Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

All the Mantis / Drax stuff.

These two were really funny. That was the best stuff in the movie.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--dK83bKv6--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/h4zt6xbwcyuzjag7swam.jpg

my "in every way" was to Ned's remark about "up the Rooker content"

but they also upped everyone else - the first movie was about Star Lord, this one is really about everybody else.

Very true. And it was nice how it wasn't just redoing plot beats from the first but expanding on a lot of specific points/arcs from it instead.

Nice hyperbreakdown of a lot of the Easter eggs. Spoilers, obv.

http://screenrant.com/guardians-galaxy-2-easter-eggs/

http://i.imgur.com/aSXzjWf.png

cyberhyberhyper

This was perfectly fun. A little smug and full of itself, but that's always preferable to overly serious. It did lean hard on one of the hoariest sci-fi tropes, though, the paradise planet with a dark secret, but that was fine, too. Loved the gold people.

Incidentally, pretty high violent body count for such a light film. That goes for all the Marvel movies, of course, but those are more generic bang, fall down deaths, or explosions. This one features huge numbers of dudes being sadistically slaughtered, for giggles.

I do like the high concept nature of all these comic book movies in that they parallel the creative diversity of the original medium. That is, the characters are the same, but the inkers, artists, writers, etc., are different. You could read, say, Thor at several different times and each issue or run could be totally different from the last, for better or for worse. Or Spider-man. Or any of the titles, really. My daughter said after this was over, "there could be a hundred Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and they'd all be the same and they'd all be good." She's right. And if (when?) that happens, these first two or three would be considered "the James Gunn run" or whatever.

If there's been a failing of this Marvel cinematic run it's that the movies have been a little *too* consistent, but so it goes.

I loved the end credits, not just the goofy breaking the fourth wall dancing around (anyone else notice Jeff Goldblum popping up dancing in the credits? Or was the Sly?) but playing find the "I Am Groot" tags, which my audience at least got a kick out of more than all the post credits scenes.

I wasn't thrilled with the scene of the mutineers being slaughtered. My reactions to movie violence are not consistent, but that one left me a bit depressed. I don't like the arrow weapon.

Agree that the high body count felt gratuitous. At least with the space battles they tried to avoid mass killings by having the bad guys use remote-controlled drone ships, but that one particular scene with the massive onscreen slaughter of living beings was too much. They tried to sorta justify it in that the slaughter was both necessary (so the good guys could escape) and a righteous revenge (because the bad guys had tortured the good guys and killed a bunch of their companions), but the scene went on too long and there was way too much loving detail put into showing all those deaths.

I think that scene exemplifies the biggest problem with this movie, which is that it tends to exaggarate and overdo the elements that made the first GotG movie so great. The previous movie had one character killing 10 others in a cool way? This time he kills 200! Vol. 1 had Rocket Raccoon improvise on technology to defeat some bad guys? This time he does the same to a whole army of them! Vol. 1 had some key scenes soundtracked by soft rock and soul hits from the '70/'80s that Star-Lord likes? This time the whole team likes them, they're played all the time, and the songs and their lyrics are even commented onscreen! Vol. 1 had some of the tense action and drama broken by inappropriately humourous comments, mostly by Rocket and Drax? This time that happens in pretty much every dramatic scene!

But the biggest problem IMO, is that this movie kinda overdid main it's emotional/psychological theme, which was pretty much the same one as in the first movie. In Vol. 1, you had these losers and broken people, who had all lost their families in one way or another (if they even had one to begin with), come together as a family of choice. And that was actually the way they defeated the bad guy: by holding each others' hands so they could handle the power of the Infinity Stone! It was the obvious theme of the movie, but they didn't need to spell it out so loudly, it came across with the characters' actions and choices.

But Vol. 2 deals with dysfunctional and/or broken family relations in way more overt way. The theme is even stated in dialogue by Drax, when Nebula asks him what sort of friends the Guardians are, and Drax says they're not friends but family. And that's okay, I don't think it's necessarily a flaw if a movie makes it obvious what its central theme is, it doesn't always have to be subtle. But it gets kinda tiring how every main character gets his own "family of choice" arc in the movie; this is most evident in the finale, where all of this subplots need to be tied up, so there are just too many tearjerking moments in a row (a la Return of the King).

But don't get me wrong, some of these emotional arcs actually work pretty nicely, because they feel organic and have their roots in the previous movie. IMO the ones that work include the love/hate sisterly relation between Nebula and Gamora, and the way Drax bonds with Mantis, whom he obviously sees as kind of a surrogate daughter (since he'd lost his own). Both of those actually brough tears to my eyes. But some of them feel kinda forced; for example, the bonding between Yondu and Rocket comes pretty much out of nowhere, and it seems they just added it there so Rocket could have his own arc too. So it's all a bit overdone, they would've gotten the message and the theme across without needing to apply it to every character. It's just too neat.

Btw, the way they handled Nebula's rage towards Thanos makes me suspect they're gonna use her in Avengers 3 the same way Starlin did in Infinity Gauntlet. Which I think would be cool, because in the movies they've added a Shakespearean edge to her by having her be Thanos's abused daughter bent on patricide. Whereas in the comics she was just Thanos's self-proclaimed granddaughter, who hadn't even met him before the IG plot started rolling.

It took a rather surprisingly long time for this thread to finally enter massive spoiler territory.

I empathize with the too-many-people-killed-deliberately-with-a-flying-shiv position, but it compels me to remind you that the first movie crushed thousands of xandarians with a spaceship. These are not set-to-stun movies. And quite seriously, those guys were pirates who mutinied and Yondu was going through them to get to his son. I would have punctured all of them too, probably.

also, they'd murdered all but one of yondu's crew, who are basically his family, by exposing them one-by-one to the hard vacuum of space right in front of him

the slaughter felt pretty in-character for yondu tbh

Speaking of Nebula, I thought the only bad sfx (bad as in "you can see the strings," not bad as in OTT or gross or silly) in this film was when she is delivering her monologue in close-up and you can tell her eye piece is painted on and not a prosthetic.

An argument could be made that baby groot is a little too much of a cartoon but to be clear he is totally a cartoon shut up.

(Noted that while enumerating all the "that was a hit last time so let's lay it on even thicker this time" examples, Tuomas does not mention baby Groot at all. This is because baby Groot is unassailable)

he's a cheeky, adorable baby tree who loves to dance and, occasionally, murder

i'm at peace with all of that

I think I'd rather get the arrow than be chased down and thrown off a catwalk by a screaming cartoon sapling who really hates me

that's gotta be a really embarrassing way for a battle-hardened space pirate to go

This was so dope. I welled up at Nebula reaching out her arm to embrace Gamora weakly.

Same w/ "I've never done a good thing my whole life. You gotta let me have this" from Yondu.

If this had been a DC movie it woulda been 120 minutes of pathos rather than like...15

Well yeah because they would have had to replace all of the jokes with something

There's a joek in the Wonder Woman trailer, i am sure they'll fix that in post.

i just wanna underscore again how fantastic michael rooker is in this - he's asked to do stuff that he's either not asked to do at all in most of his roles or are badly written on the occasions when he is. every moment, whether gruff or tender, feels genuine and, although they stretch out the joke of groot retrieving the wrong stuff at least a couple of beats too long, he looks awesome wearing that head-fin

If we're going full spoiler at this point, then: Hasselhoff's five second role was amazing.

also, since we're in spoiler territory now - omg adam warlock!

did everyone catch hasselhoff singing during the credits btw?

Hahaha yes

Yeah that was fun. And indeed Goldblum's character in the credits for no apparent reason.

Also I'd never thought I'd be thinking about a Zune again but here we are.

i suspect goldblum might have had a cameo which got cut? or maybe it's just an easter egg, i dunno

anyone else get a bit of a beyonder vibe from kurt russell as ego, especially the dioramas of ego in his 80s getup romancing aliens across the universe?

also they're getting really good at the cg de-ageing - there were only a couple of uncanny valley moments in the opening sequence

Secret Wars II Beyonder, sure. Also reminded me of the bad Star Trek movie with the God planet.

The violence wasn't just the arrow slaughter. Rocket slaughters that whole army, and of course, the space pirates kill all those other pirates, too. In all three cases, sadistically, which is different than space battles. The aggressors like watching the victims suffer, whether it is Rocket finding creative ways to kill in the forest, the space pirates jettisoning people into space one at a time, or Yondu piercing all those people. And yeah, it's inconsistent, since all the Marvel movies kill or at least seriously imperil hundreds, but here it's the sadism that's a new, not so welcome change.

I love to think about the crafting decisions that go into those bits, like a group of people deciding exactly how many alien make-out sculptures go into each stage of that sight gag, and artists then choosing the colors of the aliens and which poses to use.
Like I said above there's just an embarrassment of riches of that kind of stuff in this movie.

Uh, Rocket didn't kill anybody in the forest. They all literally got back up.

And you're conflating vengefulness with sadism? They can be comorbid sure but it's not like Yondu was trying to inflict maximum pain or torture those guys.

Rocket was much more sadistic with the incapacitating series of traps but that's also in character, he chuckled while hurting people in the first movie. A lot, iirc.

I wasn't saying that it was out of character or unjustified for Yondu to kill all the mutineers, like I mentioned above, the movie explained his actions fine. But I had a problem with how much much lavish detail they put into depicting every detail of the massacre. We know how efficient his arrow is, so we don't need to spend 10 minutes of literally showing how each and every space pirate on the ship gets killed by it. (Baby Groot tackling that one bully pirate was fine and cathartic tho.) It's not necessarily sadism on the character's part, but on the filmmakers', and I thought it was just too much.

The same with the scene with Rocket against the pirates in the forest, it went on too long, they could've gotten the same thing across in half the time. The movie was 2.5 hours long, it felt like they just didn't have the heart to cut any of the cool stuff they'd concocted, it was continuously on overdrive. If they'd cut it 30 minutes shorter, removed some of the gratuitous action and violence and trimmed the overt emo scenes, it could've been as good as the first one.

Rocket in the forest serves a different purpose - it's funny.

It *was* funny, even if I got the impression he killed most of them. (Why would he just incapacitate them so that they could get back up seconds later? I even wondered, man, how many space pirates could there possibly be?) Doesn't matter, it's still sadistic, even if it's totally in character. And yeah, the violent nature of characters is one thing - these movies are all innately violent - but it all felt a little mean spirited or whatever on the part of Gunn, violence for chuckles. Which was done well ironically, such as the intro out-of-focus background battle, or the two or three hundreds of virtual video game space ship battles - but felt a little weirder when it was more personal, like Rocket or Yondu or even the space pirate mutiny. None of it affected my enjoyment - this is all an ancillary discussion - but it did make me ponder the nuances of violence in these comic books movies. Something like Avengers is all serious but mostly bloodless violence. Something like Deadpool is all gory, sadistic, cartoon violence with a self-conscious wink, effectively and humorously so. Something like Logan was non-stop brutal, vicious violence. But the first was done in service of genre/mood (war movie vibe), the second entertainment, and the third in service of toll-of-violence theme, even if they both hinge on the same one-guy-takes-out-hordes motif.

Cos he knew they weren't there to kill him and why would anybody want a Ravager bounty on their head

So he was just messing with them for fun, even if they were firing machine guns back at him and, one presumes, trying to kill him?

(Totally within character, I admit!)

Rocket in the forest serves a different purpose - it's funny.

Agreed, but that scene still went on for too long. Watching them get tossed to the air for the sixth time wasn't that funny anymore. Same with the Looney Tunes facial stretching when Rocket and Yondu went through the 200 different warp points. It was funny the first time they showed it, the the movie cut to somewhere else, then they cut back to the warping ship, and they still had to show the stretching for quite a bit more. Feels like Gunn just didn't know when to stop a scene...

The same applies to the final battle inside Ego, it just went on for too long. There wasn't any need to get the drone ships involved in that battle at all, it felt like filler. Just Ego vs. the Guardians would've been enough. One of my favourite things about the first movie was how it side-stepped the expectations of how a action movie final battle should work. You had a decent-length battle inside Ronan's ship, and then they crash to Xandar, and Ronan faces them, and you're like, ok, this is the True Ultimate Boss Fight, I guess there's still 5 minutes more of action... And then they resolve it with the good guys dancing! And holding hands! I wish Gunn had show similar inventiveness with this movie's climax.

I feel like you're stretching to nitpick things in a movie you enjoyed

one thing we haven't mentioned about yondu's revenge is that it's one of the most visually striking scenes in the film - that bright red streak painting slick crimson curves all over the ship looks cool as hell, particularly the part in the pitch-black corridor where dying pirates are lit up by arrow streaks

if there's not an atari 2600-style yondu's revenge minigame on the website for this movie btw the marketing guys should be exposed to the hard vacuum of space asap

yo tuomas you're a 'cosmic marvel' guy - what did you think about those elements in this one?

I feel like you're stretching to nitpick things in a movie you enjoyed

Maybe yeah, it's just that GotG Vol. 1 was one of my favourite movies of recent years (and definitely the best of the Marvel Movies), so I had really high expectations for this one. And pretty much all of the individual aspects of a movie were fine in Vol. 2 too: good plot, good actors, good new characters and story elements, great visuals... It's just that they took certain things that worked the first movie and overdid them in the way that makes it less than the sum of it's parts. So it's kinda frustrating how this one has all the potential for greatness, but it fails in ways that could've been avoided.

yo tuomas you're a 'cosmic marvel' guy - what did you think about those elements in this one?

I liked Ego's backstory, it was suitably transcendental, and the Sovereign culture was interesting, though they could be developed a bit more. (Though presumably we'll see more of that in Vol. 3.) I was a bit disappointed that they completely ditched Knowhere and all the story potential it could've offered with the various funky aliens etc, since that was one of my favourite elements in Abnett & Lanning's GotG run. I get it that exploring the team's base of operations works better in serial media than done-in-one movies, but still... At the very least I would've expected them to do something with Cosmo after his cameo in the last movie, but he was nowhere to be seen. :( How could they resist adding a super-smart telepathic Soviet dog to the team?!

Also, I loved that it was so colourful! Since in the recent years the "muted tones mean serious business" disease has infected even sci-fi movies (like Star Wars), this was a welcome relief from that (as was the previous one). Space operas and superhero comic movies should have some bright colours, for chrissakes!

Btw, Marvel has finally finished reprinting the entire cosmic saga that began in Keith Giffen's Annihilation, continued with Annihilation Conquest, and with Abnett & Lanning's Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy ongoing series (as well as various crossovers), and culminated in The Thanos Imperative. They've all been reprinted in omnibus editions, so if you missed the whole saga the first time around, grab them now! This is pretty much the best Marvel cosmic comic since the 1970s.

See, this is why I use my govt. name as little as possible online. Can you even imagine how my ILX posts might come back to bite me on the ass, given that I'm the current vice president of the United States? WHOOOOOOOMPS

obviously the bad faith of Jack Posobiecus is off the fucking charts but I can't really go along with everyone on left twitter who is already calling this a clear symptom of gamergate culture because one of those tweets uses the adjective "disgusting" to describe someone who is likened to a "tranny" and if a conservative cultural figure tweeted that these folks would be calling for their head.

I love the idea of mike pence writing that stephen king sex paragraph parody

I AM TOOTH pic.twitter.com/ohkYIrRGan

— Hector 🅰️ Parayuelos (@hecpara) August 22, 2018

OMG, there is a video... pic.twitter.com/oqqIv1tNaM

— Derek Slager (@derekslager) August 22, 2018

the sequel we all need

hmmmm

https://io9.gizmodo.com/james-gunn-is-going-to-dc-and-will-write-the-next-suici-1829631777

deeply mixed feelings