Back in 2019, in the wake of Avengers Endgame, I wrote an article called "Why the Endgame Matters" about the cultural impact of the film and why a silly superhero adventure was one of the most important moments in the decade. Like most of the insightful, thoughtful and passionate stuff I write on here, no one read it. My review of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter however, still gets regular hits. Media literacy was already dying before AI folks, AI is just the cowhammer to the skull of an entire generation of readers. Anyway, I went to see Avengers Endgame Encore the day after it dropped (that was a soon as I could get there) and, once again, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. So let's do this again. Whatever it takes. For starters, the "additional content" in the Encore is a series of post-credit scenes that tie into Doomsday (which I'll go over later) and an introduction from Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. There are no AI-replaced actors, or changed lines or anything like that. There's been a bit of cleanup and some ADR, but otherwise, Encore is the film that's been burnt into my soul for seven years and counting.
Watching Earth's Mightiest Heroes battle Thanos and travel through time again, the main feeling I found myself sitting with (aside from unmitigated glee) was one that I have become increasingly familiar with as I approach my 40th birthday; nostalgia. Given my time spent researching online Far-Right radicalisation, nostalgia is something I tend to wary of in general, so it took me a fair chunk of Encore before it occurred to me that the time I was being whistful for wasn't some mythical time of my childhood when I had an incomplete understanding of the world; it was for less than 10 years ago. I missed 2019. Acutely. The obvious reason behind this feeling was clearly that I miss the MCU films being good, right? No, actually. Though the "Superhero Media" will take a while to come through the backlog, I have enjoyed much of Wave 4 and think that after nearly 20 years, expecting every film to be the same quality is a little silly. Nor was I more than reasonably melancholy to see Chadwick Boseman in his iconic role again; rest in power, king. No, as I sat there positively rapt with joy, I found I wanted to return to a world before COVID.
Now this isn't just some "the last decade has been shit" rant (though it has), but rather, I believe Avengers Endgame was the last big cultural moment the Global North shared before the pandemic started and that by watching again with all that behind us, not to mention the wars, genocide and climate collapse due to AI ahead of us is a genuinely uplifting experience. And one we can learn from. The tech bros, governments and billionaires they all work for and aspire to be are Thanos. They aren't just winning, they won a long time ago, before most of us were born. We may not be able to pull off a time heist, we may not save the world, but we can sure as hell Avenge it. If this is the end of everything we've known then I want to drag the ones who caused it with us. Whatever it takes. We lost so much during the pandemic because the few didn't want to make less money and it never changed. We don't have super powers but we can vote, march, join unions, write letters, shoplift, engage with the community, punch a cop, bomb a pipeline, delete Facebook, use public transport, help each other. Assemble. We are Groot.
