I was less churlish after finishing Endgame’s immediate predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, which had a rare weight among Marvel movies because alone among them it let its caped and armored heroes fail, and even saw many of them die. But that failure, the failure to stop the semi-genocidal Thanos (Josh Brolin, but purple) from wiping out half the population of the universe, was always destined to be temporary, and here we are back again for an Endgame in which the remaining superheroes will inevitably find a way to reverse the villain’s victory.
I agree. Guarantees of inevitable victory and miraculous resurrection only cheapen the experience. Pathos dwells in the particular, the irreplaceable, the dissolution of individual perspective within the flow of time. Wait, are we talking about movies, or…?