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Avengers: End of the game was a riot of flashy fights and fan service, with enough humor thrown to sometimes feel like a great comedy. It was silly and absurd, but first and foremost it was fun, and when it was necessary to hit the emotional and dramatic beats, it usually happened to them. Yet there was a moment in the film where I found myself distracted by the sheer flood of pleasure – when it became apparent that the many and powerful heroines in the room were not quite up to the task. heroes. They were props, there to support the stories of the guys. End of Game did not do any favors to his wives and it is time for us to talk about it.
The moment that drove this home for me is actually a moment that I've seen greeted by others: Captain Marvel returns from his two-hour stop in the movie to retrieve Peter Parker's Infinity glove. Of course, he and the public have just seen her destroy Thanos' ship in the blink of an eye, but he still asks her how she will manage to cross an entire army to deliver the challenge where it needs to be.
We then have a glowing photo of almost all the women in the film, heroically swollen breasts lit by a gloomy sun through a cloud of debris. There are so many women and among them are the two most powerful characters in the movie who do not call Thanos.
But it's just a short shot, more like a diversity cookie than a group of characters who almost always take a back seat in the storytelling and marketing of the movie. In the end, women just look cool and save time before Iron Man, Captain America and Thor can do the real work. And there is a marked absence of the painting. The original Avenger woman, Black Widow, is not here. She died an hour ago.
The problem of the black widow
This is not the first time that Black Widow has been controversial. The founding female member of the MCU Avengers unit previously had a deeply problematic scenario. In the leadership of Joss Whedon Age of Ultron, the character does little more than just ferry enthusiasts and their belongings, and admits that she can never really love or settle because her dark and deep assassin secret is … she has been sterilized in the Black Widow program.
Who would have thought that this would end up being one of his most meaty moments in MCU movies?
After performing a little more of an appearance in War of Infinity, Natasha appears in End of Game like a woman haunted by her failures and eager to protect the little humanity she has left. While the men of the Avengers went to meet, or start a family or a pack of six beers, she squatted and built a network of remaining heroes. Which is great! She's the only Avenger really Make Something – and when they decide to rebuild the group so they can make their way in the past to save the universe, it is she who volunteers to take Hawkeye, who has gone to the Lord and is making its way among other nations, apparently to stop the criminals who were lucky enough to survive the end of War of Infinity.
Hawkeye ended up being Black Widow's partner for the allotted time and both went to Vormir (where we saw Thanos sacrificing Gamora for the last time) to find him. They quickly realize that the only way to claim the stone is that one of them sacrifices what he likes the most. It would be presumed that Hawkeye would be entirely sacrificed. What he loves most is his family … and they all broke their heads in the first two minutes of the movie. In fact, his whole story up till now is that he is a man who has nothing left to lose. And you would have supposed that Natasha, visibly upset by Hawkeye's descent into the darkness, cared enough for him to possibly be the thing she loves most.
But the movie kills Black Widow instead. The scene plays as if two friends are trying to sacrifice themselves so that the other does not die, but in an interview with the New York Times, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely explain that Natasha really wanted to die because she wanted to see all her boys Avenger happy.
"In our mind, her trip was over if she could recover the Avengers," said McFeely.
"It was melodramatic to have it [Hawkeye] to die and not to recover his family. And it's only fair that she's done, "added Markus when the NYT tackled the subject of Vormir's death row.
These answers only underscore the very bad service rendered by the film to its female characters. Hawkeye lives because he has a family. Natasha, the barren woman who comes from a bad home, dies because her greatest wish is for her found-again family, heroes, to be happy. She is there to support him and other men. His character arc equals the bow that his body makes by falling to the ground.
Halfway through End of Game, the Avengers' founding wife is dead, none of her stories have been resolved. We can assume that the many unanswered questions from his past will be addressed in his solo film, but this film will likely be a step backwards. It is a bitter pill to swallow.
And it gets even more bitter when a morose Hawkeye comes back into the present alone, and you realize that the only two characters that do not go out of the past are also the only two women on the team.
The problem of the nebula
While Black Widow died midway through the film, it is up to Nebula to carry the torch to all women, at least until this moment of the diversity of which we have already spoken. She is de facto the main female character of the film. She is not mentioned once in the interview with McFeely and Markus in The New York Times.
Nebula is basically the cosmic version of Black Widow: a morally gray assassin who has a lot of red in his register that does not return from the moment he was pointed. Only she is a cyborg. And like Natasha in Age of Ultron, Nebula spends a good deal of End of Game captured by the wicked and subject to monologues.
As men build an Infinity Gauntlet and argue for it, the real Nebula is interrogated and tortured – while her past, Doppelgänger, hangs around nowadays, where no man can see it. has a different arm. This is perhaps a comment on the failure of all male heroes to consider women among them, but it is more likely that it was a choice of filmmakers. Nebula of the past needed to make sure that her father's time was traveling in the future so that no man could notice that she had an arm in flesh, while she had some one previously made of metal.
But Nebula was not the only one to be written in the story so that men could shine.
The problem of Captain Marvel
the Captain Marvel The film made its debut last month and has already won more than a billion dollars. As Black Panther, it's a phenomenon and Brie Larson has been touring nonstop since well before it was created. In most press events, she was the woman proposed by Disney, both as the new face of the heroines of the franchise and as the new face of the franchise itself. It was safe to assume that she was going to play a role in End of Game– although perhaps not huge, given the need for the film to also be a swan song for a number of older and popular characters. But what the movie ends up doing with the character looks like bad service.
Rather than symbolically resuming the rule of an established character or integrating organically with the team, it will play a major role in the future, the character is placed in a role terribly similar to that of Black Widow in Age of Ultron: Ferry crappy.
She transports Tony from space to Earth, through Thanos through a cabin so that Thor can behead him, then disappears for more than two hours only to introduce himself and carry a glove on a battlefield.
His role in the movie is to move things, reveal his new haircut and show his ability to shine very strong. As a character, she is practically non-existent. This is certainly due to the fact that this film was shot before Captain Marvel. "We fired [Brie Larson] before shooting his film. She says lines for a character 20 years after her original story, which no one has written yet, "notes McFeely. His story did not exist yet!
But this is largely a choice of filmmakers. They chose not to better integrate it in the plot or in the team, although this film was planned for years. "[T]This is far from what we are trying to tell. It was the original Avengers who were dealing with the loss and coming to a conclusion, and she was new, fresh blood, "said McFeely.
Her role is too big to be considered a cameo or Easter egg, but too small to be satisfying, especially for those who have quickly become attached to her through her solo film. Carol Danvers is so useless in the story that I found myself wondering why she was even in the movie.
The problem of the cameo
The worst problem of the film is that the women mentioned above … are the main women of the film. They have the most lines and stories, apart from Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, War Machine and … Hawkeye.
Okoye of Danai Gurira, leader of Dora Milaje, was an amazing character of Black Panther, and she had one of the best lines of War of Infinity. Yet she has little more than a long cameo in End of Game (companion Black Panther star Lupita Nyong'o, who plays Nakia, did not even show up). The same goes for Zoe Saldana's Gamora, who silently disappears after the last fight (serving as a point of emotional distress for Peter Quill); Valkyrie of Tessa Thompson; and Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts.
But at least they come to speak! Most of the women in this brilliant visual of Grrrrl's power do not say a word. Evangeline Lilly's Wasp was the first heroine to get her name in the title of a damn movie and she only has two or three lines. They are pushed to the side to make room for men.
And maybe that would have been acceptable if, in the final scenes of the film, we had an idea of the future of these characters. But while we spend time seeing where Bucky and Sam – and even Happy – are heading, we do not spend real time with women. Valkyrie is now a queen of a deities society moved to Norway, and Hope van Dyne is apparently in San Francisco with her boyfriend and now-grown daughter, but while there remains a team of Avengers, we do not do not know if women are on it or what their roles will be. We have no idea what will happen to Captain Marvel or Scarlet Witch apart from what Disney has announced.
End of Game is filled to the brim with female characters, but the film just uses them as props, and we do not know if it will be the same for the upcoming franchise – despite the fact that women are among the biggest and the most popular characters left alive. Markus and McFeely's bald words about Black Widow do not inspire hope. They thought they had done something powerful when they killed her. They did it. Something mightily stupid.
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