Directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gleefully unpack some of the persistent myths of that particular device, ripping apart the plotholes of iconic chrono-cinema stories like Back to the Future and The Terminator.
The possible answer to the dilemma of the missing Avengers is the film’s biggest joke, and I mean that literally since the dialogue will reference such fan favorites as “Back to the Future,” “Star Trek,” “X-Men,” “Terminator,” “Time After Time” “Somewhere in Time,” “About Time” (but not “Timecrimes” and “La Jetee,” the two coolest movies of that type ever made).
The Russos have always been big fans of popular culture, so I loved the references to all of the time travel films including Back to the Future and Hot Tub Time Machine .
Oh, and there’s more than a few references to “Back to the Future.”
The nature of the quantum realm is more sophisticated than in, say, Back to the Future (which gets a razzing, Stark preferring the theories of Planck and contemporary egghead David Deutsch), but the film echoes Robert Zemeckis’s farce in how characters encounter their former selves from previous films.
Before long, the surviving characters are ricocheting through the recent past, cheekily referencing movies like “Back to the Future” and “Somewhere in Time,” and reviving the classic would-you-kill-Hitler debate for the Thanos era.