Avengers: Endgame has become one of the highest-grossing films in the history of cinema. No wonder that one may consider this film not only as a commercially successful product but also as a “Zeitgeist” film. The basic concept of the term Zeitgeist is that the film raises such pressing issues that it would be difficult to view it in the context of another era. In other words, a successful 2021 film would not have been that successful in 1950.
Indeed, the modern era is characterized by the problems of overpopulation, consumerism, running out of resources (Ramhormozi 291). Avengers: Endgame raises these issues, as in the previous half, overpopulation caused the destruction of half of the living organisms. Overpopulation leads to the depletion of resources and to global warming due to the overdevelopment of industry. In other words, in the 1950s, these issues were not on the agenda, and the film would not have been so well-received.
Such films do not have the task of telling how to solve the raised problem. Therefore, surely, Thanos’s decision to destroy half of the population is not a solution. The task of such films is to actualize urgent problems associated with a certain era: which is also part of the Zeitgeist concept. The film reflected the model of travel in time and also raised the question of the structure of time (Gormley 163). More precisely, it is trying to make some sketches and approximately describe the information we have about time’s nature. Again, the question is topical, and it has never been raised so much in any other era, which ties the film to our time.
Today one may notice that more and more films touch on the problem of resettlement to another planet, pollution, and global warming. All of this makes Avengers: Endgame suitable to the Zeitgeist concept.
Works Cited
Gormley, Michael. The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.
Ramhormozi, Rahim. The Anatomy of Consumerism: The Story of Excess, Greed, Self-Indulgence, Wealth Accumulation, Insurmountable Waste, and Environmental Degradation. Friesen Press, 2019.