Joe Russo and Stephen McFeely on Endgame's confusing approach to time travel: "Time travel is a construct"
Aux Features Avengers: Endgame
Note: The following post contains major spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.
So, we’ve finally reached a point where we can freely talk about the somewhat confusing implementation of time travel in Avengers: Endgame, right? If you don’t think so, you’re free to stop reading, but there are still some questions as to how certain consequences (or lack thereof) were determined — like the successful resurrection of Gamora, whose mortality should have been sealed by the Soul Stone, or Nebula’s ability to kill off her past self without any present-day repercussions. There are theories to spare, but whichever one you ultimately adopt, it helps to remember that time travel, um, isn’t real.
At least, that was part of Joe Russo and writer Stephen McFeely’s explanation of their process for incorporating time travel into Endgame. According to MTV News, Russo and McFeely tackled time travel and what it meant for the heroes. “Ultimately we realized that, look, time travel doesn’t exist, so it’s a ludicrous notion,” explained Russo. “It’s a construct of genre filmmaking and you know, I think when we all bought in on it was when we realized the emotional scenes that could take place between the characters and people that they loved who are no longer with them… So, ultimately, if you’re entertained by them coming up with the plan, executing the plan, and then you’re emotionally fulfilled by what they do while they’re executing the plan, it’s worth the construct.”
McFeely emphasized that the execution wasn’t just about collecting stones, but also healing people, which admittedly did happen on more than one level for both the characters and sections of the audience. So does the feel-good end justify the sometimes nonsensical means? That’s up to you.
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It all seemed pretty straightforward to me, except for the part about Cap. Still not sure what happened there.
They said “remember that half-way reasonable rationale Banner gave the Ancient One about cleaning up the time lines? Yeah, people want to see Steve happy, so screw all that.”
Oh, that’s simple; Steve Rogers took a serum which made him strong.
The only confusing thing about Cap was that he returned to his original timeline, after spending Peggy Carter’s lifetime (or possibly more) in one of the alternate timelines (probably the one where they got the Pym particles and Tesseract), without showing up on Banner’s time travel pad as everyone else who’d time travelled and returned to their original timeline had done. So somehow, Cap figured out a way to return to his original timeline at some spot before he left it, solely for the reason that it would look way cooler if he was already there waiting for Sam and Bucky in street clothes than if he simply rematerialized as expected on the time travel pad an old man in an embarrassing skin tight outfit, holding a spare Captain America shield. Maybe Tony Stark from the 833 Universe helped him out with that…
>>>>”The only confusing thing about Cap was that he returned to his original timeline, after spending Peggy Carter’s lifetime (or possibly more) in one of the alternate timelines (probably the one where they got the Pym particles and Tesseract), without showing up on Banner’s time travel pad as everyone else who’d time travelled and returned to their original timeline had done. “THIS!They screwed up the story.But they easily could have fixed it in writing by showing he either returned to Tony’s original Quantum Tunnel (before Thanos destroyed it and while everyone was fixing the stones to Tony’s new glove) – OR…. he returned to Banner’s pad BEFORE Banner sent younger him back to the past to return the stones and also before Banner realized it (much harder to pull this one off).There’s no way he could have been living out his life with Peggy Carter in the main timeline since that would basically contradict everything they already set-up (rules-wise) in their time travel logic in the story.But that’s the implication they gave and it was a screwup.
The ending they used works better emotionally than one that would’ve made sense, and I appreciate the emotional quality of the scene being a higher priority to them. It’s a shame, though, because overall, I really like their approach and the ways it mitigates some of the more story-breaking aspects of time travel.
I agree.I completely get that they were going more for the emotional touchstone with that particular ending and I really wish the writers or directors didn’t come out and try to explain it after the fact because that just made it even more glaring.Also, the movie was already pushing three hours, so I can get how adding some more to explain away that discrepancy might have been pushing it.It is a shame because they did an excellent job with their time travel logic which was otherwise flawless and surprisingly consistent with the most popular and accept theory of modern physics and cosmology in Quantum Mechanics.For once a studio and the directors of a movie actually listened to their science consultants and cleverly adapted their input and information – which just further adds to what a great movie it was.
Or maybe, and I haven’t thought about this too much so I might have missed something, but maybe Cap’ didn’t return to his original timeline; he created a new timeline by choosing to stay in the past with Peggy, hiding himself from the world in order to preserve events as they happened, knowing that the slightest impact this change has on the world could jeopardise the final outcome of Endgame. He stay concealed right up until he revealed himself on that bench. In the original timeline, Cap’ never returned, and we, the viewer, are now following Cap’s new timeline. It’s the only way I can reconcile everything in my head-canon.
I think you’re better off leaving that unreconciled. First of all, if the MCU winds up in an alternate timeline at the end of Endgame, the whole movie is kinda pointless. Second, if Steve came back to Peggy, all her scenes in Winter Soldier either don’t make sense or are awful, with the prospect that Time Travel Steve abandoned her at the end of her life, and her dementia being so bad she hallucinated having lived her life without him (or had the wherewithall to make Original Recipe Steve think she was heartbroken by his absence, only to keep Time Travel Steve’s secret).Also, that stuff makes my head hurt. The best thing about Endgame’s time travel was that it mostly didn’t do that.
So are the people behind Endgame. The writers said Cap isn’t in an alternate universe while the Russos said he was. Then the Russos backtracked and said maybe we’d find out the details in the future…
The Russos were right.Originally.I don’t know why they backtracked. It seems to me like they all talked to a Physics consultant that laid out the logic to them and the writers got lost in their own storyline romanticism and forgot everything they were told, and then the Russos lost their nerve (probably not feeling confident in their understanding of how it was explained to them), and reversed their position to not seem to contradict the writers (who were wrong and doubled down on their error in interviews after the fact).
Whatever explanation makes it easier to bring back Chris Evans just in case some of the new movies don’t do as hot.
>>>”It all seemed pretty straightforward to me, except for the part about Cap.”Yep, they screwed that part up in the story.He shouldn’t have been able to coem back to that point (in time and space) unless he used the Quantum tunnel (the new one that Bruce Banner made), even if he lived his entire life with Peggy Carter.His living his entire life with Peggy Carter in the past would always always ONLY be able to occur in an alternate timeline and not the main timeline.(They already established that it’s virtually impossible to return to your own “main” timeline past and that any “past” you went to was always an alternate one).They could have easily fixed it either by showing Old man Cap returning to the main timeline either before Thanos came back from 2014 – using Tony’s original Time tunnel OR he came back through Bruce’s new Quantum Time tunnel at some point after he constructed it but before he sent young Cap back to return the stones.But there’s no way that Cap was living out his entire life with Peggy in the same timeline and then at some point in his old age just decides to take a walk to Upstate New York and wait for Sam and Bucky at that bench.That was a writing screw-up.It was one of only two (major glaring ) flaws I found with the story in the movie.(the other being a more laughable visual but still obvious flaw when they showed the portals opening up and the one showing Wakanda shows the Sun setting (or rising) while it’s also setting in Upstate New York.. With Wakanda being located somewhere in East Africa (let’s say in the region between KEnya and Uganda, which is where they have shown it before in Iron Man2 on Tony’s monitors) and also some 8-10 hours ahead of East Coast USA, that is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE (to see the Sun setting or rising in both places at the same time or setting in one while rising in the other) unless you don’t understand how Time zones work or……that the Earth is round. Since the implication was that it was sunset in New York when Thanos attacks, then Wakanda would be in the middle of the night (like 2 or 3am depending on daylight savings time) with Sunrise still like 4 hours away)
I have likely seen every movie that involves time travel ever, and I enjoyed Endgame, even though it was kind of silly. CAP CAUGHT MJOLNIR WHAT DO YOU WANT. If you were genuinely bothered by this, well, please remember…
It wasn’t quite as silly or as fun as the time travel in Looper. But I guess they could have the Marvel heroes chopping some guy’s fingers off.
The Time Travel in Looper was highly problematic and severely logically flawed.But I suppose that’s why it was…..’fun’.
Hey man, I don’t feel like we’d agree on too much, but you’ve got principles that you’re sticking to and I respect that dog.
Time travel is a cop-out.
wait, Doc, is that one of those things that can destroy the universe?
Not if you’re Timecop.
I get it, certain things can take people out of a narrative and time travel is prone to creating plot holes. People draw lines and I guess those lines should be respected.
But I also wonder how anyone who would say “time travel doesn’t work that way” would be able to accept…everything else in a Superhero movie. The rule of cool has to apply or else the whole thing is a non-starter.
If someone says “time travel doesn’t work that way,” the only sane response is “time travel doesn’t work at all”
I agree. But neither do Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Spiderman, Ant Man, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, The Vision, Captain Marvel, or a dozen characters I am forgetting.
This is a cop-out.Time-travel doesn’t work within the means of our levels of understanding and technological development.But it DOES work within the construct of the science they were using and following in the movie (i.e Quantum Mechanics – which is a very really thing in our world and without which I wouldn’t be typing this and communicating it to you from possibly thousands of miles away).In other words the POSSIBILITY of Time Travel is consistent with the mechanics and mathematical modeling of Quantum Mechanics (and Relativity too).But the PLAUSIBILITY of Time Travel on the other hand is not – at least within our level development and technology at the moment.This is also usually how science works. We prove the existence and possibility of phenomena and events through the Mathematics of the science first before we’re ever able to prove or realize them in real life.The best example of this is obviously Black Holes – which physicists were able to correctly mathematically predict the plausibility and existence of (and eventually, the inevitability of) over 100 years before we ever actually observed one (which only happened THIS year). In all that time you could have legitimately said that the concept of Black Holes were ridiculous and impossible but the math and science would say not necessarily- and the math and science were right.
Whoa whoa, slow down there.Quantum mechanics is real?!
I don’t think people would be nearly as up in arms about time travel in the movie, if they hadn’t taken some time out to make fun of movies that also had time travel in them, laid out their time travel “logic” fairly explictly, then decided on an ending that seemingly broke the only meaningful rule they laid out for time travel. I mean, I even gave them the whole “Thanos reverse-engineered quantum time travel to bring a whole army forward to their specific future even though it is no longer his specific future, even though it supposedly required the hard-to-manufacture Pym Particles” because it was a MacGuffin that moved the plot along. If they’d just had Cap reappear on the damn pad as an old man with a spare shield, they could probably have gotten away with it.
But they decided to set rules on the time travel in their film, and they decided to play fast and loose with the rules they set, after dedicating some time to lampshading/dunking on time travel movies, and this is what they get.
It’s not about “I can’t accept time travel though I accept superheros” – it’s about internal inconsistencies in the logic of the fictitious universe. “You told me these were the rules, so I’d know what the stakes were and what the tension should be, but then you broke them for no particular reason and with no real explanation.” It is harder to suspend disbelief and go along with a world where the usual rules don’t apply if the writers don’t follow the rules they themselves made up to replace them, *especially* after calling attention to the plot device in the first place. That’s a fair complaint.
But it’s up to a film to define how time travel works, and then stick to those rules. If it breaks them, then the audience can indeed point out that time travel doesn’t work that way. (The same can be said of any other superhero ‘rule’, e.g. lifting Mjlonir means you are ‘worthy’.) I think Endgame ultimately does a fair job of following its own rules, but a less fair job of making it clear what those rules are in the first place. A common misunderstanding of the film (assuming *I* understand it myself haha) is that Cap needs to replace the stones at the end to prevent altering the timelines and fucking up the present. But the point of replacing the stones is actually so that they can be drawn on by heroes at later points in those alternate timelines, e.g. Doctor Strange defeating Dormammu with the Time Stone. No Time Stone = Earth being consumed by the Dark Dimension. And so on. I think the film could have done a better job of explaining this to avoid the whole ‘time travel doesn’t work that way’ accusations.
Yeah, Cap takes the stones back to save those other timelines, not 616’s. I think the movie did a fine enough job of explaining and following its own rules. How he snuck back in without anyone noticing is an actual plot concern but it doesn’t bother me because it felt good.
Yeah, this. It’s one of the lowest forms of cultural commentary to just pretend that ALL internal and external rules stop mattering in an artwork if it allows for even one fantastical element. “LOL, you point out blatant continuity errors like Thor’s actor changing from scene to scene and boom mics visible in half the movie, but you will believe in a MAGIC HAMMER? LOL, okay whatever dude!!!”
Exactly, one of your main characters throws a magic hammer so hard that he can hang on and fly. You accepted that, so Steve Rogers causing a minor time paradox should be an easy ask. Note: It’s bad that I need to check your profile to make sure it’s you and not the troll. Usually he gives himself away quickly but he has managed to hide a bit lately and then spring a litany of terrible as a response
They usually ban him pretty quick. The help desk must be on vacation.
I must give credit to screenwriters Christopher Markus & Stephen
McFeely for undoing The Snappening in the most convoluted way possible.
It becomes Legends of Tomorrow with a much
bigger budget & a wider range of canon characters. Despite the lack
of Time Wraiths, its Time Travel logistics are vastly perplexing. I understand time travel is fictional, but why introduce a unique system of rules that’s seemingly violated without consequence?
>>>>”I understand time travel is fictional, but why introduce a unique system of rules that’s seemingly violated without consequence? “They didn’t introduce a system (or at least one that’s violated without consequences).They merely explained it within the context of Quantum Mechanics and how it could work within that context – which, incidentally is the model we live under.And in that model you can’t “violate the system” and “have consequences” because that’s not how a Quantum Mechanics-based system works at all.
Look, we’re gonna be here all day making diagrams with straws.
I got the cork board and twine!!
They’re worried about people having an issue with time travel? Might just be me, but the whole everyone shows up exactly where they were five years ago thing was much more ridiculous and not well thought out. I’m sure the Russos didn’t intend to come up with a scenario where anyone snapped off of a plane would blip back freefalling to their death.
Not to mention the tremendous societal upheaval and death that came in the wake of half the earth’s population disappearing, followed by the tremendous societal upheaval and death of the world’s population suddenly DOUBLING. The psychological shock of loved ones vanishing and reappearing after five years. The awkwardness of the wife you lost five years ago meeting the one you married last year after you finally came to terms with it, or the guy you dated through high school suddenly being back and still very much in love with you… but he’s 17 and you just graduated college.
And all of this… because Tony has a wife and a daughter and that’s “too important to lose?” All this chaos and destruction and trauma because one of the heroes doesn’t think *his* life would be as good without The Snap? What the hell kind of message is that? This was a *horrifying* “win” for the heroes.
I can’t believe a time travel based story would contain some plot holes.
They were not plot holes (at least not the one she’s pointed out in this article)This writer just didn’t understand anything at all that Bruce Banner explained of how Time Travel works in that world.Their Time Travel logic was actually very consistent and well worked out under a Quantum Mechanics model.
This occurred to me while I was reading this article, so I figured I’d share it here. In Endgame, the heroes come to the conclusion that Natasha’s deal with the Red Skull cannot be reversed, not even if the Soul Stone is returned, and so that version of her must remain dead. So why doesn’t Cap just return to the point right before Nat sacrificed herself?If he travels back to the point just after Hawkeye and Black Widow arrived at the peak on Vormir, he can give the Soul Stone directly to Hawkeye, no sacrifice required. Hawkeye gets to travel back to pre-victory 2023 alone, with the Soul Stone in hand, just as in the original timeline. And Black Widow gets to travel back to post-victory 2023 with Cap, and live. Hell, you could even go the same fake-out route the film did, and have Cap travel back, only for Widow to reappear in his place, before pointing the others to the bench where Old Cap is sitting. How you would explain the switch without grinding the film to a halt is another matter, but I thought of this in five minutes, so I’m sure it can be done.The best thing is, you’re saving a whole multiverse of Black Widows from sacrificing themselves, because once pre-victory 2023 Hawkeye and his fellow heroes defeat Thanos, their version of Cap goes back and does the same thing (arriving a picosecond earlier so as not to meet the previous version of himself). Plus, you could even throw in a Red Skull vs. Cap, Hawkeye and Widow fight, once Red Skull realises he’s being cheated. (Or not. Whatever works.) Anyway, the point is, once you introduce time travel you have to work a lot harder to produce dead ends (and circumventing them through cleverness is much more satisfying anyway).
Even without the movie saying so, I don’t think you can trick a stone that controls part of reality. The deaths aren’t incidental like Natalie had to fall into it at a high speed to claim it; it’s specifically a sacrifice.
You’re missing the point; she only sacrificed herself because it was the only way to get the Stone. If Cap is there to just hand an already liberated Stone to Hawkeye, then the sacrifice doesn’t need to happen in the first place, and she gets to live. The sacrifice is only required to initially retrieve the Stone from the mystical vault or whatever on Vormir. No one else had to die in order for Hawkeye to hand it over to the science bros, or for Cap to take possession of it after Tony uses it to destroy Thanos’ forces. The original Widow’s sacrifice still stands, so there is no trick, but a version of her from right before that sacrifice can be saved and brought back to the present.
>>>>” So why doesn’t Cap just return to the point right before Nat sacrificed herself?”Because it wouldn’t change her fate or bring her back to life in the main timeline.That change only affects THAT alternate timeline. In the main timeline Nat is still dead and nothing you do in the past (which is effectively only “alternate” timelines from your perspective) affects your present in any way.
It’s also why Nebula was able to kill “her” younger self and not see her older self disappearing from existence, Back-to-the-Future’ style.Because it was HER actual younger self but an alternate timeline version of her younger self.You’re still thinking about it in a linear way when that’s not how time travel (within the rules of this story) works at all.
And another person fails to understand what I’m saying… I know OG Nat is dead, and will remain so. I’m saying that you go back in time and pluck pre-sacrifice Nat from the past (i.e. an alternate timeline) and return with her to the future. Not only do you save pre-sacrifice Nat’s life in that timeline, but you also get a version of Widow back (who is fundamentally the same one who left on the time travel hijinks, so no great change there). This is the same method that allowed the Avengers to acquire more Infinity Stones despite their versions of the Stones having been destroyed.The main argument against this turn of events would be to question why Black Widow would agree to come to the future with Cap in the first place, instead of going back to her own version of the present to fight Thanos. The response to that… is so that she could apear in future MCU films, of course. (Though I’m sure you could swing something to do with her not being present during the battle with Thanos being important to victory).
On closer inspection of my original post I realise that it seemed like I was talking about saving the original, dead version of Widow, which I wasn’t. The point of my post was to come up with a way of saving a *version* of Nat, who would then continue on in the MCU. And since the only difference between this Nat and the original Nat is that the new one didn’t sacrifice herself, they would essentially be the exact same person. (Compared to the billions of people on Earth who were literally dead for five years, the metaphysical implications are pretty easy to ignore haha.) But I realise my original post didn’t quite make this distinction clear, so my bad for the snarky reply.
But if Cap just hands the stone to Hawkeye or BW before any sacrifice is made, he creates a timeline where there are two Soul Stones. I’d think that would be as bad as creating a timeline where the stones are removed entirely.
Well, only until alternate-Hawkeye returns to his own time, which wouldn’t take long. I’m sure they’d get away with it.
Cap stole 4 vials of Pym Particles from SHIELD in 1970. 1 took Cap back to present 2 took Tony back to present 3 took Cap back to return the stones 4 took Cap back to Peggy
I mean, once the Snap was reversed and Hank Pym was returned to life, Pym Particles would no longer have been a scarce resource. The reason they had a limited supply in the first place was that he was dead and no one else knew how to make more.
Fuck, thanks for breaking the explanation I sold myself on.
Personally I find any time travel not involving a warm water source to be outrageous.
What the hell was confusing about it?It was pretty straightforward and very consistent with our understanding of Quantum Mechanics and the M Theory.>>>>”….but there are still some questions as to how certain consequences (or lack thereof) were determined — like the successful resurrection of Gamora, whose mortality should have been sealed by the Soul Stone, or Nebula’s ability to kill off her past self without any present-day repercussions. There are theories to spare, but whichever one you ultimately adopt, it helps to remember that time travel, um, isn’t real.”Those are questions that were answered in the movie.Were you really not paying attention?1) that wasn’t the same Gamora.That was a Gamora from an alternate timeline (you could say a different reality). Any point in time is an alternate reality and timeline from the present one we live and we exist in a soup of infinite realities created by the infinite combination of possible decisions and occurrences that we could happen but don’t due to our deciding our main timeline.So any point in the past (through time travel) is an alternate reality to your actual past and in no way affects your presence nor can it. Any former or past version of yourself doesn’t kill you when their death occurs and in this way the grandfather paradox is circumvented (you can actually kill your own grandfather in the past and not cease to exist in the present because that past version of your grandfather is “not” your grandfather or at least the version of him that procreated to give rise to you. This latter particular version of your grandfather no longer exists anymore in any way that anything happening to him can affect you). So Gamora dies in the main timeline; they travel to the past and there’s a version of Gamora from the past who hasn’t been exchanged for the time stone (and won’t be because the events won’t occur the same way any longer) and in essence this is a “new” version of Gamora (relative to our “main” timeline)2) Nebula’s ability to kill her past self.See above.It wasn’t “HER” (actual past self).It was a version of her past self from an alternate timeline where the events have turned out differently therefore anything happening to that version can’t affect the present main timeline version. That’s the reason Nebula knew she could kill her past self and not affect her present self. (it was hinted during the scene where Hulk explains time travel to Rhodes, Clint and Scott (which you should have been paying attention to) that she understood the mechanics of how time travel works well enough to know this).Yes, time travel isn’t real, but it’s NOT impossible under our understanding of Quantum Mechanics, nor even under Einstein’s Special Relativity theorem (he referred to the possibility of circumnavigating time as you would space as “closed time-like loops”).It’s just implausible with our current level of technology and given everything that would be necessary (energy-wise)to make the math work..(in other words, it would involve bending Space in on itself. We can’t do that and lack the technology (or energy capability to do so). The only things that come close to doing so in the universe are also the most destructive – Black Holes.).Incidentally the aspect of Quantum Mechanics which stipulates that Time travel is a possibility and that things like alternate (and infinite) timelines are almost certainly real, is not just real but it also underpins everything that constitutes modern technology from Electricity and Electronics to Lasers, GPS satellites etc.Why do people still think there was anything at all wrong with their Time Travel construct in the movie?The one flaw (which was more of a story goof-up by the writers rather than anything screwed up in the Time travel logic) was when they returned Cap to the main timeline as an old man WITHOUT using the portal (and Tony’s wrist GPS device) therefore implying he re-lived his entire life in the main timeline – which, under their own logic was impossible.Cap returned to the respective “pasts” he got the stones from and then chose one to live out his life with Peggy Carter in which would have seen him grow old in a DIFFERENT alternate timeline unless at the end of his life he used the GPS wrist device and the Pym particles to return to the main timeline (which was the whole point of those wrist GPS devices – to navigate the infinite timelines and be able to return to your own timeline) at some point when no one was paying attention (probably prior to Thanos destroying the original quantum tunnel or through Bruce’s reconstructed mini-platform (at a different time before he was re-sent back).
Joe Russo and Stephen McFeely on Plot HolesThere, fixed it for you.
If Doc Brown knows that the Flux Capacitor will work (having seen it in action in 1955) and he knows that it requires 1.21 Gigawatts… why is he still dealing with Libyans in 1985 when Marty gets back? He had all that time to sort this situation out.
Also, he must have pretended not to already know Marty as Marty grew up. Developed his time-machine, befriended the boy and still sent him back in time (we see this as Marty returns from 1955).How many times has this happened? Which loop is it we are seeing when we watch the movie?Which film are you guys talking about again?
I imagine he’s still dealing with Libyans because he still needs plutonium and in the alternate 1985 you still don’t just walk into a store and buy plutonium.
Yet 30 years previously, with a few days to prepare, he was able to fire it up using lightning. There are places where lightning strikes fairly regularly. Putting the flux capacitor in a plane probably makes sense anyway.And he has 30 years to prepare. The guy who invents time-travel still has to do a last minute deal for plutonium? I guess the doc isn’t the sort of guy to deal with the government but still…But he doesn’t care. He knows the Libyans won’t shoot his head, he doesn’t give a fuck about Marty travelling back and forth in time in an infinite loop. He’s a maniac I tells ya!Of course they change how the time-travel works in the second one which make a nonsense of this 🙂
At what point did the writers say “Yea, time travel, that will work out just fine, nobody will complain and it always works out for movies that use it” ?
Somewhere, Roland Barthes is rolling over in his grave.
And saying it’s a construct is a lame cop-out to not-explain away the non-sensical way it was depicted.