Grauniads of the Gaxaly 2: Graun Harder
Marvel's latest and greatest cinematic effort finally gives us something to chew on: meaningful [spoilers]
I'm not sure if the hype is real. Is his really the greatest spectacle movie ever? Or is it the greatest contender for the greatest spectacle movie ever? Let's get to it.
Picking up a little after the end of the first Guardians film (Baby Groot is no longer reliant on his pot, but is still tiny and freezes when Drax looks at him in the opening setpiece), we find our titular heroes engaged by a society of body paint enthusiasts to defend ablue screen platform from an "interdimensional creature hellbent on starting the plot". Just how do they do so much against blue screens? I'd corpse immediately, but I suppose that's why I'm an office clerk and not a professional actor; there's a scene later in the film where our heroes stare in wonderment at at the extra-terrestrial baroque decor of their surroundings, when it suddenly struck me how they must have just wandered around a big blue sound stage, gasping. Suicide Squad must be my favourite blue screen joke moment of late really, where at the "climax" of the ""action"", Cara Delvingne gyrates menacingly in front of a pillar of pulsating power... What the hell was the direction on that while filming? Half of her character's outfit was CGI anyway. God alone knows how people coped on that set, running around in Oscar winning hair styles and makeup, reacting to imaginary guffs, without falling about laughing. Or maybe they did?
Anyway, after aggravating the planet of Golden Girls, the Guardians escape into a "Quantum asteroid field" (Maybe Chris Pratt really did want to be Han Solo) to escape the opposing fleet, which turns out to be remote controlled via arcade game style pods - a neat touch I thought referenced both the more outlandish tank games of Skegness amusements and a commentary on drone warfare and the potential gamification of future warfare (See also: Ender's Game, The Last Starfighter &c) that may or may not be looked back on as timely. They escape the asteroids (if they were ever there?) after a tedious piloting argument (seriously just have the Raccoon pilot. It's that simple), they are rescued from certain death by the "One Inch Man" and crash land on a forested planet (thankfully no sign of ewoks). It turns out that their saviour is none other than Peter Quill's father himself, Ego! The Guardians are split up, as Drax, Gamora and Starlord go to Ego's planet (tautologous?), while Rocket and Groot stay with the downed ship, alongside the imprisioned Nebula.
Sorry, I always get bogged down in plot description.
Let's not get hamstrung by details though. This film is pretty good, and certainly not adversely affected by the law of diminishing returns. While the villain of the piece suffers from the same "introduced and defeated in the same film" problem as basically every other Marvel antagonist bar Loki, the heel turn is pretty smart and basically comes out of nowhere. One of the major criticisms I've seen leveled against the film is that once Peter is taken to Ego he kinda gets taken out of the plot until we need a showdown at the end... But on the other hand it allows more room for the other characters. I doubt we would have had really any development of Mantis or maybe even Yondu's No. 2, Kraglin, had the film focused any more on Quill.
So? What's so meaningful? Well... Yondu dies. Like, dies dies. Sean Gunn has confirmed the only way he's coming back is via flashbacks. We find out that Peter Quill is the the last in a long line of children that Yondu has abducted from worlds, being hired to do so by Ego in order to cement his semi-villainous plan of expanding his consciousness throughout the cosmos by seeding planets and blah blah blah. Weird how in his preamble he goes on about "imagining what intelligent life would look like" and making a human body, and then going out to innumerable different planets... Still with the Human body? (The fact he's wearing flared trousers means this can only be played for laughs). The sheer offhandedness of telling Peter that he was the cause of Meredith Quill's brain cancer, before brutally taking control of the power tied up in Peter's Celestial genes is a wake up call - Ego only looks Human, but his agenda is absolutely not. As we enter the final throes of the battle between father and son, Yondu goes back to rescue our white male protagonist, but he must make a choice as the Guardians escape the collapsing planet on Yondu and Kraglin's ship: he only has one rocket pack and one spacesuit with which to make the extraction, so of course, he sacrifices himself for Peter Quill. "He may be your father but he ain't yer daddy", says Yondu in his last moments, telling us where he stands on the whole nature/nurture side of things.
Okay that was all a bit wordy, so let's boil it down: They kill someone who matters. They finally broke the cycle. We see him freeze in space, and then we watch his viking funeral, in what I can only assume is an exhaust port. Age of Ultron fans may well cite Quicksilver, but, come on? That guy is a literal flash in the pan with the standard "was bad now good then dead immediately" arc. I suppose the real test will be to see how this is dealt with in future installments, including the approaching juggernauts of Avengers 3: Infinity War and Avengers 4: this title is a spoiler, but with Kraglin taking the arrow and a new control mohawk in the first post-credits scene, perhaps the idea is more of legacy? Maybe this is a direction the MCU is moving to, with the original principal players coming to the end of their contracts, the trailers for Spiderman: Homecoming showing plenty of Master/Student conflict (but whatever happened to Uncle Ben?!?!?!?!?) between Tony Stark and Peter Parker already, and I feel confident in saying that the scene where Stark says something about "If you're nothing without the suit then you don't deserve it" will be the nadir of the picture.
A great movie? For sure. Spectacular? Absolutely. The greatest spectacle movie ever? Hmmm. Not so sure. I mean, there's Transformers: The Last Knight to go yet...
I'm not sure if the hype is real. Is his really the greatest spectacle movie ever? Or is it the greatest contender for the greatest spectacle movie ever? Let's get to it.
Picking up a little after the end of the first Guardians film (Baby Groot is no longer reliant on his pot, but is still tiny and freezes when Drax looks at him in the opening setpiece), we find our titular heroes engaged by a society of body paint enthusiasts to defend a
Anyway, after aggravating the planet of Golden Girls, the Guardians escape into a "Quantum asteroid field" (Maybe Chris Pratt really did want to be Han Solo) to escape the opposing fleet, which turns out to be remote controlled via arcade game style pods - a neat touch I thought referenced both the more outlandish tank games of Skegness amusements and a commentary on drone warfare and the potential gamification of future warfare (See also: Ender's Game, The Last Starfighter &c) that may or may not be looked back on as timely. They escape the asteroids (if they were ever there?) after a tedious piloting argument (seriously just have the Raccoon pilot. It's that simple), they are rescued from certain death by the "One Inch Man" and crash land on a forested planet (thankfully no sign of ewoks). It turns out that their saviour is none other than Peter Quill's father himself, Ego! The Guardians are split up, as Drax, Gamora and Starlord go to Ego's planet (tautologous?), while Rocket and Groot stay with the downed ship, alongside the imprisioned Nebula.
Sorry, I always get bogged down in plot description.
Let's not get hamstrung by details though. This film is pretty good, and certainly not adversely affected by the law of diminishing returns. While the villain of the piece suffers from the same "introduced and defeated in the same film" problem as basically every other Marvel antagonist bar Loki, the heel turn is pretty smart and basically comes out of nowhere. One of the major criticisms I've seen leveled against the film is that once Peter is taken to Ego he kinda gets taken out of the plot until we need a showdown at the end... But on the other hand it allows more room for the other characters. I doubt we would have had really any development of Mantis or maybe even Yondu's No. 2, Kraglin, had the film focused any more on Quill.
So? What's so meaningful? Well... Yondu dies. Like, dies dies. Sean Gunn has confirmed the only way he's coming back is via flashbacks. We find out that Peter Quill is the the last in a long line of children that Yondu has abducted from worlds, being hired to do so by Ego in order to cement his semi-villainous plan of expanding his consciousness throughout the cosmos by seeding planets and blah blah blah. Weird how in his preamble he goes on about "imagining what intelligent life would look like" and making a human body, and then going out to innumerable different planets... Still with the Human body? (The fact he's wearing flared trousers means this can only be played for laughs). The sheer offhandedness of telling Peter that he was the cause of Meredith Quill's brain cancer, before brutally taking control of the power tied up in Peter's Celestial genes is a wake up call - Ego only looks Human, but his agenda is absolutely not. As we enter the final throes of the battle between father and son, Yondu goes back to rescue our white male protagonist, but he must make a choice as the Guardians escape the collapsing planet on Yondu and Kraglin's ship: he only has one rocket pack and one spacesuit with which to make the extraction, so of course, he sacrifices himself for Peter Quill. "He may be your father but he ain't yer daddy", says Yondu in his last moments, telling us where he stands on the whole nature/nurture side of things.
Okay that was all a bit wordy, so let's boil it down: They kill someone who matters. They finally broke the cycle. We see him freeze in space, and then we watch his viking funeral, in what I can only assume is an exhaust port. Age of Ultron fans may well cite Quicksilver, but, come on? That guy is a literal flash in the pan with the standard "was bad now good then dead immediately" arc. I suppose the real test will be to see how this is dealt with in future installments, including the approaching juggernauts of Avengers 3: Infinity War and Avengers 4: this title is a spoiler, but with Kraglin taking the arrow and a new control mohawk in the first post-credits scene, perhaps the idea is more of legacy? Maybe this is a direction the MCU is moving to, with the original principal players coming to the end of their contracts, the trailers for Spiderman: Homecoming showing plenty of Master/Student conflict (but whatever happened to Uncle Ben?!?!?!?!?) between Tony Stark and Peter Parker already, and I feel confident in saying that the scene where Stark says something about "If you're nothing without the suit then you don't deserve it" will be the nadir of the picture.
A great movie? For sure. Spectacular? Absolutely. The greatest spectacle movie ever? Hmmm. Not so sure. I mean, there's Transformers: The Last Knight to go yet...
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