Brief status: I’m done with Star Trek and Star Wars. Probably done with Avengers, Thor, Iron Man and whatever other Marvel properties I’ve never heard of that they’re making movies out of. Haven’t seen a Bond movie in decades. I was done with Harry Potter & Pirates of the Caribbean after a couple movies. We shall not speak of the abomination that is the Jackson Hobbit.
Now, a really good trailer and especially really good reviews and word of mouth might move me – but I doubt it.
I don’t like to be talked down to, I don’t feel loyalty to a franchise, I don’t like seeing a beloved book bloated and mauled for a buck.
But mostly, I don’t like being bored. I like being entertained. Movies are entertainment. Since I read a lot of history, I don’t find slaughter, mayhem and misery entertaining. I’ll go read about communists if I for any reason need a dose of that.
So: went to see Guardians of the Galaxy II with the family, for the simple reason that I found the first movie quite entertaining. Mindless fun, but pretty to look at, witty in places and well-paced. So, I gave II a shot.
It was good. Not great, not perfect, but I didn’t get the urge to walk out at any point, which has happened a lot with movies recently. So, yea, good.
GG II somewhat avoided the main issue with sequels, which is the gravitational pull of BIGGER. While one might imagine that, having saved the galaxy, they’d next need to save the universe, or at least a couple galaxies. But no, they merely save the same galaxy again.
Instead, they went bigger on the emotional stakes, in all sorts of surprising, twisty ways.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Unlike many sequels, most egregiously in the execrable Pirates of the Caribbean follow-ons, the main focus, the main thing made bigger, is the relationships between the characters. Between the usual ridiculous yet entertaining cartoon action sequences, which were kicked up a little, we get all sorts of moments where the characters come into emotional conflict, ratchet it up, and resolve them to a greater or lesser degree. The script is meant to be tear-jerking at many points – a pretty major departure from the usual tragic backstory/cartoon validation-revenge sort of plot characteristic of just about all comic book movies. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Yondu – and it works. We’re supposed to buy Yondu and Rocket bonding and heroically willing to sacrifice themselves for the team – and we buy it. The sister issues set up in GG I between Gamora and Nebula need to get worked out satisfactorily – and, again, it works.
Thus, when the final boss is battled, all these emotional traps are sprung, so that we’re cheering and gripping the seat arms, wanting things to work out. Yondu’s heroic death was a surprising and surprisingly effective resolution.
The effects were as dazzling as we’ve come to take for granted. The pacing was pretty solid, after the opening sequence, which frankly dragged a bit. And the conclusion was suitably epic and satisfying.
Now onto the less than good, starting with a relatively minor complaint. I was reminded during the movie of a story told of Groucho Marx. The Marx Brothers would take their shows on the road prior to filming. As old school vaudevillians, they wanted to work out the timing and test the material. Groucho most often got the zingers and put-downs, and he was legendarily good at them. But, as a pro, he knew there was no substitute for delivering those lines in front of a live audience to see if they really worked.
Groucho also had a whole bag of tricks to get a laugh: the eyebrow raise, the funny walks, the incredulous looks. So, when testing material, he left those out. If the audience still laughed, he knew the material was good.
I wish somebody would have run the GG II script through the same process, chiefly to field-test the body and sex humor. With a few exceptions, it would not have made it. It got the sort of cheap laughs hammed up things tend to get, but left me wondering why it was there in the first place. The exceptions, of course, are the couple times Drax the Destroyer waxed poetical about sex in his faux-Shakespearean-ish language. That worked a couple times. In general, it just wasn’t fun enough to warrant the distraction. Having goofy characters deliver the lines tended to get laughs the material itself didn’t warrant.
The greatest issue isn’t a problem so much as a modern foundational myth. The plot hinges on Peter’s biological father abandoning him, finding him, explaining why he abandoned him, courting him – and then using him for evil. His father killed his mother after he begat a child on her, for his own completely selfish reasons.
Such a plot would have horrified the ancient Greeks, who were no softies. A god seduces and impregnates women solely to create little demigod Herculeses only so that he may use them to do his bidding, which is the destruction of the world. He kills off the mothers, and child after child who fails him.
Finally a human woman, who he later kills with a horrible illness, bears the son he wanted. But a highwayman, hired to retrieve this final useful son, betrays the god and hides him, and makes him into a highwayman after his own heart. The son later escapes the highwayman, gathers a band of stalwart companions and, after many adventures, becomes a great hero by defeating yet another god.
After years of searching, the god finds the son, and whisks him and his stalwart companions away to his realm, where they discover the remains of all the previous children slaughtered by their own father. An epic battle ensues, during which the evil father-god is killed and the world saved, but only at the cost of the life of the highwayman who saved the son.
Now, that’s not a bad story, at least not when sanitized as myth. But putting it in this world, even by means of a comic book story, invites comparisons. This is not a unique horror, but a common occurrence, metaphorically speaking. It rings true not as a cathartic myth, but rather as something we see every day: men using women, discarding them, arranging for the deaths of offspring they don’t desire. Then, if any child is found useful, he is loved exactly insofar as he is useful.
The fantasy of millions of children today it some combination of finding their loving father, and killing the monster who abandoned them. GG II does the trick by having Yondu turn out to be that loving father, albeit not the biological father, and sacrificing himself to save the son and kill the biological father. Also, the years of abuse and mistreatment of Peter by Yondu are explained away: Yondu was trying to save Peter the only way he knew how, and, besides, Yondu had a tragic backstory of his own. That makes it all better.
I’m no comic book nerd, but no superhero I can think of came from a happy, intact family. GG II takes the concept down further: a Batman or a Spiderman may lose parents (or stand in parents in the case of the web slinger) tragically, but they were good parents it was a tragedy to lose. Star Lord finds a father it is a tragedy to find. Gamora and Nebula had their parents killed before their eyes by – their stepdad, who is a monster they now want to kill.
If only this were just make-believe. Every child of divorce I’ve ever known fits into at least one of these slots. That a plot built on such disastrous and tragic relationships seems instantly believable is a frightening thing.
I left the movie having thoughts that were not entertaining. This is not a good thing for a popcorn movie.
Yard Sale of the Mind 
Nice review. First works better, but this is still pretty fun.
I’m not sure if your last criticism can be called a criticism of the movie so-called so much as a scathing aocietal indictment.
Right. And I didn’t even go with how Peter really is the son of his father, who casually uses women for amusement and gain – it’s just that the mayhem he causes is all off camera.
In the original they make a small point of this, and to their credit it’s touched on again with Gamora. In Peter’s head it’s probably “At least I never abandoned my kid”, which also strikes me as a realistic and often seen reaction: Quite true, very sad, and not an actual excuse for your mistakes, but the natural one to make.
I’m generally impressed with the surprisingly and somewhat out of left field moral backbone of the Guardians franchise.
That’s a good point, but also sort of sad – think of the moral backbone displayed in Casablanca, for example, which I doubt struck people at the time anything other than just the way solid people should act, Now, that a lady killer would show *any* concern for his women is somehow refreshing.
But I do get it – friendship, family and self-sacrifice are front and center, and give the movie whatever weight it has. And I did enjoy it!
No, I think you’re right and it does say something bad about modern society and media. I’m barely disagreeing with you, if I am. And as my ghostbuster series has been about, I’m trying to be more cognizant about making excuses for media I enjoy.
But with that said, I think “Guardians” is probably – probably, any unconscious biases of mine notwithstanding- something I’d feel pretty comfortable showing kids, at any rate.
Well, to be fair, it’s hard to fault a man for finding it hard to build a permanent relationship with a woman when, by definition, he’s not of the same *species* as *any* of the women he’s ever met since he was eight, and must know he can’t possibly hope ever to be a father himself (barring some kind of superscience technological intervention he probably can’t afford even if it does exist). That a good many of the species out there seem even to have compatible sexual processes for Terran-born humans is miracle enough.
And growing up in the company of the Ravagers isn’t exactly going to set examples for productive social integration, even if Peter appears instinctively to be considerably more moral than most of them — and I have to admit to some skepticism that most of Peter’s bedmates weren’t just as selfishly concerned with amusement and gain as he was. That doesn’t make his learned patterns good, but it does mean he may not have caused nearly as much mayhem as one would fear — as above, for starters at least, he is certainly not leaving bastards all over the galaxy. Breaking a few hearts, perhaps, but the strong impression I get from GOTGv2 is that thanks to his feelings for Gamora he has largely stopped doing even that.
What stuck out to me was the parallels between Ego and Chronos (Kronos) of classical myth. Which makes Peter Quill, in some ways, Zeus himself.