It is 12:57a.m. on April 26, 2019. I have just watched Avengers:Endgame. And my vision is blurred from the tears welling in my eyes as I sit here with my pizza.

Before I forget, this review is full of spoilers, so unless you want to ruin for yourself as I did — eat it, Twitter — I would not continue reading.

But here’s a little summary before we take this journey together. This movie directed by Anthony and Joe Russo follow those who survived Thanos’s (Josh Brolin’s) snap after he disintegrated half of the population. Our six original Avengers who survived all experienced the loss that it has brought and are plagued with guilt, forcing them to explore time travel and try and undo what Thanos did, and, well — avenge the fallen. Ha ha.

Now, where do I begin? With the pain that my soul has had to now endure, or the satisfaction of 11 years of buildup coursing through my veins? I’m going with the latter because the more I think about it, the more I begin to cry again.

Endgame was the end of Marvel’s “Infinity Saga,” meaning that this movie is the end of the first ever Marvel era. Here’s a tip — you cannot go into this movie if you haven’t seen pretty much all 21 of the other MCU movies. You will be very confused. Even I was confused and I’ve seen all of them five times or more.

Anyways, what I’m trying to say here is that this is a huge cultural phenomenon coming to a “somewhat end.” There will of course be more Marvel films, but not with all of the original heroes people have come to love.

But as for the movie itself, here are my thoughts that are very accurate and factual — I have never been more emotionally played with in my life, and that’s including my first boyfriend.

It exceeded all of my expectations and then some. I thought that it being three hours would make it boring and overdone, but I left that North Charleston theater wishing it was double that time. I can honestly say that I don’t know how the directors pulled it off with that many characters and plots to take care of. But, hey, I guess we all have our talents.

We start off with Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) being saved from space by Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) when he was pretty sure he was gonna kick the iron bucket. They, along with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans AKA my man) and Nebula (Karen Gillan), go to find Thanos and get back the stones to reverse all the deaths.

Since this is within the first 10 minutes, you can guess this doesn’t work out. Thanos revealed he destroyed the stones and starts on his philosophical crap until Thor chops his head off. Took him long enough. Defeated, they all go back home with no hope and then we jump five years into the future.

Tony has a kid now, which is huge character development for him given that he spent his whole life never wanting to be a dad because he doesn’t want to be like his father who was distant and lowkey emotionally abusive. This is when I started crying FYI.

Everyone else is kinda just there in regards to time after the jump, but basically everyone is trying to move on, with various degrees of success.

As a whole, Endgame was very much a sequel to not only Infinity War, but every other MCU movie thus far. Most of the scenes in the film were flashbacks to previous movies and contained quite a lot of fanservice. I’m not complaining, but there are some things they put in here that honestly seemed just out of place and straight out of tumblr fanfiction, such as Thor (Chris Hemsworth) becoming overweight and forced to become comic relief instead of an actual hero.

But besides thick Thor, there were parts of the movie that literally stopped my breathing faster than Loki’s. I’m talking about the most satisfying piece of cinema since Harry Potter finally killed Voldemort. That’s right — when Captain America was deemed worthy by Thor’s hammer and swung that thing into Thanos’s grape face like no tomorrow. My entire theater was up in applause and screams, and my mom accidentally kicked the person’s seat in front of us in her reaction.

This moment is so big you can fit Donald Trump’s ego into it and still have room for Mike Pence. Brilliant.

And if you thought the scene in Infinity War where Thor shows up in Wakanda was good, just wait until you see all the heroes, recently brought back and ones who stayed alive, come out of nowhere and save Steve from losing. And the part Marvel fans have been waiting for since forever finally happened. Captain America said with all of his beautiful godlike voice, “Avengers assemble.”

It does not get better than this. I literally cannot remember a time where I ever felt such energy flowing through me to where I got physically dizzy, but that scene got me. It was emotional, beautiful, satisfying and just straight-up epic.

But with the good comes the bad and blah blah blah. Everyone knew that something was coming whether they wanted to accept it or not — Tony Stark’s death. Listen, I’m just as big a fan as any of them and I didn’t want to see him gone, but it had to happen. He is the father of the MCU and started this, so he has to finish it. And the way they handled his death was absolutely perfect and true to his character. “I am Iron Man,” he says, referencing back to the iconic ending of the first Marvel movie, Iron Man. At this moment, I knew he was toast.

But I was okay with it because it worked. There was no other way to go about it and I thank Marvel for making it so great because what they did to Captain America I will never forgive.

Captain is my favorite. He’s my man. My king. He is what got me into these movies in the first place, and to have him just yeet himself back in time and leave all of his friends for Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) makes me furious. Now I realize that he always felt out of place being stuck in the future, but his whole arc was about moving on and finding peace within his circumstances. Yet in the last five minutes of the movie Marvel was like, “You know what let’s just have him abandon Bucky (Sebastian Stan), his best friend and only piece of home he has left, along with the new life he’s made for himself for some girl he kissed once in 1945.”

Like. What?

I’m all for Peggy Carter. I love that woman with my whole heart and I wanted them to end up together, but this felt like all the movies we’ve followed Steve through have now gone to waste. Because my Steve would not just leave the fight like that. His entire character is about always needing to do the right thing for humanity and not being able to sit out on helping the world, but he just leaves all that when he finally gets his best friend back for a girl?

I’m glad he got to have his dance with Peggy. I’m glad he’s happy. All I’m saying is that he should have taken Bucky back with him because that was just so out of character for him to abandon him.

And don’t even get me started on how they didn’t even really explain how the time travel works in the movie because it is now unclear whether Steve went back in the main timeline and always married Peggy in the end, or if he created a new timeline by altering the past. Endgame states that your past is your past and you can’t change it, but instead you create new realities by messing with time travel. However, because it is unclear whether Steve was always meant to be with Peggy in the past or not, things are confusing.

Plus he should have given his shield to Bucky. All I’m saying.

Even though I just trashed the ending, this movie was a masterpiece. Juggling all these characters seems like an impossible task, but the directors did an amazing job doing it. I’ve never in my life seen so many people in one room all connected to a group of fictional characters. The feeling of community among me and all the other people at the premiere was something I’ll never forget. Because that’s what Marvel does — it makes you believe in anything and everything.

I grew up with Marvel and I plan to continue to grow with it, and seeing the past years of my life come to a close with this film was immensely bittersweet. I laughed, I cried, I screamed. That is what a movie should do. Make you feel all the emotions and feel a connection to the film.

I’ll always remember walking into a small theater in 2012 going to watch the first Avengers, not knowing the impact that it would have on my life.

So thank you Marvel for all that you’ve done for so many people with these movies. Thank you for letting me witness all that you’ve created, causing me to believe in superheroes again. And thank you for beautifully closing this chapter.

It’s like Iron Man says — “Part of the journey is the end.”