Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 was fun, I enjoyed it.It did the things Marvel does well very well, still did all the things that I don't like so much about Marvel, and clocks in at a solid B+ movie. Like most of the recent Marvel movies, it loses me in the third act. Which is unusually frustrating in this movie because the reasons it loses me are things the movie goes out of it's way to avoid in the first two thirds of the movie. I'll have a spoiler part of the review at the very end, but keep the rest free.
The opening sequence of the movie is getting a ton of praise, and rightly so. A giant, space monster battle happens in the background while the camera focuses on Baby Groot dancing. Yes, they're is a giant battle going on, but frankly, the audience has seen this kind of CGI thing before and it's getting a bit boring. Well choreographed live action fight scenes work because there is an element of physical impressiveness to it. A good martial arts movie or, to stick with Marvel, the boat scene in Winter Soldier, keeps you engaged because it is awe-inspiring. I don't know how much of Chris Evans was CGI, stunt doubles, or wire-work, but that whole sequence is very exciting and breathtaking because it feels real. A cool animated battle works in an animated movie because there is artistic style, I would never complain about having to watch the Guardians of the Galaxy in a fight by Studio Ghibli. (Can you imagine Miyazaki's Groot?).
The issue with big CGI battles in a modern action movie is that they all feel the same. Ultimately, there's not much difference between a fight scene in Transformers and the airport fight in Civil War. The animation style is "as realistic as we can make it," the stakes are low because everybody is taking hits left and right that would destroy a tank, and it ends up feeling like a tech demo. The solution is either to up the stakes, so you're worried about the outcome of the fight (The Force Awakens did this pretty well in the climatic lightsaber duel), or to focus on something that's actually interesting. Guardians takes that second option and does it a lot throughout the majority of the movie (and to be fair, does it in the finale too). Groot dancing is funny, cute, and way more interesting than the long fight going on behind it. A space battle a little bit later in the movie is made more interesting not because it focuses on the giant battle that, lets be real, we all know is not going to actually hurt the heroes, but because it focuses on the bickering between Rocket and Peter.
It's a thread through much of the movie. Focus on a little thing while big stuff is happening in the background. It both makes the whole film more engaging and fits the ton of the movie really well. I don't think this is a solid strategy for many modern action films, I think it'd be very out of place in Batman v. Superman, for instance. But here it works well. I'll go into why Guardians fails to keep it up later, in the spoiler section, but I have one more topic first.
Guardians Vol. 2 is the first Marvel movie since Winter Soldier to make me think the comics did it better. In this case, I think Peter Quill's heritage is both more interesting and more digestible in the comics than how they handled it in the film. I really like Starlord in modern Marvel comics, I also loved Abnet's run of Nova and some of the other cosmic stuff. I wish Marvel movies would pull more from that, instead of hinting at it. But that's an admittedly minor quibble. I'm on the record as saying adaptations have the right and generally should change the source material. While I think the comics did it a little better in this case, I don't have any strong argument to make and I think it's mostly just liking what I'm familiar with.
Anyway, you are now entering Spoiler Town and should probably turn around if that sort of thing bugs you.
So two scenes really pulled me out of the movie. The one that bugged me less is the fight between Nebula and Gamora. Nebula comes in a spaceship, shoots at Gamora a bunch, Gamora runs away, and Nebula, overcome with rage, crashes her ship. It's something we've all seen a lot and at no point during the sequence do I feel like anybody is in any real danger. Contrast that with just 30 seconds later, when Gamora pulls Nebula out of the crashed shift and Nebula attacks her. It's brutal, vicious, and very emotional, with just the right amount of dialogue. That scene lands in a way that Nebula's CGI spaceship did not. I think the whole spaceship scene wouldn't have bugged me as much if it hadn't been for what came before it though.
I stopped having fun during Yondu's massacre of his crew. There was so much here that felt out of place and just kind of gross. Up till that point, the movie had really tried to keep mass murder down, with the primary space battle involving drone ships. The bad pirates had spaced a bunch of people, which I think was supposed to justify Yondu killing all of them. The problem is, none of them really fight back or are even capable of it. Yondu is just too powerful and murders them all. It feels dirty, and bad, and the entire rest of the movie when they're trying to paint Yondu as "the real dad", all I could think of was all the helpless people he killed. Especially the line about how he doesn't control the arrow with his head, he does it with his heart. His cold, mass murdering, psychopathic heart, apparently. That scene tainted the entire Yondu arc, every interaction between him and Quill, and the entire ending of the movie.
Failing apart in the last act seems to be a Marvel thing. I hope they figure out how to end a movie again.
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