What The ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Trailer Tells Us About the Team’s Plan to Save the World
The plot of Avengers: Endgame is one of the most closely guarded secrets in film history. Until today, we didn’t even know what the movie was called, and it comes out in less than five months (and more like four months, since we also learned today — more secrecy! — that the movie opens in late April, not early May). So anything we speculate based on the Avengers: Endgame trailer is purely that: Educated guesswork.
Still if you’re looking for clues and potential spoilers in the Endgame trailer, the biggest one seems to come at the very end, when Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang shows up at Avengers HQ (after he’s already been shown on a screen suggesting he’s dead) for Captain America and Black Widow to let him into the building. But what’s really important isn’t Scott; it’s the thing standing behind him.
That would be the van we last saw in Ant-Man and the Wasp’s post-credits scene cliffhanger. It contains a gateway to the quantum realm. If you missed it (or you need a refresher) here’s that scene.
So Ant-Man and the Wasp ends with Hank Pym, Janet van Dyne, and Hope van Dyne snapped out of existence and Scott Lang cast adrift in the quantum realm. Obviously, he got out somehow in between the end of his movie and the end of Infinity War. (I mean he already escaped from the quantum realm once in the first Ant-Man, so it’s not shocking he does it again.) And then he brought that van to the Avengers.
Scott went into the quantum realm on this particular mission to collect “quantum healing particles,” but I’m not sure how you “heal” people who are already dead and turned to ash. (The canister he carried with him didn’t seem like it would hold enough magic healing junk to fix half the universe, but hey the quantum realm is really small, so you never know.) It could be possible that he uses those quantum healing particles not to fix the entire world, but to heal one Avenger at one key moment in the fight.
Instead, the most important line may be one spoken by Michelle Pfeiffer in that clip:
“Don’t get suck into a time vortex. We won’t be able to save you.”
Pfeiffer throws that line away (probably on purpose) but that could be hugely important. There have been persistent rumors that the Avengers will defeat Thanos somehow by going back in time to some point in the Avengers’ past. If that’s true, here’s how they could to do it — Ant-Man will lead the Avengers into the quantum realm (they even have a quantum ship that can shrink multiple people down; that‘s how Hank finally rescued Janet in Ant-Man and the Wasp) and then take them into a time vortex deliberately, so they can head back to fix the mess they made in Infinity War.
There’s no guarantee that will happen, but it’s a mighty plausible scenario. The only alternative I see is the Avengers just call it quits and make peace with the fact that Black Panther and Bucky are gone forever. Which would be a very bold stroke by Marvel. Avengers: Endgame opens in theaters on April 26, 2019.
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