The culmination of 10 years and more than twice as many movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Avengers: Endgame” promises closure where its predecessor, “Avengers: Infinity War,” sowed chaos. That film — which revealed that the cookie-cutter uniformity of all those MCU movies had been part of an unprecedented master plan — infamously wrapped with a snap: a gesture that, when performed by a supervillain armed with the six Infinity Stones, was capable of wiping out half of all life in the universe.

Audiences have had a year to mourn the loss of Spider-Man, Star-Lord, and Black Panther (whom they’d only just met two months earlier), and to nurture theories as to where directing siblings Anthony and Joe Russo might steer things from here. Maybe all those characters weren’t really dead. Maybe the remaining Avengers just needed to travel inside the Soul Stone to get them back. Or maybe “Avengers: Endgame” would have to resort to that most desperate of narrative cheats — time travel — to undo the damage caused by Thanos (the purple-skinned, multi-chinned baddie so compellingly performed by Josh Brolin).
The element of surprise and the thrill of discovery are everything in these movies, so every attempt has been made to minimize spoilers. Yes, “Avengers: Endgame” is the most expansive film yet, and yes, it strives to provide emotional catharsis for several of fans’ favorite characters. It’s even safe to say that “Endgame” shifts the focus from extravagant, effects-driven displays of universe-saving — manifold though they remain — to the more human cost of heroism, which comes at great personal sacrifice.

That said, readers should also be warned that “Avengers: Endgame” hinges on the most frustrating of narrative tricks, and that no meaningful analysis of the film can take place without delving into some of the choices made by the Russo brothers and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. If “Infinity War” was billed as a must-see event for all moviegoers, whether or not they’d attended a single Marvel movie prior, then “Endgame” is the ultimate fan-service follow-up, so densely packed with pay-offs to relationships established in the previous films that it all but demands that audiences put in the homework of watching (or rewatching) a dozen earlier movies to appreciate the sense of closure it offers the series’ most popular characters.

To the extent that it has all been leading up to this, no franchise in Hollywood history can rival what the Disney-Marvel alliance has wrought, although “Avengers” would not be what it is without the three-films-over-three-years scope of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the coming-of-age continuity of Warner Bros.’ eight-part Harry Potter saga, or the 21st-century shift of serialized television to expansive, ensemble-driven narrative. Each of those experiments in cumulative, multi-part storytelling served to test just how far audiences would go to follow characters they love over time. But nothing — not the horror of Han Solo frozen in carbonite, nor the shock of James Bond’s wife murdered at the end of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” — could prepare fans for the Snap, and the pain of watching half the heroes they’d gotten to know turned to dust at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War.”