Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

I still remember someone had a brand new Zune at the one and only Qt3 gathering I attended in Seattle years ago during PAX. I want to say maybe it was someone working at MS at the time, who had one that had just been revealed but maybe wasn’t actually even on sale yet? Or at least not easily available? I might have that wrong. Honestly can’t remember who I met there other than @Dave_Weinstein (I think?) and @Editer. So Zunes will always make me think of Qt3!

So we finally went and saw the movie Sunday afternoon. The general consensus was that while we enjoyed it it was not as good as GotG 1. But as someone up thread said I think that is largely because in GotG 1 everything is new to you.

I found the plot to be kinda meh, almost like something out of an old Star Trek TV episode. I also wish they could tone down the language some. GotG is the only part of the Marvel world to consistently use language that really isn’t fit for the much of the audience. It doesn’t bother me personally, but the audiences do include a large number of kids.

But overall, a good movie based on the characters and action.

Finally got to the theater over the weekend!

Overall, yeah, I enjoyed it. But isn’t the family/friendship thing pretty trite at this point? Layering that on top of daddy-issues isn’t doing the script any favors, either. And getting all the pieces together to pull off some catharsis on those themes with as many characters as possible kind of made for some awkward pacing in my opinion.

This movie did give me a scene where Sean Gunn sings “soup, soup” to himself while having soup which is my favorite scene in film so far this year.

And we can always use more Drax. “You are beautiful… but only on the inside.”

“At this point” in the Guardians franchise or “at this point” in film making history? If the later, I’d have to disagree that we’ve somehow evolved past certain topics like family and friendship. If the former, they clearly signaled at the end of Vol. 1 that Quill’s heritage was going to be a major piece of the sequel.

In particular, contemporary visual storytelling where there’s a limited amount of time to get the audience invested in a character’s internal dramas.

I wouldn’t say “we’ve somehow evolved past certain topics” but there does seem to be a trend to use these ones in particular as a crutch to create drama and emotional hooks when they aren’t saying anything particularly interesting on the topic. I guess you want your audience to relate to your characters and their emotional struggles, and audiences often have things like “families” and “friends” so it’s easy-peasy, but that’s a pretty low bar to get over to tap into your audience. I guess it’s better than not having any underlying themes at all, but it’s a bit of “oh, this one, again” these days. Writers are wearing that path out, for me, at least.

I don’t know if I should have lower expectations from movies with talking raccoons or higher expectations from movies with talking raccoons. It is quite a conundrum.

went into this blind. really liked it.

Should I make the obvious joke here, or should I let it go. Decisions, decisions.

Another potential for weirdness, based on Gunn stating that GotG Vol. 3 will be the “end of the arc” for this particular collection of Guardians, is that presumably we’ll see the team break up or suffer some noticeable losses in that flick. It’ll have to be thrown pretty massively far in time for the Guardians as a group to ensure whatever tragedies befall them don’t affect the lineup used in the Avengers flicks in the next couple of years.


I finally saw this this weekend (my girlfriend loathes GotG with a passion; while she’s willing to bitterly tolerate most of the movies I enjoy to spend time with me, she has no patience for this, and my otherwise busy social calendar meant I couldn’t really get out to see the #1 movie I was excited for this year until a month after it came out!!).

I LOVED it. Holy fuck that was so awesome. The what-the-fuck visuals, the consistently on-point emotional moments for the entire gang, the sheer glee the actors obviously took in their roles, the fabulous score, the balls-to-the-wall action sequences (I can’t decide which I loved more: Yondu’s arrow massacre, Drax tethered to the back of a blown-in-half spaceship gunning motherfuckers down with a rifle, or Gamora just straight up hefting a fucking starship gatling gun to blast said ship to smoking pieces), the fucking Hasselhoff references and payoff, all of it was just fantastic.

I hear some complaints–I would have loved a few more crazy psychedelic setpieces scattered throughout (blowing the crash sequence on an uninhabited forest was a waste, apart for the neat stealthy Home Alone sequence it provided for), the catch scene was maybe just a smidge too on the nose, and a couple of action sequences did stretch about 15% further than they really needed to–but overall, I’ve little doubt this’ll be my favorite Marvel movie in the next year or two.

I really can’t decide which pairing in the flick I loved most: Starlord and Yondu, Yondu and Rocket, Rocket and Groot, Groot and Drax, Drax and Mantis, Mantis and Gamora, Gamora and Nebula. . . all so good. The rapidfire back-and-forth between laugh-out-loud funny, disturbing grimdark scifi, and schmaltzy familial drama reminded me of my absolute favorite sessions of the scifi Fate campaign I’ve been running the last few years. . . which makes sense, since the campaign was heavily inspired by GotG 1 in the first place. Pity I’m not 1/10th the storyteller that Gunn is.

10/10, 5 stars, all possible thumbs up, want to do nothing but see this movie again and again for the rest of my life.


edit: Also, a friend I saw it with pointed out that Gamora has some of the best facial expressions in the entire movie. During the back and forth between Starlord, Drax, and Ego about Ego’s human form, where Drax asks if it had a penis, and Ego informs him that not only did it have one, but that it was a pretty good one at that, she pulls the most hilarious “oh for the love of Christ” facial expression.

Haha. I saw it last night. 5/5 Best Marvel movie.

I just loved it. My fiance, who generally does not like superhero movies, save for gotg 1 and Avengers 1. Loved it, and correctly pointed out how good it was to have a female character that was funny. Mantis was very funny. Completely absent are funny females in the Marvel movie universe. All of the MCU female characters basically match the tough serious lady tropes that are very boring.

I seriously do not know if I can take any more of these Marvel films that are not like this. You really can tell that this movie is largely free to be James Gunn’s singular vision, which keeps things interesting, even though the plot and characters are very similar.

Great music, genuinely laugh out loud funny, colorful, with a really great story about fatherhood and birth parents vs adopted parents.

If you had told me that Yondu would make me cry, I would have told you to gtfo… but here we are.

Best character arc of the movie, a man who had everything he thought he wanted, loses it all, and finds redemption therein.

Finally saw this at the theater yesterday. I was surprised how many people were in there with us, the theater was at probably 70% capacity, which is damn good for a 2 month old film!

I loved the first GotG. So much crazy action, racing along through the plot while trying to absorb just what all was happening with these wild characters. I had never read anything GotG, so everything in this setting is totally new to me. The first movie is easily my favorite Marvel movie to date.

This one…well…I have to say I was disappointed. I still thought it was a decent movie, but I expected more. This one, with the exception of the opening fight sequence, just felt SLOW. I found the Ego plotline to be very contrived and lacking in any sort of suspense. Honestly, the fight scenes in this movie, again excepting the opening sequence, just kind of sucked when compared to the last one. Remember the great sequence in the first movie where Starlord, Rocket, Groot and Gamora all fight each other in the center of town? Or the hilarious prison break? Or the huge climatic battle against the big ship where pirates, star sentinals and our heroes combine to take it down? There was nothing like that in this movie. Nothing.

Even the comedy fell flat for me at times. It felt like they kept going back to the same running gags too many times. “It’s not ripe” was awful. Drax and Rocket were mostly well used, and Rocket’s facial expressions were awesome, but baby Groot, while adorable, was pretty much a one-gag wonder. The Ravagers stuff was pretty meh, especially Sylvester Stallone. If they do make a movie with his crew, I probably wouldn’t care enough to see it.

The best things about this movie were Drax, Rocket and Yondu. I was blinking back tears at the Yondu redemption, and his interactions with Rocket were pretty awesome as well. That sub-plot actually salvaged the movie for me, as otherwise I would say it wasn’t a very worthy successor to the original.

I finally saw this movie and largely feel the same as SlainteMhath, if not more negative. I thought it was just too light and frivolous, with too many jokes and almost a complete lack of tension or drama, while the original had a more effective mix of drama/comedy. It was also really heavy-handed (and repetitive) with its themes of family and loyalty - it was already part of the original movie, but it was almost the singular focus in the sequel, as if Disney Movie Committee #3 decided that they thought the family-focus of the Fast & Furious movies was a needed secret sauce to lather onto a Marvel movie.

Even the comedy was flatter than in the original - Baby Groot was so one-note - Dave Batista did a great job as Drax (and had great comic timing), but as a result they distorted his character into such a buffoon that he’ll be heard to take more seriously in the future.

Gunn really seemed to despise the actual character of Mantis (let alone Taser Face, which is more understandable, heh) and so just included bastardized versions of them for humorous effect - and that largely worked, but the lambasting as so persistent that ridiculing them seemed, if anything, even more important to Gunn than being funny. It got a bit weird and distracting, as if Gunn was trying to prove a point and ruin characters that may have been forced upon him by Disney Committee 3.

Watchable, but one of the worst Marvel movies. I’d rank it only ahead of the Thor movies, Norton’s Hulk, maybe the first Captain America and Iron Man 3. 5/10

Wait, what?

Am I correct when I say you actually know the source material, the comics?

Wait, what?

IMG_0452

Yes, at least up to a few years ago, but I don’t think adaptations have to be particularly faithful, and I liked the original movie despite it also changing up whatever it wanted. The interpretation of Mantis wasn’t faithful at all, but I don’t think she’s very well-liked in any event, although such a derogatory adaptation of her seemed kinda cruel, but it also could have just been playing off the fact that she isn’t well-liked by comic fans. Or just by James Gunn.

Re: the other comments on Captain America (1) and Iron Man 3 - they’re definitely the Marvel movies that are most divisive. I thought the first Cap was just a little too bland and generic, but that’s the case with all of Joe Johnston’s movies that I’ve seen after October Sky (Hidalgo, Jurassic Park 3 and The Wolfman, the latter two are far worse than Captain America). I like the character moments in Iron Man 3 (and in all of Shane Black’s movies) but despise most everything else about the movie (other than the Mandarin twist, which was somewhat worth it for Ben Kingsley’s performance, but it would have worked better in a less silly movie).

For the record, I don’t think Marvel has ever made a terrible movie, or even one not worth viewing at least once. But Guardians 2 is one of the most forgettable ones. In addition to the issues I described above, it’s also encumbered by the same problem comedy sequels like the Hangover (and many others) suffer from - electing to ramp up to 11 aspects of the original that people enjoyed instead of realizing that those aspects worked well because they were better integrated with other tones and contexts. This movie just feels like it’s trying too hard to replicate the original’s success but Gunn and Disney are just muscling through the effort without really being creatively inspired.

The only thing that the GotG movies really took from the comics was most of the cast from the 2008 version of the book and Gamora’s family history. A few ancillary characters from that book have cameos, such as Cosmo the space-suited dog.

Drax is pretty much true to his 1973 origin as a single minded assassin, but it was Thanos he was after, not Ronan. Star-Lord first first appeared in 1976 as an alternate-universe character. In a 1981 one-shot issue of Marvel Premiere, he was a grown man roaming around alone in space with a talking ship. He was later integrated into the main MU. His father was not Ego the Living Planet. Ronan the Accuser was a long-standing MU character used in the movie as a throwaway bad guy. Rocket Raccoon was a toss-off character who showed up in a 1982 Hulk comic, got his own mini-series in the mid-'80s, and then got mostly ignored until the post-2000 revival of Marvel’s cosmic line, ending up in the new version of the GotG. Wish I had held on to that mini-series.

Yeah, it was kind of clever the way Gunn paid homage to that origin a bit by including Knight Rider, especially since everything about the Hoff is amusing.

Drax in the movies is closer to the version they morphed him into in connection with the Annihilation crossover when Marvel relaunched their space characters. Drax is a lot more powerful in the comics than he’s depicted in the movies, although the sequel at least gave him some moments that made him seem very durable.

Groot is essentially the 2008 character, although he predates the “Marvel Universe’s” launch of Fantastic Four by appearing in one of the 1960 horror/sci-fi books the predecessor to Marvel (Timely) ran at the time.