The spoiler ban has been lifted, but if you still haven’t seen Endgame please do not read this post until you have. I will be talking about some very spoilery moments from the movie.
So in the beginning of the movie we see Clint teaching his daughter how to fire a bow, while in the background his wife is setting lunch out on a picnic table with his two sons. It’s a scene to show the humanity of a person who has literally fought aliens and giant evil robots. It brings him down to earth and shows how much he has to lose as a person. His wife calls them over for lunch and when Clint goes to retrieve an arrow from the target he turns around and everyone is gone.
This scene hits hard with loss for Clint. Everything he held dear in life is gone, taken away from him because of an event he knew nothing about. We are shown a moment of confusion and fear from losing everything and having no explanation about what happened to the people that you love. We see fear from him and then the movie hard cuts to five years in the future.
The next time we even hear about Clint he has murdered an entire room of cartel members so fast that they did not even have a chance to remove their guns or fight back. The very next line of dialogue tells us that this is not the first time he has done this. Natasha and Rhodey talk about who they know it was him because this is not the first time that this has happened and Clint is presumably leaving a trail of bodies behind him.
Skipping over everything else we find ourselves in Japan with a beautiful single-shot scene that starts us on the side of the building and follows an unknown assailant through the building as guns are fired at them and people are killed. ending when a hooded figure and a Yakuza boss fly out of the window and land on the street. They have a quick fight and we see that this person who has been reeking all of this havoc has been the one and only Clint Barton aka Hawkeye.
He ends the fight with a perfect line that defines his entire arc in the movie and explains to the viewer why he has been going on a rampage against gangs. “You are done hurting people.” (I may be misquoting this, but you get the idea.) This Yakuza boss is done hurting people, because if Clint’s family were snapped out of existence and these people were not there is no justice. He took it upon himself to correct this wrong. His family was innocent and did not deserve to be erased from the universe and these people who do nothing but hurt the people around them miraculously survived.
THIS ARC IS THE BEST ONE NEXT TO IRON MAN! FIGHT ME! I am a huge fan of Red Hood from the DC universe because he is the Batman that makes sense and this arc is so reminiscent of Red Hood it drives me bonkers. I love it. Clint sees the injustice in The Snap and feels personally attacked by it even though he was not in the battle. His family was taken away and the only way that he can make sense of that trauma is to rid the planet, and I will say that again. RID THE PLANET of the people whose existence only hurts those around them. He does not care if he dies. Like Thor in “Infinity War”Clint has nothing left to lose and does not care anymore. All he wants to do is to make sure that the injustice of innocent people dying and evil people staying a live is to seek out evil and destroy it. That is the only thing that can make the world make sense again.
In a world and universe filled with gods, super soldiers, and children that stick to walls; Clint Barton, the man that never misses, brings us back down to Earth with perfect humanity.
The more and more I think about this character arc in just this film it confuses me as to why no one is talking about it. It shows tons of emotions and is really encapsulated with the line that Clint delivers to Natasha when she finds him. “…Don’t give me hope.”
Grayson C. Beane 