Fair warning: I was in Warsaw to see Avengers: Endgame. I’ll be discussing my impressions near the end of this update, so if you’re one of the small sliver of people in the Venn diagram who 1) haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame, 2) care about Avengers: Endgame, and 3) hate spoilers, you’ll want to come back later.

I’ve been to Warsaw before, for a few days, and the last time I had the misfortune of visiting over what turned out to be a holiday weekend. So much of what I was trying to see was closed. So even though I was only in town for a single night, I decided I wanted to make the most of it.

What does the most of it look like? I went to the top of the Palace of Culture and Science; visited the Chopin Museum, the Polish Army Museum, and the National Museum; and then saw Avengers: Endgame. And on top of the whole thing I walked everywhere¹ and still had time to lose my computer bag and backtrack twice to find it again.

Of those, the Palace and the Army Museum were fine but kind of forgettable. I only did the Palace because the bus from the airport dropped me off right there.² And I was on the fence about the Army Museum, but it was right next to the National Museum and I did have time to kill. By about the third room I was thinking “Well, this is all a bunch of flags, guns, and uniforms,” and by the seventh room I hadn’t been proven wrong yet. There’s a bunch of decommissioned military vehicles parked outside which was far more interesting than I found the exhibits inside, and those were free to see.

I thought the Chopin museum was good, but they don’t do especially well in presenting his life. There’s a lot of artifacts and music presentations. And I certainly learned some things.³ But I had to go to Wikipedia afterwards and read up to fill in a lot of gaps; if I knew anything about classical music maybe I’d have been more engaged.

But the National Museum was simply amazing. It’s an art museum, divided between ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian sculpture; a Gallery of Medieval Art collected from churches; a mind-bogglingly large collection of 19^th-century art; and finally a collection of modern art. Really, it’s the Medieval and 19^th century art which are the jewels here. They’re organized by theme rather than time period, gathered mostly from Poland and supplemented by other artists across Europe.

There is, no pun intended, an art to curation. Some of it is working with the pieces you have — the better or more impressive the art, the easier it is to just throw stuff on the wall and still have something breathtaking. And much of their collection is truly stellar. But beyond that, you want to put things together that reveal something deeper about the art, to illuminate the way artists have been working struggling with similar issues, or dealt with various challenges, or the way particular movements evolved over time. This museum did that, over and over again. I spent two hours. I could have spent four. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back in Warsaw, but if I am, I’m going to try to return.

I capped the day by seeing Avengers: Endgame and it was … fine? As a technical achievement it’s literally spectacular, juggling nearly two dozen films and at least twice as many movie stars over a decade and weaving the various components together into a single coherent narrative. And for them to almost all be consistently interesting and compelling and entertaining? It’s unprecedented.⁴

And I can’t say I was bored or distracted during the three-hour runtime, which is a miracle in and of itself. I really did appreciate the unexpected touches. There’s only really one big battle scene, which is a gutsy move for a movie like this. Instead it’s filled with character moments — loss, and grief, and mourning. It asks difficult questions about the human⁵ costs of revenge, of moving on after you’ve lost everything. And if it never really answers those questions, it’s amazing it even raised them in the first place.

So why am I not raving about this movie? I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to figure that out. I’m a little annoyed at some of the fan service,⁶ and the plot holes are as plentiful as they are in any movie involving time travel.⁷ But those are minor quibbles.

Ultimately I think it’s because it’s a comic book, and it’s operating well within that model. So it’s telling a grand story about life and death and sacrifice, about the choices we make and the prices we pay for them. And those choices have consequences, and we see characters we’ve followed for 10 years die. It’s all deeply affecting.

But these are comic book characters. We’ve already seen characters come back to life on the whims of the writers. This is a medium that thrives on resurrections, on remixes, on revisiting old characters in new costumes. I did like the movie. But do you really think that’s the last time we’ll see Black Widow? That Iron Man won’t turn up for a cameo in a film or two? Characters will be dead for as long as the stories with them dead are more interesting than the alternative, and no longer.

The quote used to be “The only people who stay dead in comics are Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben.” Two of those people are currently officially alive in comic continuity. I don’t object to the decision of who got killed in Avengers: Endgame. But I’m having a hard time taking it seriously.

Next: Lviv (LWO) to Düsseldorf (NRN)
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Footnotes

¹ Everything here is within about a square mile, so that’s less impressive than it sounds.

² Like, literally in the parking lot

³ He was romantically involved with George Sand for a long time. Is that common knowledge? It felt like I should have known that, rather than unexpectedly stumbling upon her letters complaining about him to a girlfriend.

⁴ And as DC has proven, it’s not as easy as it looks.

⁵ And Asgardian?

⁶ As I mentioned to some friends, if after 22 films you can still fit most of the female leads in your movies in a single frame without crowding them, you probably shouldn’t call attention to that fact.

⁷ Primer excluded, of course