timeline to reassemble the Infinity Gauntlet using alternate reality Infinity Stones. The movie did explain this.

No, the alternate timelines still exist. Returning the stones was so they could still be used in those alternate timelines.

[AJBopp]

No, the alternate timelines still exist. Returning the stones was so they could still be used in those alternate timelines.

Just pointing at that there were no alternate timelines in the movie at all. Everything happened in the same timeline, including the end of the movie. It was quite clear about this.

[80sbaby]

Just pointing at that there were no alternate timelines in the movie at all. Everything happened in the same timeline, including the end of the movie. It was quite clear about this.

Not true, according to what Banner, Nebula, the Ancient One or the Russo's have said. It's also not what was shown, hence Nebula being able to kill "herself."

[WebLurker]

No, the alternate timelines still exist. Returning the stones was so they could still be used in those alternate timelines.

No, rewatch the scene when the Ancient One and Hulk discuss the problem; returning the stones "prunes" the branches; Hulk specifically explains that after the Ancient One argues that giving him her Stone will screw up her future.

Just pointing at that there were no alternate timelines in the movie at all. Everything happened in the same timeline, including the end of the movie. It was quite clear about this.

That is literally the exact opposite of what everyone in the movie says.

[80sbaby]

No, rewatch the scene when the Ancient One and Hulk discuss the problem; returning the stones "prunes" the branches; Hulk specifically explains that after the Ancient One argues that giving him her Stone will screw up her future.

Having seen the film 5 times, I'm positive in what I'm saying. The AO refers to only being concerned about preserving "her timeline" in that conversation with Hulk. The branch that would be clipped is the dark one where she didn't have the stone.

[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.

[MarkRodriguez09]

IDK, I kinda liked the struggle of things actually working out for Tony and Banner but understanding that if they have a chance to save billions they can, even if it means changing things that could potentially ruin what they have now. In Tony's case, he paid the ultimate price and his daughter will grow up without a father.

[Jokerz79]

Yes, the Infinity Wars timeline still exist with half of the universe is still dead. Endgame didn’t solve anything, it just gave us a different timeline, a total cop out.

They didn't change their past they didn't stop the snap they just brought everyone back.

[Powerboy]

That is the primary thing the movie was very explicit about not happening.

Exactly. The movie had characters explaining how time travel "really works" in detail specifically to clarify that they were actually changing the past, not creating an alternate timeline.

I think the first time I ever read the idea of time travel as an alternate timeline was in David Gerrold's the Man who F'd I mean Folded Himself. It was a great idea to make time travel a little more palatable to our linear minded brains. But it's only one take on time travel. The Avengers took a point of view that there is one reality or at least only one that is accessible and it can be rewritten.