Avengers: Endgame Needs to Avoid Justice League’s Mistake

(This article contains SPOILERS for Captain Marvel and Justice League)

The recently-released Captain Marvel has confirmed Kevin Feige’s statement that Carol Danvers is the most powerful hero in the MCU, and will no doubt be a threat to Thanos and an advantage for the Avengers. It’s clear that her addition to the team will give them a huge advantage, but the fact that her power levels are off the charts have caused some to worry that she’ll make the fight too easy. This is unlikely, especially since for one thing Avengers: Endgame is over three hours long. Also, since her powers are derived from the Space Stone, a.k.a. the Tesseract, as well, that could possibly be a weakness for her. All that said, in thinking about this potential issue, it brought back to mind the movie Justice League, in which a team is assembled to fight a superpowered villain and his army. In that movie, the team uses one of the Mother Boxes to bring Superman back to life to help them in the fight, treating the scenario as the team’s only real hope in stopping Steppenwolf. While they have to fight against him at first, he winds up joining the team. Since he shows up in the middle of the climactic fight, it’s clear that his presence turns the tide of the battle into their favor. It makes it feel that he is in a way a deus ex machina since he seems to be able to defeat him very easily. Just as they are at the point of defeat, Superman shows up, with the audience first hearing his voice in a response to Steppenwolf’s monologuing before seeing him. He then is quickly able to only save civilians, help to separate the mother boxes, and then instrumentally help defeat the villain. Captain Marvel in a way is like Superman in the sense that she can fly and is very powerful. Based on the mid-credits scene of her film and the trailers for Endgame, it appears that she will arrive either very early on in the movie or is already with them when the film begins. Still, in a way Endgame is essentially part two of Infinity War and she was absent from the latter film. Granted, the final battle scene in Justice League is much shorter than the one in Endgame will presumably be. Let’s hope that Captain Marvel is indeed an important asset to the Avengers, but is not the deus ex machina plot device for an easy defeat that Superman was in Justice League.