Avengers: Endgame throws in plenty of laughs along the way. In fact, in the long stretch between its appropriately somber opening chapter and an emotionally grueling finale, it may be the most lighthearted and character-driven Marvel movie since the giddy comic entry Thor: Ragnarok. Endgame consists almost entirely of the downtime scenes that were always secretly everyone’s favorite parts of these movies anyway.

Succeeds at its daunting task: summing up an epic struggle with bedazzling action; with a style that progresses, apart from a few lapses, from the elegiac through the episodic to the symphonic; and with more humor, zest and feeling — the real, heartfelt stuff — than you’d dare to expect from what is, after all, an immense industrial undertaking.

No matter what comes next from Marvel Studios, this Avengers is a gargantuan love letter to the equally enormous mythology that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and the rest of their collaborators built — and to the generations of readers and moviegoers who truly believe in it.