The Avengers Messed Up

The Avengers Messed Up

How our favorite superheroes ruined the world they meant to save

© Marvel Studios

It’s no spoiler to reveal that in Avengers: Endgame, the good guys end up defeating the bad guys. That’s just how superhero stories work — at least in the second half of a two-part film series. But the Avengers don’t seem to realize that they’ve created many more problems in the process. The end result: The Earth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still totally screwed.

(Major spoilers for Avengers: Endgame follow. But come on — you’ve already seen it.)

Oh, those Avengers. Both individually and together, they’ve saved the planet many times over. Sure, sometimes they accidentally create a robot that freaks out and decides the best way to protect Earth is by destroying humanity, which is, admittedly, not technically incorrect — but the Avengers mean well!

After Thanos wiped out half the life in the universe during Infinity War, the Avengers finally have a chance to live up to their name and actually, you know, avenge something in Endgame. Unfortunately, it takes them five full years to do so — five years during which the remaining population of Earth is forced to live with the loss of countless loved ones, in a world where every aspect of civilization is suddenly half-staffed. Endgame doesn’t really linger on the horrifying effects this must have had, emotionally and socially, other than to briefly show how many people still can’t cope with their losses, and how the survivors have tried to consolidate their lives in a much emptier world than the one they used to live in.

Literally every single person who disappeared would have lost their jobs as companies, industries, consumers, and profits adjusted to the new normal.

This makes sense, because it’s pretty dark stuff. So when the Avengers manage to figure out how to travel through time, you’d probably expect them — I certainly expected them — to prevent Thanos from snapping his fingers at all, erasing the half-decade of suffering and chaos from ever happening. Nope. Because of the very specific time travel rules Endgame establishes (which are dodgy!) the Avengers can only bring back those who were killed to their new present. Which they do, and herein lies the problem.

There is absolutely no way the Earth could handle its population suddenly doubling. Food production would have most likely been halved since the snap, meaning the returning 3.5 billion people would have very little to eat, for months at minimum — although it’s not like they’d be able to afford to buy food. Literally, every single person who disappeared would have lost their jobs as companies, industries, consumers, and profits adjusted to the new normal. In the instant of the Great Unsnap, the world’s unemployment jumped to around 50%. The global economy would likely collapse entirely.

To be fair, resurrecting half the universe didn’t technically make the Avengers responsible for making sure these people were fed and sheltered. So let’s turn to a massive problem that is entirely of their own making: Time. As I mentioned above, almost no time travel movie has rules that make sense, although Endgame sure goes out of its way when Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk establish the importance of not altering the past, so alternate timelines are not created. The Hulk explains that by borrowing the Infinity Stones in the past and returning them to the same minute they were taken, assuming no one notices, nothing in their timeline will have actually changed. Of course, this also assumes that the Avengers don’t screw things up.

Boy, do the Avengers screw things up. They mess with the timeline so much, in fact, it’s almost comical — to the point that it’s genuinely baffling that the movie pretended there were rules at all. The big alteration, of course, is that when present-day Nebula returns to 2014 to steal the Power Stone (just before the events of Guardians of the Galaxy), it turns out she shares the same Wi-Fi network as 2014 Nebula, allowing 2014 Thanos to discover the Avengers’ plan and hitch a ride to the present, using the Avengers’ time machine. The end result is that the Avengers win when Tony Stark unsnaps this younger Thanos and his minions out of existence.

You don’t need to be Stephen Hawking to figure out the problems of the Avengers killing the Thanos of five years earlier — before he managed to get his big purple hands on the Infinity Stones at all. It means, of course, that the first Snap never happened at all, because Thanos died before he could do it. So no one ever died at all! This actually sounds great, except this impossible act has definitely created one or more timelines, which is a huge no-no.

That’s the big time travel problem, but there are plenty more. By bringing Gamora and Nebula from 2014 to the present, the events of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie didn’t happen. Surely a major Hydra agent believing Captain America was also a Hydra spy for the two years between the first Avengers movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier would have changed many things, perhaps even leading to the discovery of Hydra’s infiltration of SHIELD a lot sooner. Even Captain America’s decision to return to the 1940s, and live the rest of his life from there, would make changes to the timeline — and even Endgame directors, the Russo brothers, don’t seem to know how Cap returned to the prime timeline! And then there was one other small change: There’s a new Loki on the loose with a new Cosmic Cube.

We don’t even need to worry about how Loki’s freedom would affect the events of the second and third Thor movies, because now the trickster god has his own Infinity Stone, thanks to Captain America, Ant-Man, and Iron Man totally flubbing their mission to steal it when they travel to 2012 and the events of the first Avengers film. During some straight-up nonsense, the Cube — aka the Tesseract aka the Space Stone — gets knocked to the feet of the handcuffed Loki, who grabs it and disappears.

The Space Stone allows its bearer to teleport anywhere across the universe or to warp space itself, which essentially allows telekinesis on a major level. Hey, remember in Infinity War when Thanos threw a damn moon at Iron Man? That was the Space Stone’s doing.

By bumbling through the pasts of their previous film, the Avengers are screwing things up very, very badly.

So Loki, who was already a major pain in the ass when he only had his illusion powers, now has an Infinity Stone. Remember, this Loki hasn’t yet had the pangs of conscience that inspired him to be slightly heroic during Thor: The Dark World and Thor: Ragnarok. The consequences for Earth, Asgard, and the universe could be — and surely would be — staggering.

I know all this is nitpicking, but Marvel’s decisions here are weird as hell. All the time travel nonsense would have actually been completely fine if Endgame hadn’t stressed how any alterations of the past would create new timelines, and that this was an unequivocally bad thing. Then, all the time travel shenanigans could have been hand-waved away, like in every other time travel movie. Instead, audiences are forced to recognize that by bumbling through the pasts of their previous film, the Avengers are screwing things up very, very badly.

But even this bizarre choice pales in comparison to keep that five-year gap. Sure, the fact that the surviving part of the world has had to live in a nightmare for half a decade certainly highlights the pathos of the Avengers living with their failure — but making it a canonical part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s continuity is stark raving mad. Half the planet has been deeply traumatized for a five full years! Many characters are suddenly five years older than their supporting casts! Even if everyone just gets over it off-screen, any future stories Marvel tells will need to account for this to some degree. (For instance, what will Wakanda look like in Black Panther 2 when their king has been MIA for so long?) It’s such a weird decision, and so unnecessary — especially when the Avengers ended up having zero problems wrecking the timeline in countless other ways. Why not have them erase the Snap as well?

If you’re wondering how this could be done, let me introduce you to the greatest, most powerful deus ex machina in any universe: The Infinity Gauntlet. It’s all the plot justification the movie needs to do anything, really. If it’s powerful enough to rewrite reality so half of all living beings in the entire universe can be subtracted from or added back, it can do or undo anything the story needs or wants. If nothing else, I can assure you it’s not just for genocidal finger snaps.

The bright side is that all these plot holes don’t make Avengers: Endgame a bad movie. In fact, it’s pretty difficult to even notice these issues when you’re watching practically everyone in the 22 films that make up the Marvel’s “Infinity Saga” stop by to kick ass in the movie’s beyond-epic final act. I’m certainly not telling anyone to not go see it, in part because the box office numbers indicate you already have, and in part because it’s a genuine, uh… marvel. It’s just that with a few extremely easy plot alterations, the Avengers could have saved the universe better.