I thought the same thing.
And with “Spoilers” in the thread title, exactly why are we putting non-plot points in spoiler tags?
Because there are some people around here who are freaking psycho nutbags about anything that could be remotely considered spoilery, including the day of the week the movie came out and how much tickets cost.
Regarding his Earth pop culture knowledge:
His mother made his mixtape(s) for him. Since he so connected to the music she shared with him, I don’t all think it implausible that she’d have shared her other interests and loves. If she was a Jackson Pollack fan, I’ve no doubt he’d be very familiar with Jackson Pollack.
Also, when I was the kid’s age- and at about the same time in the 80s- black light was pretty much the coolest thing ever to me. I was fascinated by it.
Totally.
It was good and pretty fun, but ultimately not as fun as the trailer made it looked.
I wasn’t invested in the villians and thought the final third felt super generic, like any number of other superhero / Marvel films I’ve seen before.
I know, and they drive me to drink with their nutbaggery (not a long drive, but it is always good to have a designated driver). I’d personally rather hear them try to justify their complaints when it is already in the title, seeing as how in every other thread we have to be careful not to reveal Rosebud or Luke’s family tree.
Regarding a cameo/cameos spoilered in previous comments
In the movie:
Nathan Fillian voices the big blue guy in prison who takes a shine to Star Lord
In the stinger: Does not give away the name of the character, just who voices it.
Seth Green voices the character
Went with my kid. It was very enjoyable. I am not a fan of Marvel movies, but this was very good. Obviously plot holes you could drive a starship through, but I don’t think anyone in the audience really cared.
Just got back. Great fun! Two beefs. One, zoe Saldana was written very inconsistently. She’d go from badass one scene to taken prisoner by three random inmates the next. The other is that the ending was a bug Deus Ex. I get that Quill is half-SOMETHING but it felt like they controlled the infinity stone with the power of friendship. Urgh. But the other 95% was terrific.
Power of heart didn’t seem all that silly to me after they got done running down the stone itself. A chunk of rock that can destroy an entire planet and make you telekinetic and will somehow assess you and destroy you or not based on as yet unspecified vital statistics and it’s totally unstoppable but we’ve also totally got these neato orbs that can contain the aforementioned untold power for some reason.
My issue is that I’m not real up on the Marvel universe stuff and unless I misheard, the ‘good’ empire here is something called Nova Corps? And we trust them not to fuck around with the doily of ultimate cosmic power?
She was biding her time. Whenever you think she was in a helpless situation, she wasn’t; she could’ve kicked her way out of it with ease at any time.
If that’s what they explained it as, then fair enough. But it was really distributing the power amongst four, something nobody else had done, which made it manageable.
PS, the Collector’s assistant, Carina, who grabbed the stone first was really cute. She also has a Harry Potter name: Ophelia Lovibond.
When describing the stone, they specifically mentioned trying to use several powerful beings at once to control it, and they were killed in the process.
Pfft, they were a secret coven with robes and shit in the exposition. They were doomed from the start; ability never even came into it.
It worked “for a time” before it eventually destroyed them. I’m guessing the amount of time the guardians could have held it was significantly lower than the amount of time the powerful beings holding it did.
The several powerful beings were trying to use the combined power of all SIX Infinity Stones.
In this movie, we’re only dealing with one. Same as one person trying to use the Tesseract in Captain America and The Avengers and one person trying to use the Aether in Thor: The Dark World.
As I understand it, gathering all six stones is the Great White Whale of the Marvel Universe (apparently, they’re gems in the comics). In Thor: The Dark World, when The Collector got the Aether he said “One down, five to go.” The Power Stone would have been his second Infinity Stone if his assistant hadn’t gone postal.
SPOILERS ARE OPEN! Because I want to rant efficiently.
I feel like I have a split personality tonight, as I really enjoyed the movie in the theater (though I noted some stupid and dissatisfying stuff as well), but now I’m really getting irritated by the stupid stuff.
Look, comic books are fundamentally dumb and juvenile (the vast majority of the time, m’kay?). Movies have the option of upping the intelligence of the source material or having fun with the dumb parts. Guardians of the Galaxy, based on my limited understanding of the comic book and its characters, plays very fast and loose with the materials and doesn’t improve on it, instead injecting Hollywood cliches and tropes and making a movie that is really quite dumb.
But first… the good.
As I said, I enjoyed the movie in the theater. I think the plotting and action is really quite exciting and interesting up to the point where Quill and his future buddies are captured.
The acting in this movie is, for the most part, great. I love how Ronan is played. The actor manages to give the character a lot more depth than the script would normally allow. The look is really good too, though there will be some caveats below. I think the CGI for Rocket and Groot is truly excellent.
It’s a well-made, well-acted movie, an all-around enjoyable popcorner. I don’t regret seeing it, but, nevertheless…
The stupid is getting to me.
I’m just going to rant as stuff comes to me, in no particular order. So enjoy:
Why is the Orb on an abandoned planet? When that civilization left, they just decided to leave behind one of the most valuable and powerful objects in the universe? Does that make sense at all?
How does Peter Quill know where the Orb is? If you say the Ravagers knew so he knew, how did they know? Not explained.
And how did Ronan’s minions know where the Orb is? When Quill first gets the Orb and they appear, I thought that they were the guards of the Orb. But no, they are searching for it too. So they just happened to arrive coincidentally on the planet at the same time Quill did. Not realistic.
Why does Thanos need Ronan to search for the Orb for him? Can’t he just do it himself or use his direct reports to do it? Why is the whole transaction with Ronan even necessary? Thanos is a powerful enough being on his own to get the job done. My point here is further strengthened by the fact that Thanos subs out his two “daughters” to Ronan. Why not just use them directly?
The whole reason for Ronan’s need for revenge is never coherently explained. There is no excuse for this. Would he really be buck naked and getting dressed in front of a prisoner like that, giving a speech? The speech revealing his motivations really makes no sense. In this way, the movie is hampered by its source material instead of empowered by it. By the way, the way he is dressed and his black makeup put on is rather cool.
In terms of things that don’t work well visually, Drax’s skin looks like a rubber suit. Really fake. It in no way looks like real tattooed skin. Worse, however, is Thanos. WTF?! He looks totally made out of rubber with ridiculous baby-blue skin. Like a fucking blue rubber monkey floating in space. Ridiculous.
All of the Nova uniforms and sets look like ass. It looks like a parody of Starship Troopers, which itself was a kind of parody. Glen Close looks like shit in this, doesn’t feel like a leader (not her fault). Where the Nova people are meeting and whatnot looks like a 90s office building. They look ready to do some newfangled video conferencing or something. The rooms look really cramped–hardly the stuff of a major empire or planet or whatever.
Every fuckin’ Marvel movie is the same McGuffin shit now: eeeeevil villain wants some object that can destroy the fuckin’ universe. Thor: The Dark World, same goddamn thing. Avengers, same thing. The generic cataclysm offers no tension and no fear. People obviously like GotG, but I doubt very few people really felt any worry over Zandar’s fate. Not just because we know the heroes are going to win but because these scenarios just aren’t scary any more, if they ever were.
Also tiresome is how lacking in power the ultimately powerful objects are. In Thor: Dark World, the evil Teletubbie guy has the red shit (the Spice? Da Shit? Doesn’t matter…), and he can kinda fight Thor with it, but he’s getting his ass kicked anyway. Ronan gets that purple stone into his hammer and is ready to destroy a planet with it, but he can’t actually use the hammer in the meanwhile to defeat a fleet of ships and some pretty pissant opponents.
Ronan is supposed to be a master general and military guy, but his plan sucks ass. Fly the big ship down and, what, he jumps out and touches the hammer to the ground? Fuck, even in the 1970s, the US and CCCP had MIRVs. How about just sneaking onto the planet? It’s a fucking planet. It’s big. Send down every single one of those little ships inside the big ship with him on one of them. Land somewhere, mission accomplished. Or can’t he just point the hammer at the planet from a few million miles away and just zap it? Where’s the power?
The whole thing with the Kyln and their escape is extremely primitive and childish. You can have a prison with real discipline, or you can have an Escape from New York situation where people are thrown in and forgotten, but you can’t have both. Why would they house male and female prisoners together, and not even in cells? Yeah, that’s realistic. They way in which they escape is just defined as “they escape”; the details are completely arbitrary and make no particular sense.
Here’s an example of not respecting the source material and making something really dumb: in the comics, the Collector is an ancient, highly intelligent, and powerful being. In the movie, he’s apparently mentally disabled, allowing the stone to be lost by a low-level, disgruntled employee. Is this fucking Walmart in space? Nice work.
C’mon, the whole thing with the mom and the mix tape is just Hollywood being its totally fucking cliched stupid self. First, realistically speaking, the character would long ago have re-recorded that music onto a safer and more stable format. Yes, it’s cute that he is still using a tape deck. I get the joke, I just don’t buy the joke.
The implications of Peter Quill’s origins are not very savory. He is abducted at age 10 and raised by vicious thugs who apparently kill a lot of people in order to steal shit. He would have been doing that for 26 years… so why is he still a nice, charming guy with just the right amount of rogue in him for us to fall in love with him? Total bullshit.
The relationship between Gamora and Nebula is beyond lame. We are just told they are Thanos’s daughters, oh but then they are really just slaves. But then they are “sisters” to each other… even though they’re really not. The movie is half-assing the source material and trying to tack on some emotional resonance with “sister vs. sister!” Doesn’t work.
There’s a LOT more I could nitpick, but that’s most of the major stuff, and this OP is long enough. I look forward to your thoughts!
Probably best to merge with the already open Thread and just quit with all the tip-toeing around spoilers that we’ve been doing in that Thread. I was kinda annoyed that that Thread started with Spoiler tags since it’s a Thread for people who have seen the movie and the title warns of spoilers.
Reporting this Thread not thinking you were wrong to start it, just thinking a mod decision may be needed.
Cool, but I want a true open spoilers thread!
Agreed.
I didn’t get back to the screening in time for the first stinger, but saw the second. What did I miss?
There wasn’t really a first stinger, or “mid-credits scene”. They start rolling the credits, then cut back to the ship to show everyone is happy and they’ve become a team/family. Music is playing and you see that Groot is starting to grow back.
There’s a comedic bit with baby Groot dancing only when no one is looking at him. I forget which character keeps looking up only to have Groot stop dancing before he is seen . . . Drax maybe.
Not really what I’d call a stinger. More just a bit of dénouement.
The only real stinger is the actual final post-credits scene.