Game of stones

Thanos, voiced by Josh Brolin, in Avengers: Endgame

At the end of Avengers: Endgame Thor and the Hulk come out of the closet, tie the knot in Las Vegas and live happily ever after in Asgard. Yes, I’m making that up, even though I think they would make a sweet couple.

I’m doing so because this is a movie where spoilers are so frowned upon that one American high school sent an email to parents urging them to tell their children not to reveal the twists and turns to their classmates.

“We as administrators understand the magnitude of an event like this,” they said of the movie. Forget Thanos and the obliteration of the universe. That sentence alone would be enough for me to remove my child from the school.

Elsewhere, American football star LeSean McCoy “infuriated the Twitterverse” by sharing details of the movie and, in Hong Kong, people in the ticket queue beat up a man who started revealing too much.

Not that the spoilers have stopped anyone from seeing the movie. Twitter is not full of people spitting, “What???? Hawkeye has a new haircut? That’s ruined everything!!!! I’m staying home.” At the time of writing Avengers: Endgame had taken more than $US1.5 billion ($2.1bn) at the global box office in less than a week and was set to break all financial records for a superhero movie. The weird thing about all of this, aside from it just being plain weird, is that Avengers movies, like all superhero flicks, are hard to spoil because they don’t play by human rules. Characters die in one movie and return in another. Time is irrelevant, and that’s a deliberate part of the narrative and fun to think about.

Before watching this movie I saw a trailer for the next planet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Dark Phoenix, an X-Men instalment starring Sophie Turner aka Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones. My 13-year-old looked at me and said, “Hasn’t everyone in the X-Men movies died already?” I wasn’t sure of the answer. Maybe.

The other weird thing about this fear of spoilers is that the marketing of such movies, especially the near-endless trailers, reveals far more, to a worldwide audience, than does some bloke standing outside a Hong Kong cinema.

The trailer for Thor: Ragnarok, one of the best Marvel movies, showed the scene where Thor is forced into a gladiatorial ring. The gates open to show his invincible opponent … and it’s the Hulk. This, perhaps the start of their on-screen bromance, was something I would have preferred to have come as a surprise.

So all I will say is that significant things happen to major characters by the end of Avengers: Endgame. For this reason I return to Thanos, the intergalactic despot who is the alleged villain. It’s partly why we are running a photograph of him here rather than one of an Avenger. We could have run a revealing one of Captain America, say, or Iron Man, supplied by the movie distributors, but to do so may reveal too much.

That’s not to say that nothing unusual happens to Thanos, voiced and motion-captured by Josh Brolin. His moments towards the end are quietly brilliant. Viewers will have to find out for themselves. He is my favourite character in this movie and in its predecessor from last year, Avengers: Infinity War, the first superhero film to crack $US2bn in global box-office earnings.

We know that at the end of Infinity War Thanos, in possession of the five infinity stones that bring unprecedented power, snaps his fingers and wipes out half of all life in the universe. In that flick of the stone-studded gauntlet, important members of the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy, and their human supporters from the Shield, appear to die. The question is: will they stay dead in this new movie?

Thanos is something of a philosopher-god. “I am inevitable,” he says, not by way of warning but as statement of fact. Having decided the creatures of the universe — among whom earthlings are just a minor irritant — have failed to appreciate their good fortune, he unleashes a Noah-like flood on them. Later, he comes to understand that half-measure was not enough. He must build a new universe, with new life, where everyone is happy. I confess I see his point.

So, as the new film starts, we have a universe in ruins and a bedraggled group of superheroes who have lost the fight they were supposed to win. This is one of the absorbing parts of Avengers: Endgame, something that takes it towards the greatest Marvel movie of recent times, Logan (2017), with Hugh Jackman as a washed-up Wolverine. I wasn’t running a stopwatch but I reckon Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner, with odd hair) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) spend more time on screen in ordinary clothes than in villain-fighting costumes.

Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) does not, for wonderful reasons I cannot reveal. And Thor’s off-duty dress and demeanour is the highlight of the movie. Hemsworth has long hogged the humour on the Avengers patch, and nothing changes here except the fact he has been CGI-ed in a way no one would expect.

This unmasking of the superheroes reduces them to people (or Gods of Thunder), with all their conflicting emotions. It takes them to their mistakes and regrets, to their friendship, to their love and to their anger. Tony Stark/Iron Man thinks Steve Rogers/Captain America is a liar and perhaps a coward. Thor thinks they should all leave him in peace in Norway.

This shift also lets good actors act. Downey Jr, free of the iron suit, reminds us what a class act he is. Tilda Swinton does the same in a brief but blistering appearance as the Ancient One. She shows the Hulk that green power is not the only way to light up a room.

It is this part of the story, the human side, to narrow it down to our marginal planet, that holds the movie together for its three-hour run time. If anything, the climactic battle scene — inevitable, as Thanos would say — is what I would trim.

But, yes, this is an Avengers movie so the costumes do have to be donned eventually.

The basic plot is that Scott Lang/Ant-Man comes up with a plan to time travel, retrieve the infinity stones, stop Thanos from doing what he has already done, and return billions of people and other creatures to the universe.

This leads to two things: a series of clever jokes about Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 movie Back to the Future and, in a related sense, an intriguing intellectual discussion about time. Can changing the past change the future, the future being the present just left to return to the past? Lang, having been trampled on by the bigger brains of Stark and Banner, sort of encapsulates the answer: “So Back to the Future is a bunch of bullshit?”

Whether the time travel works is for viewers to find out, but I can say that a moment comes when the present-day Avengers meet their former selves, and it is outstanding, as is an extended sequence where Stark and Rogers return to the 1970s. Here, again, Downey Jr knocks it out of the park. And Stan Lee makes his posthumous cameo.

Indeed, I would have liked the whole movie to be about this confluence of different times. Will today’s Captain America fight the Captain American of five years ago? He always has been, despite all of his white T-shirt Uncle Sam-ness, at war with himself. Will Thor see his former self and decide his future should be with the Hulk?

Let’s not rule it out, just as Disney boss Bob Iger, the man in charge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has not ruled out another Avengers movie. Endgame is just a word.

Avengers: Endgame (M)

National release

3 stars