Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Avengers: Endgame
2019 · Joe Russo · Avengers: Endgame on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how muted and gray the first hour looks. (light)
Trent Opaloch keeps the palette subdued and the compositions still through the opening act. There is very little of the saturated spectacle these films usually run on, and almost no motion in frame.
Payoff: The look tells you where the film starts: after the loss, in a world that has stopped moving.
Watch where each survivor is placed in their first scene. (staging)
Stark adrift with no one. Thor shut away. Natasha alone in a compound built for dozens. Steve in a circle of strangers. Each space is sized wrong for the person inside it.
Payoff: The situation is bigger than anyone in it, and the staging says so before any dialogue does. In the reading: the encompasser (synsign). The reading calls this the encompasser: a situation so large it presses on everyone, shown here by how much empty room each person has.
Listen for how long Silvestri withholds the Avengers fanfare. (sound)
Alan Silvestri wrote the 2012 Avengers music and brings it back here as a signal of assembly. For long stretches he keeps it off the soundtrack and lets near-silence carry the scenes.
Payoff: The music is being saved. When it finally arrives it is doing the work of eleven years at once.
Watch Downey and Evans in their quiet scenes. (performance)
Both have played these parts for more than a decade, and the film stages them as departures. The performances lean on that history rather than on new information about who these people are.
Payoff: You are watching actors and characters leave together, and the film counts on you feeling both at once.
Count how long the film runs before real spectacle. (structure)
Markus and McFeely spend the first hour on defeat and low-key character work. Nobody is introduced. The film assumes you already know every person in it and what each one has lost.
Payoff: The sense is not in this movie. It sits in the twenty-one before it, and the film spends that credit. In the reading: the relation-image. The reading calls this the relation-image: sense assembled in the viewer's head out of connections they brought in with them.
Once you have seen it
Watch Mjolnir and who is holding it. (setting)
Age of Ultron set the rule that only the worthy can lift the hammer, and slipped in a beat where Steve makes it twitch. Endgame collects on that four years later.
Payoff: One object carries a rule you learned in another film, and breaking that rule is the whole payoff. In the reading: demark. The reading calls this a demark: the object that breaks the habit you were taught, and forces you to read it again.
Follow how the portals sequence is cut together. (cutting)
Ford and Schmidt run convergent parallel cutting straight out of Griffith: a wasteland, a rescue arriving from many directions at once, then one decisive act. The grammar is a century old.
Payoff: The film spends an hour proving nobody can act, then rebuilds the oldest machine in movies to let them.
Watch the Gauntlet pass from hand to hand. (staging)
The battle is enormous and mostly digital, so the Russos block its emotional beats as a relay. The object crosses the field, and everyone who touches it gets one readable moment.
Payoff: A single object holds the relation the whole film is organized around, which is how a digital melee stays legible.
Watch the heist re-enter scenes from the older films. (structure)
The team drops back into 2012 New York, Asgard and Morag, and the production rebuilds those sets and costumes. Some shots are literal reconstructions of footage from earlier movies.
Payoff: The franchise turns its own back catalog into locations, so the heist is a tour of what you already watched.
Carry this in: The first hour is about people who cannot act. Watch what the film has to do to give that back.