Endgame VS. The Snyder Cut Pt. 1: Endgame
Sometimes, it takes something truly better to realize just how flawed something you once thought was great really is.
Yes, I’m saying it: Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a better film than Avengers: Endgame.
Before diving into the two biggest issues I have with Endgame, let’s talk about the mess the writers created for themselves. It’s as if they took a page—pun intended—from Stephen King’s On Writing and wrote themselves into a hole so deep with Infinity War that they had to invent time travel to get themselves out. And let’s be honest: that wasn’t a creative choice, it was a convenient excuse to rehash past MCU highlights and cram in as many cameos as possible.
Endgame was nothing more than Fan Service: The Movie.
Misused Characters
Can we just all admit that Captain Marvel is the textbook definition of a deus ex machina? At both the beginning and end of Endgame, she swoops in during moments of complete hopelessness—appearing out of nowhere with no prior setup or logical reason for being there. It’s less storytelling and more plot convenience wrapped in a glowing punch.
And now, let’s address the literal elephant in the room: Thor.
By the time Endgame rolled around, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were finally finding their rhythm. But for whatever reason, Thor continues to be their creative blind spot. After all, they also wrote Thor: The Dark World, arguably the weakest entry in the MCU.
Now, I get the counterargument—it’s one I’ve even made myself. Thor’s transformation makes him the most relatable character in the film. His spiral into depression, isolation, overindulgence, and alcoholism is a clear depiction of PTSD and inability to cope with his failure. In theory, this was a bold and humanizing direction.
But here’s the problem: Marvel had already handled PTSD masterfully in Iron Man 3—a film not written by Markus and McFeely. So it was surprising when Endgame took that emotional depth even further with Thor, only to turn it into a joke. We saw a god broken to his core… and we laughed. We saw that he was struggling, both mentally and physically, but we didn’t care because it was funny. We were enjoying it so much that, when he returned to form at the end, it didn’t feel like a true moment of redemption because it was borderline unwanted. Seeing him don the cape once again, wreathed in thunderous lightning as he summoned both Mjolnir and Stormbreaker, had all the ingredients of greatness—but Marvel undercut the moment by preceding it with sarcasm. It could’ve been a cathartic, full-circle payoff. Instead, it was just… cool.
The (Not-So)Epic Final Battle
Even before The Snyder Cut was released, I had serious issues with the finale of Endgame. It’s framed as a massive, climactic battle—but in execution, it’s really just a series of smaller, disjointed fight scenes stitched together to feel like something bigger. We see individual heroes scoring personal wins against minor enemies, but there’s no real sense of momentum or progress from the army as a whole. The film zooms in so tightly on these micro-moments that it completely loses sight of the macro-scale battle it’s supposedly depicting.
This focus on isolated character beats often disrupts the pacing, grinding the action to a halt so we can get little reunion scenes or comedic beats. One of the most jarring examples is the Star-Lord and Gamora moment—it feels like the entire battle has been put on pause just so they can exchange a few lines. The chaos of war is suddenly just background noise.
From a larger perspective, the battle also lacks any defined objective. For much of the finale, the opposing sides are just fighting for the sake of it. It’s all spectacle and no structure. There’s no goal—no fortress to storm, no defense to hold—just endless brawling. It’s not until the gauntlet re-enters the scene that we get the semblance of an actual objective, but even that quickly devolves into a glorified game of keep-away. And even then, there’s still no clear endgame (pun intended). The audience can’t invest in the Avengers' efforts because there's nothing concrete to root for. Rooting for the Avengers here is like rooting for the home team of a sports game, you’re doing it more out of obligation.
Eventually, the movie remembers Ant-Man’s time machine van, and only then do our heroes get a tangible goal to pursue. At this point, the narrative finally clicks into place—but the battle around it becomes irrelevant. The armies that were once front and center fade into the background, serving no meaningful purpose. From a storytelling perspective, the only reason Thanos' army is even there is to keep the hundreds of heroes too busy to swarm him at once—because without the gauntlet, he’d have no chance.
In truth, neither army affects the statuesque of the story, they’re just set dressing. The battle looks grand, but it doesn't actually matter.
And finally—this might sound pessimistic—but the tone of the battle is far too optimistic. Aside from the Avengers HQ being destroyed early on, there are almost no real setbacks. The heroes and Wakandan soldiers are putting up such a strong fight that the outcome feels inevitable from the moment Doctor Strange shows up with his multiversal cavalry. At that point, the Avengers stop being the underdogs. It’s not just that we expect them to win—it’s that we’re never given a reason to doubt that they will. There’s no tension. No dread. Just bright, hopeful heroism marching confidently toward a predetermined victory.
It’s wild to think that a film with this much star power, the highest-grossing movie of all time, and hailed by many as one of the greatest superhero films ever made—still had room to be better.
