Ten separate franchises. 21 full length movies. Over 48 hours of total runtime. All of this led up to one epic movie that Marvel had been building up to for the 11 years since the first Iron Man movie was released. The product was a three-hour-long Russo brothers passion project that successfully managed to close up the Marvel Cinematic Universe we know and love while simultaneously leaving the door open for future Marvel movies.

The movie starts with the Avengers seen directly after the events of Avengers: Infinity War, as they are planning how to reverse the devastating effects of Thanos’s snap. The plan they decide on fails and they are left hopeless. The movie quickly fast-forwards five years and the Russo brothers decide to show us what our heroes are like without the Avengers. Parts of the group can be seen conducting missions in space while the others can be seen helping the community, becoming masked vigilantes, or even settling into a quiet lives. Overall, the scene helps hammer in (no pun intended) the importance of the team for each member of the group as for the most part they seem lost without it.

The action starts with Ant Man miraculously being freed from the quantum realm where he had been trapped for five years. He then concocts a plan of action that reunifies the broken group. The time travel scene in the movie is both nostalgic and magnificently executed. It allows the viewer to be transported back to past movies as our current heroes look for the stones to assemble a new gauntlet. This scene celebrates all that Marvel has achieved with its groundbreaking universe. It has managed to create unique film franchises that still manage to intertwine so that character arcs are consistent and plot holes are few and far between.

After these flashback-like scenes, we are reminded that Thanos still exists in the alternate timeline. He travels back from the alternate timeline to meet the Avengers five years after the snap. As he would say himself, at this point in the movie it truly did seem that half the population’s fate was “inevitable.” The battle for the gauntlet was the last time that viewers got to truly see all of the Avengers in action as they took on Thanos’ army in the battle for their world. The scene was quite possibly the most pivotal scene of any Marvel movie up until this point and exemplified why the movie was amazing. This scene was exactly what the audience wanted to see while at the same time being a melancholy glance at something they may never see again: the full force of the Avengers on screen.

The rest of the movie wraps up all of the plot points and, with them, over a decade of forethought and planning. When the final credits rolled, you could feel the emotion of the entire audience. Marvel did what should have been impossible: finding a fitting conclusion to their cinema masterpiece. No good thing lasts forever, and this movie successfully closed off an eleven-year period of amazing movies, compelling characters, and unique storytelling. Avengers: Endgame may very well become the biggest movie of all time. The planning that went into the execution was unparalleled and the escalation of movies leading up to it was stunning. Millions of people grew up with these heroes and got the chance to watch the movies evolve and improve each year to build towards the epic climax that was Endgame. The movie is smashing nearly all preceding records, and deservedly so.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe series is likely something we will never see repeated. It was a bold gamble by Marvel that paid off incredibly. The movies made the comics accessible to everyone and reinvigorated people’s love for the superheroes of their childhood. To be honest, I could write for days about the importance of the movies to me and how much I have cherished them all. However, in the words of the legendary visionary Stan Lee, “’nuff said.”

This piece also appears in our May 2019 print edition.