The latest edition of Honest Trailers is here to take on Avengers: Endgame, and they’ve left no Infinity Stone unturned in their quest to (lovingly) rip the biggest movie of all time a new one. While the team behind the series clearly has some love for Marvel’s epic conclusion to the Infinity Saga, they also have more than a few bones to pick with the follow-up to Infinity War. Joe and Anthony Russo may have directed an immensely successful crowd-pleaser, but nothing is perfect.
The video kicks off by pointing out that Avengers: Endgame is a whole lot more than the conclusion it was set up to be. It’s the end of Phase 3, sets the table for Phase 4, puts the pieces of the puzzle in place for upcoming Disney+ shows and so much more. They then discuss how the five years that have passed since Infinity War have changed things, making jokes about how many parts of culture seem frozen in 2017, baseball still being unpopular and director Joe Russo casting himself in an early scene, which actually wound up being a bit more important than this video makes it out to be, as he was the first openly gay character in the MCU.
But that is neither here nor there. Once the Honest Trailers gang gets to the meat of this thing, it’s pretty great. Much of the time is dedicated to dissecting the movie’s much-discussed time travel. It’s no secret that Marvel didn’t treat time travel like audiences are used to, thanks to movies like Back to the Future, but that made for a confusing mess that works for the overall narrative, yet leaves a lot of open-ended questions. Rightfully, this element is picked apart in the video.
Related: Tony Stark’s Endgame Snap Backed by Black Sabbath’s Iron Man Is Truly Epic
Much of the runtime of this longer-than-usual edition of the popular web series is spent looking into the individual character arcs of the main characters. Many excellent and hilarious points are made. Captain American has adapted to modern times better than we may have realized, Tony still gets the last word and Black Widow’s storyline is, from a certain point of view, in service of the male heroes. There’s also the matter of Captain Marvel, who is so powerful that the creative team had to find ways not to have her around just to make things challenging enough for the Avengers who were left on Earth.
At the end of the day, a little hazing isn’t going to damage this movie’s legacy. Avengers: Endgame, as the end of this movie cleverly points out, is now the highest-grossing movie of all time, managing to take in a staggering $2.79 billion at the box office, which was enough to finally overtake James Cameron’s Avatar. Cameron’s sci-fi epic held the record for nearly a decade. Should the latest from the Russo brothers earn any Oscar nominations later this year, its place in cinema history will only be further cemented. Be sure to check out the Honest Trailer from the Screen Junkies YouTube channel for yourself.
