Warning: Massive Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home spoilers will be found below.
In an overall sense, Avengers: Endgame‘s conclusion was decidedly conflicted. Yes, the superheroes managed to reverse Thanos’ snap, but on a more tragic note, the Mad Titan was only fully defeated through the death of Tony Stark. Given that Spider-Man: Far From Home picked up almost immediately after the events of Endgame, director Jon Watts was tasked with following up on both of those major events, so he had to toe a careful line with tone. Watts previously told us that this was “a pretty daunting challenge,” given that Homecoming established a lighthearted air, and there’s been a load of bleakness in the years that passed. And of course, half of the universe’s population came back to life, so how did he juggle it all without doing a disservice to lightness and dark?
Those of us who have seen Far From Home will likely admit to feeling slightly guilty about laughing at how the movie handles the reverse-snap moment, which is referred to as the ending of the “Blip” in this new installment. In a mockumentary-style high-school news report, we get to see marching band members getting dusted during an assembly, and then they magically reappear in the same spot with the un-dusting, which happens to occur during a basketball game. It’s a darkly funny moment, and Watts told the Huffington Post that it was important to him to stick to a trivial instance of un-snapping, rather than considering more gruesome possibilities, like if someone was in an airplane when they got dusted, so they’d obviously reappear in the sky, crash to Earth, and die again. Here’s how Watts viewed that subject:
“What would happen to people in motion, if you’re in a car or in an airplane? Obviously, they didn’t blip back in the middle of the sky and fall to the Earth because so many people would die. There are so many questions, but we just stuck with the ones that made sense in our story … That’s the thing. Everyone arrived back safely somehow. I don’t think suddenly people were raptured back to Earth and plummeted into the ocean. That would not be the happy ending that [Tony Stark] was planning.”
Watts makes a solid point. While the Avengers as a collective may not have thought through the effects of an un-snapping, Stark clearly wrestled with the idea before signing onto the mission. Of course, this also leaves out what Doctor Strange foresaw for the future for the un-snapping, but given that he was dusted, gaining his take wasn’t an option until it came down to Stark snapping Thanos at the end of Endgame. It’s all so circular, but things got even weirder when Watts kept talking to HuffPost about microscopic entities.
“Thanos said all living entities, all living beings, half of all of them, so does that include bacteria?” Watts hypothesized. “Did half of the stomach bacteria inside of you disappear and people get really sick?” Hey now, that’s too much overthinking. Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered?
(Via Huffington Post)