End Game?

As we edge towards Monday, the lift of the spoiler-ban for Endgame, my arm twitches to write about the film that has affected me like none other has. Okay, I'm not going to lie. I needed all this time to process it, to come to terms with it. This isn't a review, I'm not sure what it is. It is perhaps a moan of satisfaction after one of the best nights of my life. A moan I am able to let out after a week of watching what is the greatest movie I have watched so far, and perhaps the greatest one I will ever watch. Oh what a night it was.

It took one night. One movie to ruin every single franchise I've enjoyed so far, for me. It didn't entirely ruin it. Perhaps, for the first time, I understood the gravity of the conclusion of a franchise of this magnitude. A franchise whose movies - the only medium I've interacted with it on, defined to me its every character (except Spiderman of course), making me fall in love with each one of them, making me watch them interact with each other, staying true to themselves while accommodating each other. I now understand the magnitude of this effort that must've gone into Harry Potter, into Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, but this was like a fan walking into Disneyland for the first time.

The big picture here was overwhelming on another level, way bigger than my alleged intelligence could fathom, much less, process, and it stayed true to what it stood for, not losing its track, not diluting its philosophy and was brave enough to choose and execute its own conclusion. This was the first time my heart was taken in a roller coaster - my mind has been, enough times, by a lot of movies, but I have never had such overwhelming feelings, one after another, just overlap like that. Endgame earned its laughter, its 'wow's and its tears, and, of course, a permanent place in all our hearts.

Avengers: Infinity War was one of the most anticipated films of the decade, a huge milestone in a franchise that I watched being built brick by brick - if not from the first ever foundation stone, at least shortly after it began. And while Infinity War lived upto its expectations, it set the bar really high for its sequel Avengers movie. Incidentally, my time with MCU began with Avengers before I started with the Iron Man series, and ended with its fourth installment of the firs MCU film I ever watched.

As I entered the theatre with my brother, my ideal companion and comrade when it comes to superheroes, I asked him how they could make a movie better than Infinity War. "Endgame": sounded like a loose reference to Sherlock Holmes, two of whose most iconic actor-caricatures were starring in it. These were the two people who had specifically mentioned the title of this film in other films, long before it had been announced to us. I was worried. The hype was just uncontrollably chaotic. We all had our theories, we turned each movie, each line, each hint of a clue a thousand times in our heads, as had a billion people across the world. Our brethren, co-fans of a cinematic universe that deserved its fans.

We take movies seriously, my brother and I. We watch each movie deeply, immersing ourselves into details that matter, questioning each stance, each decision its characters take. My brother taught me to listen to the background score and to listen to the story that the music tells. We watch a movie over and over again until we know its every scene to the minutest detail. And then we watch it again, because now we like it. We have never felt that to be a waste of time, but never before has a movie rewarded each re-watch of each of its prequels.

The Russo Brothers knew what they were promising us - they knew how high our expectations were, and signed up to fulfil it. The hard, genuine way. We knew it ten minutes into Endgame, when the story spat on all our theories, clearing our brimming cups for the upcoming drama. There was no music for the first half - we didn't need music to keep us grounded, we knew exactly how our people were feeling about the the world Thanos had created.

And we sat there, our hungry senses stuffing themselves with all they were getting, hungry for what we were watching and hungry to know how they were going to snatch the world from his "generous" hands. We weren't rushed, we didn't want to fast forward into the future, we were merely feasting on every scene of the movie, living in the present, meditating on each frame. We didn't want to let go of what we were watching, hell, we didn't want this film to ever end. We knew they were going, some of our best heroes were going to die. We were just happy to see some of them having a life. Oh, I'm sorry Steve, about the bad language word.

We had evolved with these men and women - Tony's iconic "I am Iron Man" quote at the press conference and his heated arguments with Pepper, Natasha Romanoff's brilliant fighting techniques, Captain America's good heart, Bruce Banner's gentleness, Fury's secrets and Thor's weird quotes had etched themselves in our hearts forever.

And we sat there, savouring one of the greatest three hours of our lives, thanking the writers for strumming the strings if our heart in this manner. These eleven years were perhaps all about them planting those moments in the strings of our souls, waiting to play them like music when the time came. Perhaps they were able to do that with the soul stone. Who knows what all they had to sacrifice for it? We just saw the masterpiece unravel itself in all its glory, for us to possess, to watch and re-watch for the rest of our lives.

You ask me to review the movie to point out its flaws and rate it? I choose to see through its flaws, even the ones that I noticed, because I do not consider myself worthy of judging it. I felt so about Inception, I felt so about The Dark Knight, I felt so about Thani Oruvan, Papanasam, A Wednesday, Vikram Vedha, Vada Chennai and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. But I have never felt this small in front of the makers of a movie - in front of a movie itself. I never realised that so much could be done on a theatre screen.

I've watched and teared up at the end of countless shows, but none left am impact that lasted as much as this one did. I do not seek to dilute the greatness of any other show, I love all of them. This is merely out of my inability to express how grand, brilliant and all encompassing this was.

You ask me if I can talk about MCU any longer? I can do this all day.