Guardians of the Galaxy 2

[osprey_archer]

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2! Which is fun and and funny and full of exciting action, although sometimes I think it’s pushing the found family thing just a bit too hard; yes, Yondu is a better father figure than Peter Quill’s actual father, but this is because Peter Quill’s actual father is a man - well, a sentient space creature - with an ego literally the size of a planet (he’s actually named Ego! Surely proof of villainy right there) who wants to turn the entire galaxy into extensions of himself by sucking energy out of Peter as if Peter were a human battery.

Yondu is better than that, but that still does not put him within spitting distance of “decent father figure.”

However, this is probably not a movie that you should be thinking about too carefully anyway, and on the level of good popcorn fun it totally delivers. Things I particularly liked:

1. Mantis, the empath, and the weird bond that developed between her and Drax.

2. Drax in general. Drax’s general Draxishness. The whole scene where Mantis-the-empath reveals Peter’s feelings for Gamora and Drax laughs hysterically? Priceless.

3. Still not feeling the Peter/Gamora thing, BUT FORTUNATELY Gamora is given plenty of non-Peter things to do with her sister Nebula, who starts out as the Guardians’ prisoner and naturally (in action movie terms) turns into their exceedingly reluctant ally who nearly guns Gamora down only for the two of them to discover at the last moment that they actually retain too much residual fondness for each other to kill each other.

FEELING IT. This is the kind of complicated hatred + love that I am here for.

4. Nebula’s BARELY CONTAINED RAGE in general is my jam.

5. Baby Groot! I realize that the filmmakers are shamelessly using him to play on my emotions, but nonetheless I fell for every bit of it. I want a tiny walking talking tree friend!

6. The guy who plays Yondu's loyal henchman is Kirk from Gilmore Girls and I found this endlessly hilarious. And actually quite fitting! Kirk is pretty much Taylor's henchman in Gilmore Girls, albeit on a smaller scale, where the only thing he can mess up is the town Easter Egg Hunt and not, oh, cause the entire crew to mutiny.



So yes. A good time! Worth the price of admission! Do recommend.

Comments

[evelyn_b]

OH GOSH. I really liked this movie! I kind of liked that Yondu was the lesser of two evils, and that he was doing his best even though his best was genuinely pretty awful. Not being a god gets you a lot of points right off the bat because it limits the number of people you can kill even on your best days. (I thought Ego's creepiness was really well done, and the slow rolling reveal of just how wrong the picture was).

I'm not thrilled with Peter/Gamora either but I can live with it in a pinch.

[osprey_archer]

I loved the slow reveal of Ego's creepiness. He seems so cool! And he has his own planet! And turns out to be his own planet! And it's such a beautiful spectacular planet, if completely empty, aside from Ego's pet empath who likens herself to a flea living on a dog's fur, hmm, that sounds a bit off, but - distraction! Peter and Ego are playing catch! And Peter's soooo happy. (Clearly all Yondu ever needed to do was play catch with him. Oh Yondu.)

And oh Peter. The scene where Ego crushes his Walkman is surprisingly tragic for a scene featuring the death of an inanimate object.

[evelyn_b]

The Walkman! D: After all they'd been through together! D: D:

[missroserose]

Pretty much all of this, although I thought they did a fine job demonstrating why Yondu wasn't a great father figure - I mean, he literally dies redeeming himself, which you generally don't do in literature unless You Done Messed Up Bad. But I'll be damned if I didn't shed a tear or two at the end.

Really, I particularly liked how complicated all the characters (and their feelings for each other) were. It's the sort of nuanced portrayal of group dynamics you don't often see in superhero fiction. I felt like we could have had a little more group appreciation of the awesomeness that is Rocket - it kinda seemed like he spent most of the movie being a verbal punching bag - but on the whole I enjoyed the heck out of the "when the chips are down, family is who comes to pull your ass out of the fire" theme.

I also appreciated the relatively simplified story compared to the first one - not being familiar with the 8000 comics' worth of franchise backstory, the villains in the first were kind of inscrutable to me, and the condensed-recap speeches sort of left me confused when the strength of the story was clearly the group interplay. Props to the filmmakers for realizing that and shifting their focus.

Totally with you on Gamora/Quill. Least on-screen chemistry ever. And frankly, Gamora just doesn't strike me as the romancing type.

As an aside, I was watching the first one a while back with Brian, and just for fun we were mentally cataloguing the characters as D&D classes - Groot was (obviously) a druid, Rocket a sorcerer/rogue, Drax a barbarian, Gamora a fighter...but then we were stuck on Quill. So I start outlining, okay, he's not terribly strong, he doesn't really do any magic analogue, he's sort of roguish but seems more focused on making people laugh than stabbing them in the back, he's really good at talking his way out of situations - well, it seems like he'd fit the Bard class, but he doesn't play an instru-- And then he pulls out his Walkman on screen, and I was like, DUH. He carries a musical instrument with him literally everywhere!

[osprey_archer]

Honestly, given that Rocket's twitchy little raccoon fingers are the reason they're in this whole mess in the first place, I thought the group was quite restrained in the amount of Rocket-the-punching-bag they pulled. If I were on the team I would have been screaming that we should throw that damn raccoon out the airlock.

(Although probably I would have been relieved when inevitably I was overruled, because Rocket is hilarious and adorable and I am so with Mantis in her desire to pet him like a puppy. Actually, that is probably the perfect punishment for his battery theft. He would hate that.)

I am pretty sure that Thanos is going to be the Big Bad in Infinity War, and it worries me that they've had two movies to make me care about him but really haven't succeeded, aside from making me hope that Nebula is the one who gets to kill him (which seems unlikely from a story-telling standpoint: surely Marvel will want the Avengers to take him out). Well, we'll just have to wait and see...

Also Peter the bard is perfect and I love it. And it makes the scene where Ego destroys his Walkman EVEN SADDER.

[missroserose]

Doesn't it though? I think I visibly cringed at that point. No! You can't do that! It's like crushing his soul!

I was, however, amused at the efficacy of the Zune joke and how it reflects the increasing pace of technology. The Walkman was the dominant personal music player for nearly two decades, whereas the Zune (after its initial marketing hype) was outmoded in just a few years. Although some of that was simply that Apple had already cornered the market by then.

[littlerhymes]

Yeah, I think they rrrrreally leaned too hard on that Yondu angle and I'm surprised people are being so forgiving of that - but as you say maybe not a movie you wanna think too hard about... But in general yes! So entertaining! Very colourful!

I keep giving the MCU another go every time I think I'm done with it (I hated Dr Strange so much omg), but this time it actually paid off lol.

[osprey_archer]

There's that bit where Yondu's like "He may be your father, but he's not your daddy," and I was like COME ON YONDU, YOU KIDNAPPED PETER AND THREATENED TO EAT HIM, WHAT KIND OF DADDY DOES THAT? but I guess Peter was so hungry for a father figure who was not a terrifying god-creature who wanted to turn the whole universe into himself that he decided he could forgive everything else.

I figured I would loathe Dr. Strange so I never saw it, and I have never been given any reason to regret this decision. Most Marvel movies, even ones like Antman that don't really capture the fandom, at least get some gifs, but Dr. Strange really sunk without a trace.

[brigdh]

This was such a fun movie!

I agree with you that Yondu is absolutely not a good father figure, but I am always in love with characters who have done terrible things, and know that they've done terrible things, but nonetheless are trying to... not redeem themselves, exactly, but to do something good despite being mostly an awful human being blue alien. So that whole plot was totally made for my id. :D

[osprey_archer]

I think if they'd gone just a liiiiitle bit less hard on the "Yondu is a better father" angle - better doesn't make him good! - I would have enjoyed his not-exactly-redemption arc more. Yes, Yondu, now is your chance to sacrifice yourself for your surrogate son!