Avengers: Endgame — How time travel works

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Avengers: Endgame (2019) poster. Image: Marvel Studios

Making sense of Avengers: Endgame most fascinating–but very confusing–plot device, and how it (mostly) stays consistent throughout. Spoilers are ahead for this movie.

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If you’re reading this, you’ve more than likely seen Avengers: Endgame (and if you haven’t, best that you go see it first and then come back here, because there’s going to be Heavy Spoilers). Like many in the theatre, you laughed, cried, and cheered at all the right moments, looked at what happened on-screen in awe, and maybe even clapped when it was over. Yet as you left the theatre, talking about it among your family and friends, a troubling thought occurred to you, one that just wouldn’t go away. That thought was, “That was great…but it didn’t make any sense!”

And you can sum up why it didn’t make sense in just two words: time travel.

Yes, Avengers: Endgame uses one of the coolest, but baffling, scenarios in all of science fiction. All of us, at some point or another, imagined going back or forward in time, whether it be walking with the dinosaurs, meeting our own ancestors, or witnessing what will happen a century from now first hand. Yet, as we know–or think we know–from countless novels, movies, video games, and television shows, the act of going back to the past or the future isn’t as simple as it sounds. There are rules, and very complex ones at that.

Endgame isn’t any exception; in fact, it may have some of the most complex rules of time travel in any mainstream movie. Not to worry, though, because we’re going to try to explain how traveling from one point to another works in this movie. Thus, if you watch Endgame a second time, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s going on, and why it actually doesn’t violate its own rules…or at least ninety percent of them, anyway.

Why the Ant-Man movies are more important than you thought

Who would’ve thought that, at the end of Avengers: Infinity War that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) of all people held the key to undoing Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) snap? It also turns out that watching Ant-Man (2015) and Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) are actually essential for understanding the most easy-to-understand aspect of Endgame’s method of time travel.

As shown in the Ant-Man movies, there exists a subatomic universe called “the Quantum Realm,” where “all concepts of space and time become irrelevant.” Simply put, time moves at different rates in the Quantum Realm than it does in our own universe. One hour spent there could mean an entire year has passed by in our world. This explains how, in Endgame, Scott wound up five years in the future even though he only spent five hours in the Quantum Realm. It also means that, because the Quantum Realm is a universe composed of infinite space and time, you could travel to any place or any time in the known universe.

Of course, the only way one can enter the Quantum Realm is to shrink down in size using “Pym Particles.” That’s problem number one. Problem number two is that, once you enlarge yourself, there’s no guarantee where or when you’ll end up. Hence why Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) had been secretly inventing a special GPS to navigate through the Quantum Realm to prevent his fellow Avengers from becoming lost. Problem number three? You better be sure you’re not affected by the Quantum Realm or, like Scott found out first-hand during the time travel tests, you could end up as a baby or an old man.

In short, we might also call the Quantum Realm the “MacGuffin Realm.” All you really need to know, however, it’s the mechanism which makes time travel possible in Avengers: Endgame. The real fun begin when you go over the rules of Endgame’s method of time travel.

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