MovieChat Forums > Avengers: Endgame (2019) Discussion > * SPOILER * Why was [this character] wit...

* SPOILER * Why was [this character] within 50 miles of [this place]?

posted 6 years ago by FreddySez (6)
7 replies | jump to latest

I've made a quick pass through the comments to see if this is redundant - sorry if I've missed anything.

So think back to the end of the 2012 Battle of New York. Bear with me on this -- let me name two points in time:

(A) is the moment the battle is won and everyone is lying down on Park Avenue chatting about shawarma. (B) is the moment everyone is up in Tony's penthouse looming over Loki, who says "I'll have that drink now."

My question: How much time are we supposed to believe elapsed between (A) and (B)?

Here's why I'm asking: (*SPOILER*)

In Endgame, We go from (B) directly down to the lobby where Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) is waiting with some agents to take Loki and the Tesseract into custody.

But Pierce was a member of the council that had just ordered New York to be nuked. As far as he knew a few minutes (?) ago, the lobby of Stark Tower was going to be a couple of million degrees right at the moment we see him there. Tony diverting the missile was not something Pierce or anyone else anticipated.

His being there makes sense only if there was a big unspoken time jump from (A) to (B), long enough for Pierce and his goons to learn of Tony's heroics and then jet into town. Which was not the sense I got watching the original movie.

So is this a plot goof or am I off base?

[–] AP (5288) 6 years ago

[deleted]

[–] AP (5288) 6 years ago

Pierce was not on the World Security Council. He was the head of SHIELD, although he and one of the guys on the WSC were both Hydra so I can see how that might be confusing. Typically, Pierce would be in the Triskelion in Washington DC but it's not 100% certain he was there at the time. Everyone knew what was happening in New York, after all. While it's unlikely Pierce would be in the city since one of his peers was plotting to nuke the town, it's possible he could have been close enough to monitor the situation. Then again, flying from DC to New York wouldn't take long, especially if they flew him in on a Quinjet. A normal, commercial flight would be about 43 minutes according to my last google search. A Quinjet would probably take much less time.

[–] FreddySez (6) 6 years ago

In the movies as opposed to the print history, Pierce is on the World Security Council. He’s its secretary, which in faux-UN-speak suggests he’s in charge of it. You just don’t see him on Fury’s 2012 videoconference because they hadn’t snagged Redford for that cameo yet.

So it’s very unlikely he did not know in real time about the nuke plan. Which means the gang took almost an hour to go upstairs and apprehend the bad guy, which seems implausible.

[–] AP (5288) 6 years ago

In Winter Soldier, we see that he has an office in the Triskelion. Assuming he was in DC at the time (no real verification on that, but it's a good place to start) he would be close enough to come over once he realized the nuke plan didn’t work. Since he's presumably coming from the Trikelion and arrives at the same time as Sitwell, Rumlow, and other SHIELD/Hydra agents, it's likely he came on a Quinjet. From the time the nuke went into the wormhole to the time the team made it downstairs, I think a good 15-20 minutes could have passed. Considering Quinjets regularly go across the globe in what appears to be an hour or so, that's plenty of time.

[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

Who cares.

[–] FreddySez (6) 6 years ago

A totally reasonable IRL analysis. But then why are you here?

[–] wickerman1271 (946) 6 years ago

Because the directors/writers think we are a bunch of idiots that don't pay attention to details in their movies , so they just throw random stuff at us without reason.