I didn't come out of Infinity War saying "oh god, why did I watch that?" like I did with Civil War, but I was unfavorable toward it. There was something almost appealing about the scale and breadth of it. In the ten years between Iron Man and Infinity War many moving parts were incorporated into the MCU and Infinity War promised to be the one to bring the most to the fore. Thanos's apparent invincibility was more important than anything he says or does, something that created a puzzle of how all the different pieces could come together to take him down. Yes, it is a commercial movie, so it's no surprise that it was unsatisfying to critics with more outsider interests, but it doesn't always matter how every element of a movie was motivated.
But Infinity War featured too much inane navel-gazing from Thanos. Like Civil War, it traffics in too many ideas that don't make sense if you think about them for two seconds, which is actually distracting from whatever was almost satisfying. Endgame doesn't. It doesn't waste time on posturing at things that have nothing to do with its most effective methods.
What Endgame is here to do is not just solve the puzzle of beating Thanos, but congratulate you for sitting through all the MCU movies, for remembering the art design, all the side characters' names, and so on. The film is not well-written. It kills off Black Widow instead of Hawkeye when the choice comes up, even though Age of Ultron included a lengthy scene of Hawkeye's family explaining that they were OK with him risking his life. And it has to follow up on Infinity War killing off Black Panther despite the fact that he debuted in a film that came out the same year. The film pays lip service to the importance of "moving on" and "letting go" for about an hour before giving everyone what they want: reunions, closure, a moment in the spotlight for everyone. When Thanos says "I am inevitable" to Tony Stark, Tony doesn't respond as if that means anything. It just means Thanos is difficult to overcome. So all Tony says in response is: "I am Iron Man." We don't need more than the brand, the factors set forth in the prior Iron Man movies, to complete the puzzle.
Endgame is like Cookie Clicker. We love to make numbers go up. 3 hours! Dozens of characters! 22 movies over 11 years! Even if you missed some of the previous movies, Endgame will still have something you recognize. People applauded at multiple points in the film's third hour when their favorite showed up. It's like in the The Avengers, when Captain America's eyes lit up because he understood another character's pop culture reference.
This doesn't mean there isn't more to it. You don't have to look far to see that viewers had genuine experiences hope or triumph or loss while watching it. Even if the story as a whole doesn't hold together thematically, key moments like Captain America's final scenes in the film evoke these feelings. The film's scale amplifies them, and the movie is an exercise in a technique that exploits that.
Some objections to the MCU are, of course, objections to this technique. Some are misplaced. For instance, I find it baseless to object because it's not "challenging" or not approaching some standard of high art. On the other hand, others object not to the technique itself, but the role it plays in a particular business model. These articles (and the more fleshed-out book The Political Economy of Hollywood) by James McMahon suggest that Hollywood learned something around 1980 which kicked off a decline in the volatility of box office earnings that has continued ever since. Between its sheer number of releases and its acquisitions of other studios, Disney controls an increasing portion of the films distributed and promoted in theaters. It also angles to vertically integrate distribution through Disney+. The success of each MCU film is predetermined by its access to an already-cultivated audience, the relentless promotion of the franchise, and the assumption that future MCU films will only make sense in light of previous ones, plus their Disney+ series. With the 2020 termination of the Paramount Consent Decrees, it's possible Disney could dominate theaters even more by owning them outright.
Some compare the churning out of MCU films to the way studios churned out westerns and films noir in the 20th Century. The difference, however, is that westerns and noirs could be made cheaply, and some of the best of them were. Each MCU film comes at an astronomical cost, even nonentities like Thor: The Dark World. It comes from the promises of increasing scale, returning celebrity faces, and from marketing campaigns. The cost is also part of the model. And as the above articles suggest, the studios producing westerns and noirs had to accept some level of risk, which sometimes benefited filmmakers creatively.
That said, many people, including myself, who take issue with the behavior and excessive, malign influence of what McMahon calls "Major Filmed Entertainment," and similar actors in the film industry, do not think that people ought to prefer other movies. We do think that many would appreciate other movies, if they had access to and awareness of them. And even if they wouldn't necessarily get something better or more important than what they get out of the MCU, they might get something different and equally good. It's not just Disney's influence on what shows up in theaters and on social media that creates problems with this, but their influence on copyright law and their acquisitions of large film libraries.
None of that means the films are incapable of meeting the audience's needs, though it does contemplate that an audience's demand for something does not necessarily speak to those needs, since entities like Disney have ways of manufacturing demand. In any case, criticism of a technique in the abstract, based on its cultural situation, is no criticism of any individual movie. For the individual viewer, the technique's effect is the intensity it provides to the audience, and no film in the MCU deploys it as well as Endgame.
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