Cinema Science ASSEMBLING THE OPERATIONS OF AVENGERS: ENDGAME
Since its inception, Cinema Science has centred on films popular and recent enough to occupy secondary students’ cultural consciousness. Granted, that rule has been bent, and outright broken – see Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018)1 and Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998),2 respectively – on a couple of occasions. But if you’re looking for a movie that you can expect your students to know about in your average science lesson, it’s hard to think of a better option than Avengers: Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2019).
For the uninformed – all two of you – Avengers: Endgame is the culmination (though not the conclusion) of more than ten years of storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise stretching across twenty-two films upon Endgame’s release. The MCU, as it’s commonly abbreviated, has consistently dominated the box office, but never more so than when the gang gets together for an Avengers film. At the time of writing, four of the films in the top-ten all-time highest-grossing films internationally have the word ‘Avengers’ in the title, with Endgame itself breathing down the neck of the reigning box-office champion, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009).3
The film is a direct successor to 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War (also directed by the Russos, and also nestled in the top five box-office earners of all time), picking up after a well-spoken alien tyrant – the ‘Mad Titan’, Thanos (Josh Brolin) – obliterates a full 50 per cent of the universe’s population. The film that ensues only briefly traffics in the after-effects of this halving, despite a five-year time jump. But in its time travel–enabled ‘time heist’ – an obligatory (and undeniably spectacular) climactic action sequence – Endgame has much to offer a beleaguered science or mathematics teacher hoping to inspire their students by harnessing a pop-culture juggernaut.
Time heist!
The incorporation of time travel into the universe wasn’t a surprise for fans of the franchise.many of the superheroes reduced to dust in the climax of had sequels in pre-production; Disney isn’t going to risk the profitability of the franchise and its star, Chadwick Boseman, nor is Sony likely to consent to the eradication of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man to enable an emotional ending. Financial realism aside, Marvel went out of its way in (Peyton Reed, 2018), released between and , to set up the pseudoscientific, mostly magical properties of the ‘quantum realm’.
