Will we ever witness a superhero spectacle as grand as Avengers: Endgame?

My original article here.

6 May 2019

Last year, at pretty much exactly this time I sat down and wrote about how Avengers: Infinity War lives up to the 10 years and 18 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies worth of hype. And here I am doing it again for the spectacle that is Avengers: End Game.

Avengers: Infinity War lives up to high expectations

Ten years, 18 movies, a lot of hype and finally Avengers: Infinity War arrives. The question is, does the movie deliver?

BY CHARLES SIBOTO 2 MAY 2018

I say spectacle because this is what directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, have given us. They’ve made a film that surpasses ridiculously high expectations and services, now, 21 preceding MCU films with an insane amount of love and detail. This is by no means a perfect film in the sense that when YouTubers pick it apart and agonise over every detail that everything makes sense. We live in a time in which everyone’s a screenwriter and knows better than the people paid to do so – no film or series can meet those expectations.


This past weekend was huge for the geeky fandom. Avengers: Endgame was released to huge hype and the third episode of the last season of Game of Thrones promised us the biggest and longest night battle sequence since the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Social media was buzzing (and still is) with memes, spoilers and on Monday morning perhaps a sense of disappointment. I think both Endgame and Game of Thrones delivered and that emptiness that we now feel is that we won’t see such spectacle for a long time. Both Thanos and the Night King represent such a huge scale of threat and villainy that we just honestly don’t know where to go after this.

Picking up where we left off

I digress, though, we’re here for me to tell you about Endgame. I thought that after Avengers: Infinity War that all this movie could hope for is to be as good as that but, no, it goes and far surpasses that movie! The 181 minutes of runtime means that the movie pays attention to all the characters and give them all a bit of the spotlight. This also means that the movie can hit different thematic beats in its story. The movie opens with the remaining Avengers and the rest of the world recovering from and dealing with the repercussions of that finger snap from the last film that resulted in half of all life in the universe being wiped out. Everyone’s grieving and we spend time with the surviving characters, all of whom have lost people. The Avengers are not used to losing and Thanos has soundly defeated them so they’re at their lowest.

Avengers: Endgame is emotive and impactful

Avengers: Endgame has ensured that a 10-year journey has come to an end with a film so emotive and impactful that it will be spoken about, in reverence, for some time to come...

BY NATALIE LE CLUE 30 APR 2019

All the characters deal with their grief in their own way. Hawkeye is back and pretty much on a criminal murder spree after his family gets dusted. Tony Stark is angry at Captain America for not being there when he needed him and for the rift created between the team after the events of Captain America: Civil War. The Cap is running a survivor’s support group where he helps people move on from their grief but admits that he can’t move on.


Natasha tries to hold the rest of the Avengers team together because they’re the only family she has. Thor is in a state of self-loathing because he should have gone for the head. Everyone’s pretty much not having a great time. This part of the story also reveals a flaw in Thanos’ plan. He erased half of life in the universe but the remaining half hasn’t forgotten and instead of moving on people are stuck in their grief and the world goes through somewhat of an apocalypse because, well, half of the universe’s workforce is just gone.

Fan service and Easter eggs abound (*Spoiler alert*)

You can’t keep the Avengers down for too long, though, and the movie kicks it up a gear when Ant-Man escapes from the quantum realm and puts time travel on the table for the team. They come up with a plan they refer to as a time heist and go off to try and get back everything they lost. The time heist allows for many, many callbacks through the MCU’s past movies. This part is pure fan service and just a treasure trove of Easter eggs. The references to the MCU are just brilliant and the nods to other time travel movies make for a lot of laughs.

This part of the film is Marvel showing off their amazing ability to use humour whilst still making you feel like everything you love will be lost. It’s quite magical. The time heist itself is wibbly wobbly timey wimey and probably doesn’t make sense if you overthink it. Things obviously go wrong when you mess with time and the action kicks in on an epic scale from here on. It would be too much of a spoiler to tell you how huge everything becomes from here! Again, all I can say is that it’s a spectacle of astounding proportions! Thanos is still very much the main threat and he is still as menacing as ever.



Marvel has crafted a masterpiece with Endgame and I think whatever they do from here on out, it will remain as a highlight that will not be overshadowed anytime soon. You don’t need to have watched all the 21 preceding movies to enjoy this movie, but it sure as hell makes your experience so much better if you did. The MCU has taken what for the longest time could only be successfully done on the pages of comic books, showing off the sheer spectacle of a huge space villain like Thanos, that Mad Titan hell-bent on destroying half the universe on a massive scale. You don’t even understand, this movie is me reading Grant Morrison’s epic comic book, Final Crisis (DC, I know) and wondering how a comic book can be so massive in scale and emotion. Watching Endgame is like that and as the credits roll up you wonder if you’ll ever feel this way again.

Respect the Hustle

Hello there, you beautiful, beautiful souls :).

I had a chat with the lovely folks over at Freelance Cape Town some months back and they decided to publish the whole affair on their blog! Here I though we were just having a nice chat between friends. But since we are airing laundry you can go check out their post on my life as an editor and freelancer here.

Stay fresh and as the kids say, respect that good ol' hustle.

The Journey Thus Far . . .

Journeys have been an overarching theme in my life of late, whether it’s at work or at home. Journeys are perhaps one of the overarching themes of all life. That and running a race. All my teachers in primary school loved comparing life to running a race. I digress, though. What I want to get at is that when one is on a journey it is good to stop once in a while and take stock. Just stop, catch your breath, relax and look back at the way you have come. A little break also allows you to look at the road ahead and to plan a bit. I recently joined the wonderful people over at Freelance Cape Town as a freelancer (duh!). Marius Vosloo, the guy who heads the team up, immediately made me feel welcome and at home. They recently launched their blog, called Our Voice and it serves as a platform for creative people to be heard. Marius asked me to write something about my journey as a freelancer thus far. I haven’t looked back on the way I have come in a while and this proved to be the perfect opportunity for me to pause, take stock and reflect on my journey as Charles thus far and to add my voice to theirs and see what sort of music comes of it.

Dear Reader and fellow traveller, sit down and rest your feet a while and let me tell you my story.

My name is Charles Siboto and I am a reader and lover of beautiful stories. I haunt places where I can find good stories. My love for stories has resulted in me becoming someone who works with stories, whether they are my own or stories that other people wish to tell. I mainly prefer stories that other people tell because there is nothing better for me than getting so caught up in someone else’s visions that you just cannot help but love and understand that person a bit more than you did before being moved by their story. I grew up as a reader and from early on I knew that stories are magic and that I want to be a part of that magic when I grow up. I never knew in what capacity I would help make and spread more of this magic but at least I had a general direction in which to start looking for where I can fit in.

I am not even all that picky in my love for stories. I love the stories my grandmother told me as a child and listened to Gcina Mhlope on the radio every Saturday morning on a show she had that was sponsored by Joko tea. I can’t remember the name of the show but I loved the monsters she always told of and how the children in the stories always outsmarted them. I read books, comic books, played video games, watched movies and listen to weird radio dramas. I landed up studying English Literature, Linguistics and Literary studies and I loved most of it and hated some of it. I remember one instance in my fourth year of university where I read the comic book, Final Crisis by Grant Morrison and had one of the greatest moments of my life reading a story and it shook me to my core. Final Crisis is a massive story in its complexity and when Zillo Valla (if my memory serves me well), one of the beings in charge of protecting the multiverse utters the following words it just gets me every single time I read that story: "Behold: we monitors who were faceless once . . . We all have names now, and stories. There are heroes and villains . . . secrets and lovers." Things like this unstitch me. Somewhere in that comic book Superman asks that the words, To Be Continued be carved on his tombstone because humanity’s story never comes to an end, it always carries on. I read and love J.R.R. Tolkien and he taught me that some stories can break your heart and yet still strike you with sorrow as sharp as swords, eucatastrophe he called it, the good ending that breaks your heart.

Stories lead me to where I am today. My name is Charles Siboto and I am an editor of children’s books by day at one of South Africa’s biggest publishing houses. This is a great honour and privilege for me because it was a struggle for me to get my foot in that door but like any good character in your favourite stories, I persevered and always kept ongoing. I am also a freelancer in the sense that I use the majority of my free time to blog and write about books, movies, comic books, video games, technology, lifestyle events and even a dash of politics for various online media. I also offer my services as a proofreader and editor to almost just about anyone who needs it. Interestingly enough, French engineering students turn up on my doorstep with reports for me to proofread on a regular basis. This led me to my exciting new venture, Charles Siboto Bulletproofreading for Interns Abroad. A bit of a mouthful, right? But it’s all very exciting and I hope the venture does well. I have even dabbled in doing voiceovers, officially becoming the voice of one of our book characters at work, Dogtective William.

This, dear Reader and fellow traveller, is where I find myself currently. I am juggling a publishing career and exploring many avenues as a freelancer. I am learning a lot in both spaces and I love it. I’m working with stories and helping people who tell them find ways to tell them as clearly as possible, whether it’s an author writing a book for children or a company that needs content written to succinctly share their vision. My own story remains, always, to be continued . . .

Cupboard Person of the Week

Superman

“It's not about where you were born. Or what powers you have. Or what you wear on your chest. ... It's about what you do... It's about action.”

With the Batman trilogy's director, Christopher Nolan producing and 300's Zack Snyder in the director's chair I have faith the movie will be worthy of the Superman mythos.

This week I’m pulling out the biggest gun of them all! This post will be riddled with exclamation marks to emphasise the awesomeness of this more-than-man! Everything about this guy’s extreme; there are no half hearted attempts at anything on his part. I am referring, of course, to the greatest hero of them all, Kal-El or Superman as we know him on planet Earth.

The Sphinx: What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?

Superman: They Surrender.

-          Grant Morrison

Let me start off by saying that I didn’t like this guy much to begin with. In fact, there was a part of me that outright hated him! He was just too good at everything for me to take him seriously as a hero. He is almost perfect dammit! This is strange in itself, that I’d hate the guy for being too rad-ical. I liked (and still do) super muk muks (as Dan Turpin refers to ‘em) like Batman who are at the ‘peak’ of human excellence and whatnot because at the end of the day they’re human and if I train hard enough I could be like them. This was a naive thought, though, because when it’s all said and done Batman’s also too good to be true. Thus, after looking at Superman from a new perspective I’ve started appreciating him for what he is in the DC universe. I actually like him quite a lot now, especially after reading Final Crisis: Superman Beyond by Grant Morrison.

“It is a remarkable dichotomy. In many ways, Clark is the most human of us all. Then... he shoots fire from the skies and it is difficult not to think of him as a god. And how fortunate we all are that it does not occur to him.”

-          Batman

I agree with Batman's sentiment that Clark is the most human of us in that he lives up to most of the virtues that we uphold as being good and true but never seem to be able to live up to. He shares some similarities with Jesus in that regard. The whole idea of man made perfect and all. As our greatest hero he sets the standard for us. Philosopher, Peter Kreeft says of Christ that He is not the exception when it comes to being the perfect human being but the rule. Superman's whole ideal is the same, he seeks to inspire people to stand up and be more than they ever thought they were and to uphold justice in all that they do, regardless of their power and abilities. People don't have to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound to stand up against the tyrannies of this world. But it does look cool dealing with them by shooting heat rays out of one's eyes, you have to admit.

Superman's one of the most powerful beings in the DC universe but his humilty is quite astonishing and he is willing to give his all, body and soul, to protect is adopted homeworld against powerful threats like Darkseid, who in Final Crisis launches an attack against existence itself. In a squeeze Superman's the dude you want by your side: powers that embody the term badassery (a real made-up word, Thato!) and humility that makes you think you're on the same level as he is. He is without a doubt DC's greates hero and I, for one, cannot wait to see him in all his glory on the silver screen next year in Man of Steel. I really hope the reboot does him justice because all the movies thus far made him seem a little bit silly. With the Batman trilogy's director, Christopher Nolan producing and 300's Zack Snyder in the director's chair I have faith the movie will be worthy of the Superman mythos.


P.S. That turned out a little more serious than I'd intended. Not enough Pow! and Bam!