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.

Winter is Coming!

"The Starks are always right, eventually. Winter is coming."

It is upon us, in fact.

The first episode of Season 4 aired last Sunday night in the US and we, here in sunny South Africa, will be getting it from the 18th of April. Needless to say that we are all very excited for new episodes of the show that has gotten many a fantasy hating soul into the genre. This could have something to do with fact that you see a lot of boobs in the show but the convoluted and fun plot does eventually win over boobs (not taking anything away from boobs, they are one of life's coolest things). It's also morbidly exciting to see which of your favourite characters will get killed off next because George R.R. Martin clearly takes the whole Valar morghulis business seriously.

Since winter actually is approaching here in SA I decided to spend as many of the precious sunny days we have left being a beach bum. I've been lying on the beach getting all kinds of excited about one of the best shows on TV right now and recapping on the previous three seasons when I get home. This is the one show I'm glad to see without having read the books beforehand. There are just so may unexpected deaths and surprises that it's nice to be genuinely surprised for once.

The best thing about the show is the grey morality. There are extremely good characters and extremely evil characters but most just hover in that grey area between good and evil. You spend a lot of time hating people for being such tools and then you find yourself liking them a few more episodes in. Everyone's out for vengeance or power and you spend a lot of time rooting for people and then switching sides because they are entirely stupid or they get killed. It's interesting to see how the story will unfold because there is so much happening in the fringes that no one seems to care about: dragons, wildlings; creepy, undead guys called White Walkers and even more creepy, and possibly undead, guys called the Others. Shit is real and everyone squabbling over a super uncomfortable throne made of sharp swords! By the time the story reaches a climax everyone might be dead.

I've met people who don't like the show because they don't like fantasy in general (which is fine) or they are hipsters and hate anything mainstream even if it's actually good. The haters seem to complain that the show is mainly about sex. This is not true. The show does have a lot of sex and but it's also rather violent. It still bothers me that people are cut up about sex but are fine with violence . . . The show is more than sex and violence though. The story takes elements like sex, violence, politics, magic and dubious morality and plays with them in interesting ways. This is why we like stories as a race, they let us experience things in ways which we normally would not.

Don't be an asshat and let your kids watch the show unless you're a super cool parent who actually teaches your kids about mature issues. You really can't blame GoT for the way your kids or pets turn out. Take some responsibility once in your life. If you hate the show that's fine, just don't watch it. Also, try and hide from all the fans because they will chew your ear off about it. The whole thing's like Breaking Bad all over again ;).

For everyone else, enjoy Season 4.