Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

(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.

Lotta orange and teal in this one.

Loved it. Tonally different than the first, but still really enjoyable.

Lost it completely with "Father & Son" - that song has made me weep uncontrollably since I was a teenager. I legit fell apart for a few minutes there

Lotta orange and teal in this one.

You're kidding, right? (Compared to a lot of other films right now, this was far more all over the place color-wise.)

Was gonna say

can't say I thought it was particularly egregious but I did read this in an interview with James Gunn

"I wanted to make the second movie have a very distinct visual look that was much different than the first movie.

"One of the first things I did was ban the use of the colour purple.

"There's purple in the movie, but there's very little purple in the movie. Because purple was by far the dominant colour in the first movie.

"This movie is more about yellow and blue and teal and orange."

Weird.

I think a lot of what Tuomas diagnoses as overdoing it is stuff that I read as exhalation, having some more fun, "it's all but guaranteed we're going to make a shitload of money so let's play around" silliness with the occasional overextension. The opening credits fight sequence is brilliant; the "got any tape" bit is about the best use of surround sound in a theater that I can readily remember. I feel like you don't get those things without also having to accept the risk of some googly-eyed space jump gags or a mildly overwrought mutineer execution sequence.

i loved the casting of Kurt Russell
mainly bc latter-day Kurt looks like an old mythological god like Zeus etc 😃

Where did he go for a while? Like, all seemed quiet on the Kurt Russell front, and then, bam, Death Proof, Bone Tomahawk, Hateful Eight, this ... And now Goldie is back in action, too.

Kurt Russell is sort of the antecedent to Bruce Willis, no? Same sort of modest origins, crossover action appeal, leading man, able to do indie stuff in addition to pay the bills crud.

A former kid star - from Wikipedia: 'In 1966, Walt Disney wrote "Kurt Russell" on a piece of paper as his final words.'

apparently they were really close!

Final words is an exaggeration. Also he wrote "Kirt Russell"

https://www.mouseplanet.com/9734/Walts_Last_Words_NOT_Kurt_Russell

"Where did he go for a while? Like, all seemed quiet on the Kurt Russell front, and then, bam, Death Proof, Bone Tomahawk, Hateful Eight, this ... And now Goldie is back in action, too."

Death Proof came out almost a decade ago... but yeah it looks like after that he kinda stopped working for a while (going from at least a movie every year to one every couple years until 2015).