I Love Time Travel - Part 25 - Avengers: Endgame

America's asses.

You like nerdy superhero movies and the mother of all of them comes out.  The whole world is ready, it turns out to be a great time, and it includes time travel.  I like Avengers: Endgame a lot, I like a lot of the choices and the endnotes for a lot of the characters.  But the time travel stuff…I’m not so sure about.

(Argh!  Thar be spoilers ahead!)

I don’t need to break down the plot.  That’s not the problem.  I don’t even disagree with the choice to use time travel. They already introduced a magic glove that can rearrange the universe, so what’s wrong with a little time travel?  My problem lies in the discussion of time travel and their attempts to make it happen. 

Scott Lang is our audience surrogate/dummy and assumes time travel works like it does in the movies (of which Endgame is one.)  Banner and Nebula explain, as if Scott never paid attention in Physics class, that time travel doesn’t work like that at all.  They say that…well…in a dumb way, that traveling through time has NO CONSEQUENCES for you whatsoever.  You can go shoot yourself in the past (as Nebula does) and nothing will happen to you.  You can save JFK, give yourself lottery numbers, or kill baby Hitler and not a damn thing will happen to you.

Ick.

First of all, how the hell do they know?  I understand that Banner’s all green and smart, but so far, no one has ever successfully accomplished time travel it without a magic ring. I always assumed that we won’t ever know for sure the nature of time until we figure out time travel.  It’s all theory by people way smarter than you and I. The problem in the fictional world is that you’ve set up a method of time travel that is shitty to the entire universe outside of the travelers themselves.  If I need an Infinity Stone, I’ll just go steal one, no matter what happens to the world I take it from. In a nerdier sense, that means no Scarlet Witch, Vision, Captain Marvel, the Guardians don’t get together, the Avengers themselves don’t get together.  If I’m Thor, and my hammer has been destroyed, why not go back and steal it from my younger self?  Now younger Thor doesn’t have jack shit!

It’s not until bald Tilda Swinton explains to Banner that they can’t just steal the stones and take off to another time that we right the wrong of our heroes’ original plan.  The stones are integral to the development of all of these characters and their lives, so after they are borrowed, they have to be returned to the time and place they came from. So, what we understand now is, that it is important to preserve the timelines and not just pickpocket important shit from them and split. Got it.  I just don’t follow the logic that your timeline can be screwed around with, but the other timelines have to remain intact? 

(Remember, I’m only interested in fictional and/or cinematic time travel.  It doesn’t exist in reality (yet?) so we have to play it out in make-believe.)

The 2 major camps of time travel are the loops and the strings.  Loops go back and can’t change shit, and strings can change whatever at a high cost. Each camp has a glaring flaw.  Loops eliminate free will and strings can’t account for the replacement of the second self.  (Marty McFly comes back, everything’s different, including him.  Where’d the other Marty go?)

Endgame time travel is a different breed altogether. Are they really positing a passive time travel?  Breaching the limits of time and space with no repercussions at all? It served this story because it needed to set up the ‘time heist’ to retrieve Infinity stones and not to alter the past.  But a transgression against the nature of time that in no way can endanger your own timeline is tough to swallow.  I mean, in reality, it could very well be how shit works.  I don’t know. (Jim – History major, shitty at math.)  As far as its current realm, the one of science fiction, it kinda sucks.

Here’s what I think happened.  And this is my writer brain kicking in.  The obvious choice is to go back and get the stones through Scott’s idea and Tony’s super-science.  You go back, have some hilarity, have Cap fight himself, meet a younger Thanos.  Action, adventure, and 2.5 billion dollars.  But the writers knew that this was RDJ’s last hurrah as Iron Man and a total reset was out of the cards.  Tony needed an exit and the snap had to hurt. With this version, his daughter’s life is preserved, he goes out a hero, and cashes his Marvel checks for the rest of his life. That’s how we got the movie we got. Because the final plan hinged on the fact that Morgan Stark had to remain in existence, everything that we saw in Part 1 had to stay put.  I honestly believe with so many characters, a time stone, Pim particles, and a hundred other variables, they couldn’t fuck around with time travel consequences.  It was just too much.  That would have made it a 4-hour movie!

But hell, I still loved it.  I would like to point out that Endgame is the highest-grossing movie of all time; which that means that the number one slot is currently held by a time travel movie. (Drops mic in nerdy fashion.)