Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, Wesley Morris, Kyle Buchanan and Aisha Harris

What a superhero movie could be wasn’t clear when “Iron Man” kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008. Now with “Avengers: Endgame” concluding the saga — at least for now — we know that it can be about everything from friendships to political debates and issues of representation, all while saving the world, of course. We asked five people who cover pop culture for The New York Times — Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, chief film critics; Wesley Morris, critic at large; Kyle Buchanan, pop culture reporter; and Aisha Harris, assistant TV editor — about the MCU legacy and how it’s changed Hollywood and us. Here are excerpts from the conversation.

— STEPHANIE GOODMAN

Fan Obedience and Flying Horses

KYLE BUCHANAN: Coming after “Infinity War,” which had little downtime, the most appealing parts of “Endgame” were the scenes where the heroes weren’t thinking about how to save the world because they had already tried and failed. Now, they just had to adjust. Honestly, “Endgame” reminded me in several moments of a Richard Linklater film: It has that same intense preoccupation with time, there’s long scenes where people are just hanging out, and there are a whole bunch of startlingly likable jocks.

A.O. SCOTT:There’s an element of these movies that is basically a workplace sitcom. It’s about a bunch of people who — whatever their different temperaments and personalities — all have to get along and work together. And a lot of the conflicts in these movies are kind of personnel and H.R. issues as much as they are battles against cosmic evil.

BUCHANAN: It’s a superheroic version of “The Office.” You’ve got Chris Evans as John Krasinski and Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Carell.

MANOHLA DARGIS:I think that’s true. They’re also successors to the western. It’s a group of people, whether they’re in a wagon circle or not, who come together and fight some enemy. And now, the frontier, as “Star Trek” told us so long ago, is out there. But I miss horses. There is a really awesome horse in this. I would have watched that rider and that horse for an hour.

SCOTT: I felt like that was almost worth the price of the ticket — it’s Tessa Thompson [as Valkyrie] on a flying horse!

AISHA HARRIS: I come into this entire cinematic universe as a very apathetic viewer — to me they all kind of blend together. But I could recognize if you were a fan, you would love this movie, and I think that is what these movies have become: fan service. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I appreciate that this film seems to have satisfied at least the people who were in my screening. I’m happy that people are happy.

SCOTT:I take a slightly more sinister view of the whole fan question. It’s about fan service but it’s also about fan recruitment in a way. And about the creation of entertainment as obedience — you’ll go to these things and you’ll like these things. The whole logic of this franchise shell game is that you’re never quite satisfied with any particular movie because the point is you have to be sucked into the whole thing.

DARGIS: What we started to see with the Marvel Universe is that you’re either on board or you’re a traitor. There is very little room to have any skepticism or say, wow, this Marvel movie’s kind of like the last three that I saw.

HARRIS: I think that it’s good that “nerds” have their day now. Things that people used to get made fun of for 20, 30 years ago now everyone loves and accepts that it’s cool. It makes me feel sad about other types of genres that do not get taken nearly as seriously, whether it’s the rom-com, as Wesley recently wrote about, or Netflix’s “chick flicks.” I wish that fans who took those sorts of genres seriously were seen as viable viewers for the Hollywood studios to make movies for, as they have done with this franchise.

Representation or Lip Service?

WESLEY MORRIS: Everything you guys are saying is true about the way that these movies are made for fans. But I also wonder, what wrong could these movies do that would alienate those people? For instance, making Tessa Thompson Valkyrie — there was probably a moment where people would have flipped out and objected to that casting choice. Or making any aspect of Asgard even remotely brown.

DARGIS: Or making women more powerful because really the thing I disliked the most intensely about this newest movie is that one scene ... [Pepper Potts, Shuri, and basically every other woman in the Marvel-verse rally to aid Captain Marvel.]

MORRIS: It’s ladies’ night for 30 seconds. Let’s get all your favorites. Women, come on down! As disgusted as I was by the attempt to spackle over a problem that that scene does, I also felt weirdly exhilarated by it. And the thing that made me mad was that it was only there as a form of lip service and the shot went nowhere.

MORRIS: But in that moment you have eight women who assemble to help another woman. Some of them have Oscars. Some of them deserve Oscars. If you got those women together to do any other kind of movie, without the stuff of the Marvel apparatus, I would give my whole paycheck to watch that movie.

BUCHANAN: That scene is obviously trying to set up some sort of future Ladies of Marvel spinoff, but for me the most exciting moment was when Thanos head-butts Brie Larson and she’s unfazed. I found that weirdly powerful to watch.

DARGIS: I find it cynical — one after another of these movies where it was basically all the Avengers and Scarlett Johansson in her tight little suit.

BUCHANAN: The superhero genre is now so dominant in Hollywood that when we talk about screen representation, a big chunk of that is who is represented in superhero movies. “Black Panther” and “Captain Marvel” have opened the floodgates somewhat, although I hesitate to call them floodgates yet. Maybe they've opened a few doors.

SCOTT: Turned the faucet on slightly.

BUCHANAN: Chloé Zhao is going to direct the upcoming Marvel movie "The Eternals" with Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani, and I've heard one of the coleads is a gay superhero. And that’s going to be a weirdly powerful thing for me to watch in a blockbuster like this, to see a gay character presented in that way, knowing that this is the dominant movie genre and will be exported throughout the world.

A Franchise at War

SCOTT: “Avengers,” in a way, depoliticizes the old comic book series, and blunts some of the interesting psychological and existential aspects of the characters. Take Spider-Man in the Sam Raimi movies — it’s a really interesting character study, and it’s asking, how would it feel, in the middle of adolescence, to undergo this? Those movies felt tethered to reality in a way. Once the military-industrial-Avengers complex took over with “Iron Man,” then a lot of that interesting texture and politics and psychology gets smoothed over, and we get a much more streamlined and carefully blunted corporate product.

DARGIS: Think about who Iron Man is, though. This billionaire industrialist ingenious inventor — in weapons manufacturing. This has been the lead Avenger. That says a lot.

BUCHANAN: I do hasten to point out that Captain America could have been an always-side-with-might character, but in most of his movies he questions his orders and, in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” dismantles the idea of pre-emptive war.

DARGIS: The United States has been at war how many years now? And we’ve had these long-running movies that are just war movies, again and again. Yes, they are overtly depoliticized, but they certainly are political in another way. Each movie’s a justification of war.

BUCHANAN: That’s sort of what I found most disarming and charming about “Endgame” — it feels the least like a war movie of any of the Avengers films. It opens with them vanquishing Thanos but that doesn’t necessarily bring them any closure or satisfaction. And it’s relatively light on battle scenes, which is astounding given that this is a three-hour culmination of more than 20 separate action movies. There’s a giant one at the end and that’s about it.

DARGIS: But it still is building slowly toward that battle. I like some of the Avengers. I love a few of them. But another 10 minutes, another war scene. They’re war movies. I think that’s weird, certainly worth talking about.

HARRIS: To quote Donald Glover, “This is America.” I wonder if there’s a way to look at these superhero movies as an extension of the many ’90s action movies that were about intelligence and spies and anything that starred Harrison Ford or Nic Cage. Or even the ’80s when we had Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. There’s always been militaristic aspects in the way Hollywood makes action movies. This is just beefed up with sci-fi and fantasy elements.

SCOTT: These movies have always been about war, about combat, and about conflict. And it’s always interesting to ask who is fighting and in what cause, and how does that map onto whatever’s happening in the world? What this “Avengers” proved itself to be is an allegory of the global elite — this is the Davos class. These are people who kind of regard themselves as superheroic, tech billionaires. They’re our rulers and we’re their fans.

BUCHANAN: But I think that if you look beneath the hood, they’re doing interesting things within that framework. “Captain Marvel” becomes a movie about siding with dispossessed refugees. There are characters like Iron Man, who bear trauma and PTSD from their ongoing war. And “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” which, again, is not predominantly battle-focused, I think of it as the “A Little Life” [by Hanya Yanagihara] of superhero movies. Every single subplot in that movie is about unpacking characters’ traumas. To me, the battles in these films are just a pretext for the characters to hang out.

DARGIS: I think their hanging out is the pretext for the battles, but OK.

SCOTT: The ethic and the aesthetic is fundamentally authoritarian. There’s an interesting historical correlation in the rise of these movies — which are within their worlds fundamentally uninterested in anything democratic, that promote a super-elite Ayn Randian idea of what authority and heroism looks like — and the rise in the real world of anti-democratic authoritarian politics.

MORRIS: Right. “Iron Man” had a simultaneously radical idea and an appalling one. That movie begins in the caves of Afghanistan. His company, Stark Industries, is responsible for making weapons for that war. That’s a very specific moment in world events.

SCOTT: And the arc of those movies is also a way toward this idea that we need to privatize wars.

DARGIS: He’s a billionaire who can save us. Does that sound familiar to anybody else?

MORRIS: All of those Chuck Norrises and Stallones and even Bruce Willis, all of those guys were working people who either came out of actual American conflict or actual working jobs and found themselves — either through convoluted screenwriting or very convincing social and political circumstances — embroiled in what we would call an action movie.

SCOTT: And a struggle against power. Whereas these movies are more and more on the side of the power. The character in the recent Avengers movie who is most like what you just described is Erik Killmonger. And the politics of what happens in “Black Panther,” which I think is best of the class, are fascinating because it villainizes and stigmatizes Killmonger. His death is tragic, but it’s necessary so that the energy of that radical struggle can be reabsorbed into this technocratic monarchy, which is Wakanda. And it’s interesting that Killmonger is identified with Oakland and Wakanda is basically the Silicon Valley of Africa.

MORRIS: Oakland becomes a protectorate of Wakanda by the time it’s over.

HARRIS: The interesting thing about the Killmonger character is the way in which [the director] Ryan Coogler and the other people behind it tried to have their cake and eat it, too. A lot of people picked up on that with the hashtag #KillmongerWasRight. Granted, he died.

MORRIS: He had to die. But I love that they made the choice his. It wasn’t T’Challa saying, well, the plot says you’ve got to die, Killmonger, so “bye.” He says, I would rather be dead than to live against my politics, even in a world controlled by y’all.

DARGIS: Right, die on your feet rather than live on your knees.

MORRIS: That’s a radical idea, too. That movie was nominated for best picture. I will never stop thinking about how radical an idea that was to have in such a movie.

‘Avengers’ as High Cinema?

BUCHANAN: In the first “Avengers" movie, Joss Whedon had a deleted subplot that would just track a ground-level waitress as she reacted to all the big battles going on in Manhattan. Since then, especially as the Russo brothers have taken over, they’ve mostly moved the action to anonymous locations. If I had a major bone to pick aesthetically with the Marvel movies, it's that very few of them reach for the exciting frames and colors of a James Gunn “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie. During the climax of “Infinity War," Thanos does his fatal snap on the most anonymous stretch of grass in Wakanda. I would have killed for that to be an interesting frame.

DARGIS: That’s the other problem with these movies: the filmmaking. The filmmaking often does not rise to my level of interest. I liked “Doctor Strange" because it’s fun and trippy.

SCOTT: And “Thor: Ragnarok,” I think.

DARGIS: But oftentimes we’re not talking about the filmmaking. We’re talking about everything else.

SCOTT: I think that’s partly intentional. I did refer to this as a monument to adequacy, and I think that in a way there’s a risk in having the filmmaking be too idiosyncratic or too witty or too visionary. There’s an interesting precedent in the Harry Potter movies, where among film critics and people who were thinking about these as cinema, everyone will tell you that the best one is “Prisoner of Azkaban” — that’s the one that Alfonso Cuarón directed and that is the one that stands alone best as a piece of cinema. For every self-identified Harry Potter fan, that’s their least favorite because it’s the weirdest and it doesn’t track with what they think the books are. That series corrected afterward and went in a fairly bland and manageable and accessible direction. And I think Disney and Marvel have very carefully done that from the very beginning.

MORRIS: Well, think about how many Hulks it took to get to Mark Ruffalo. One of the high points of the last 20 years of these movies was Ang Lee and James Schamus’s “Hulk.” You’ve got this amazing confrontation between Bruce Banner and his father. So you’ve got Eric Bana and Nick Nolte squaring off under intensely nuclear-oriented circumstances, and you’re thinking about metaphor of the nuclear family. But the stakes are so high. The whole movie is building up to that, and the filmmakers thought about the ways you can create the experience of reading a comic book while also being at a movie. Now, the effects weren’t as good as they are in “Endgame.” But I found that movie an achievement.

Name! That! Star!

BUCHANAN: Back when I worked at Vulture, we would do this feature every year called Most Valuable Stars, and the fascinating thing for me was to look at poll data of how many people could name the stars of these superhero movies. You would have people who were starring in the biggest movies of the day — a Chris Hemsworth, a Henry Cavill — and people could name the characters that were being played, but not the stars. I think that’s particularly interesting when it comes to Marvel because those actors are so well-cast and able to bring something extra to these roles, but the superstars of today are those characters, not necessarily the actors.

DARGIS: The Spider-Man movies — because Sony kept rebooting them — show that, really, the star is the unitard, right? It’s the outfit, you can put whoever into that. And there will be other people who will be playing Thor, who will be playing Hulk. One of the things about watching this movie is that they’re all aging out. It’s time either to die or hang up your weapon.

SCOTT: I think it’s true that these franchises swallow movie stars rather than minting movie stars. But I think there’s one exception. And the exception is Robert Downey Jr., whose star is attached to this franchise in a way that none of the other ones quite are. He is the spark of a lot of this — he set a tone of humor and pathos.

MORRIS: He brought his persona to Tony Stark.

SCOTT: He brought all of his charm to it. What’s interesting, of course, is that what really is ending now is him. Tony Stark is dead. All those people gathered for Tony Stark’s funeral.

DARGIS: I was so much more taken with Chris Hemsworth.

MORRIS: He was the person who by virtue of being in these movies has made the biggest impression on me, and he’s managed to take a lot of that charisma into other places. But do people want to see him do something that isn’t “Thor?” Do people want to see Chris Evans do something that isn’t “Captain America?” I don’t know. And the movies will probably never let us find out. Because they don’t make the kinds of things anymore that let people like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans, and even to some extent Chris Pratt, do more than movie-star karaoke.

DARGIS: Or they do little independent movies where they flex their muscles and show, I can act, I can bring this scene.

BUCHANAN: I liked Chris Hemsworth a lot in Ron Howard’s “Rush.” I thought that was proof of his ability to give a movie star performance in something that wasn’t a Marvel movie. But people didn’t really go to that.

SCOTT: I think the perfect test is that each one of those Chrises should direct and star in a remake of “A Star Is Born.” That is the industry test for: are you really a movie star outside of franchise? That’s what you do.

MORRIS: To your point, do you know the biggest star in these movies that you never physically see?

MORRIS: Bradley Cooper is a genius! He is very good as Rocket and he never has to deal with, oh, that’s the dude from the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. He still gets to be his charismatic, interesting, clever self in these movies. And he still gets to be Bradley Cooper, movie star.

The True Legacy of ‘Avengers’

DARGIS: This is the Disney-fication of the movie industry. Marvel, with Pixar and Lucasfilm, has helped Disney start to swallow the rest of the industry. 2008, the first “Iron Man” movie opens, Disney has 10.5 percent of the domestic box office. It’s at 26 percent last year. They are just eating everything. Disney conquered childhood and has now managed to conquer adulthood.

SCOTT: The one wild card, maybe, in this deck, is popular taste. In spite of all of the best efforts of movie studios and Walt Disney and other corporations, they’ve never quite been able to control it or predict it. It’s not inconceivable that at some point, too soon for the interests of Disney and Marvel, people will start getting interested in something else.

BUCHANAN: I think this is a genre that is here to stay, in part because there are so many other routes to go within the superhero framework — it’s a pretty flexible genre. Whether you’re OK with that is up to personal preference, but when Marvel hires a director like Chloé Zhao, who made the wonderful “The Rider,” for “The Eternals,” I have hopes that she can do something fascinating with it.

MORRIS: It’s been interesting to watch superhero comic-book movies, as a genre, evolve in terms of who all it brought into its world. In 20 years, these movies have managed to do more interesting stuff along those lines than 20 years of any other genre, I would say. They have managed to at least open to other executives the possibilities of what it would mean to have an entirely black-oriented movie — and I don’t mean just black people in it, but blackness as the core theme of the movie itself. Setting aside that gratuitous shot of those women in “Endgame,” nobody financially seems to have a problem with women doing two hours of superhero work in a movie.

HARRIS: Within the next 10 years the entire universe will be rebooted again. I can see a world where there is a new Captain America, but Chris Evans, even though he’s now 80 years old, will come back to help Anthony Mackie or whoever is now the new Captain America learn to take his place. We are going to see the same thing over and over again. I don’t think it’s the end — nothing ever really goes away anymore.

SCOTT: Aisha, you’ve persuaded me to take this opportunity to announce my retirement from film criticism.

HARRIS: But you’ll come out of retirement because nothing ever ends.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/movies/avengers-endgame-critics.html" id="acd99960-a2b7-3a44-a22d-f0766c563fd2">The New York Times</a>.

(Beware: This article contains spoilers.)

The End Is Nigh: Time to Talk It Over

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Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, Wesley Morris, Kyle Buchanan and Aisha Harris

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The End Is Nigh: Time to Talk It Over