“Have you seen the movie?,” the whispers go across the school campus, “It was awesome.”

Oh la la, where to begin? Yes, it’s “the movie” now, spoken in hush tones. After a whopping 1.2 billion-dollar opening weekend, the best performance for a movie ever in the existence of cinema, Avengers: Endgame is now the movie. 

It is quite possibly the most controversial and divisive among neck-beards. Some think that it renders all previous Avengers movies null; others believe it was the most satisfying ending to a long chain of modern classics. But for all the muggles who tagged along with their geek compatriots– it was down-right baffling.

During the film, one could hear the muggles demanding in whispers “Who’s that?”; “Who’s this?”; “Why did everyone just gasp?”; “What does that thing do?”; “How did he do that?”; “Was that Stan Lee?” Then, all the muggles simultaneously looked at their watches to notice that two hours had passed, but the third act had just commenced!

I can actually empathize with the muggles. To tie a pretty little bow on the behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I understood beforehand, would be a feat of super-human strength. After twenty-two Marvel movies, this is the last time the Avengers assemble. The previous Avengers movie, Infinity War, proved that all the plot lines from Guardians of the Galaxy to Spiderman could fit in the same box, but that pretty little bow on top unfolded into a tangled knot of Möbius strips and spiderwebs, like all the tape pulled out of “Awesome Mix Vol. 1.”

Still, the bow holds: the plot is intact.

I hadn’t seen all of the Avengers movies, and it still made sense to me. The film jerks the viewer around, but I still followed. There was a point in the film, however, when I thought “Flying horses and spacemen and sorcerers and quantum leaps and paradoxes and magic rocks!?– I should probably just turn my brain off.”

Of course, Endgame would not be a Marvel movie without making all of the viewers watch through their tears. Even I could not hold back a few. When a Marvel film debuts, theatre attendants ought to walk up and down the aisles with boxes of tissues. In short, the film is both incredibly fantastical and incredibly human, and striking that balance makes this film a work of art and a modern classic.

Is it my favorite movie or even my favorite Marvel movie? No, my favorite Marvel movie remains Spiderman: Homecoming (9/10). Today, I cannot rank Endgame higher than this, but the movie may very well grow on me as I grow older. See, for a grab-bag of fantasy tropes and hero archetypes, Endgame is very adult, very mature, yet it still maintains the PG-13 rating. The film speaks to the struggle and love and death and life and the nature of fleeting time; these themes are universal, but only adults who have had first-hand experience with these would fully grasp the tragedy and the triumph. In the same way, Spiderman is much more relatable to me personally as a high schooler; he has to balance homework with what he knows to be more important. He has to pretend to be normal while grappling with his idiosyncrasies. He has to learn to wade through the mundane with his inexperience while he tries to answer a higher call. That’s adolescence in a nutshell.

This movie has the potential to become my favorite movie of all time– one day. There is no doubt that it will stick with me.

Today, I give it a 7/10. If asked twenty years in the future, I may give a 9/10– or even a 10/10.