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 rarely Silvestri uses the Avengers fanfare. (sound)
Alan Silvestri wrote the 2012 Avengers music. For long stretches he keeps it off the soundtrack and lets near-silence carry the scenes.
Payoff: The quiet tells you what state these characters are in.
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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: The first hour is about people who cannot act. Watch what each of them does with the quiet.