Mostly enjoyed it… a lot of fun and good combo of action and humor. Some questions that nagged me during and after, though. Obviously some more serious than others. Spoilers inherent, I suppose…
Peter Quill was abducted at age 10… did he ever try to get back home? How did that go? Or has he even reached out to his grandfather and friends and family to say he’s okay… or to let the powers that be know about the whole “aliens are real” thing?
How does his Walkman still work 20+ years later? I don’t get the impression that AA batteries are available on every corner in the Marvel universe. It’d be easy enough to indicate he’s found some way to recharge the batteries off the ship’s energy or something, but they don’t really mention that.
Ronan (I had to look up his name again b/c I thought he was a really vanilla and forgettable baddie) double-crosses and pisses off Thanos. Who promptly gets so upset that he… doesn’t do anything for the rest of the film?
I’m guessing it’s not that hard to come up with something with all that space tech lying around. That tape deck he had aboard his ship wasn’t in his backpack when he was abducted either.
Thanos is extremely intelligent, and very patient. He was likely plotting something, but would only put his plan into action when it yielded the maximum benefit to himself. Bear in mind he hasn’t had revenge on Loki yet for failing to get him the tesseract. He is no doubt planning on taking care of that loose end when he goes to Asgard to get the tesseract himself.
Aww, no love for Rooker? His big badass moment against twenty of Ronan’s guys got one of the biggest cheers at my screening. We spend the whole movie wondering why the hell the leader of a space gang is armed only with a single floaty arrow… and then he shows us exactly why that’s all he needs.
Plus, I love how Yondu seems to have genuine affection for Quill - you can see him doing everything he can throughout the movie to NOT kill Star-Lord, so long as he doesn’t lose face in front of his gang. And his grin at getting (literally) trolled at the end was great. Not that I think he’ll let Star-Lord slide for reneging on the deal, per se, but Yondu seems like the kind of intergalactic biker king who respects, and even likes, having adversaries with giant brass balls.
That makes a lot of sense. There is a mind blowing amiout of detail going into these films. It’s just a massive undertaking. I have a general sense of where the movies are headed, but I’m looking forward to seeing how they get there.
His ultimate goal is not collecting all the infinity gems. That’s an intermediate goal on the way to activating the Infinity Gauntlet and wiping out life in the universe to impress his girl.
In a film with a genetically and cybernetically altered machine-gun toting raccoon, a spacecraft named after an 'Eighties sitcom start capable of flying across the galaxy in hours, and an outlaw’s paradise occupying the head of a dead celestial being, and and this is what you’re worried about?
Also, who would want to go back to 20th century Earth once you have the opportunity to get on with green skinned alien girls? This is every Trekkie’s literal wet dream. (Well, male ones, anyway.)
But he knows that all the good guys will be on his ass if they get wind of his plan, so he has to set things up in the background so that the timing is right.
As i said above, i had a lot of fun at the movie, but all this fanboy stuff is one thing i sort of find annoying about it.
Not the fanboy stuff, per se, but the fact that the movie explains virtually none of this, and as a result leaves the non-fanboys with a movie where the bad guys are almost completely unexplained and their motivations almost completely unexplored. Basically, if you have no background in the comic universe, you just have to accept that “These guys are evil, those guys are good, and you’re supposed to root for the good guys.”
I can live with that, i guess, but it seems to me that it wouldn’t take a whole lot of scriptwriting brainpower to fill in the audience a bit more on the backstory.
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think that this is a case of “fanboy stuff” that requires background knowledge to understand. We as the movie audience are intended to be, for now, in the dark about Thanos’s motivations. It’s something that is clearly being built up for a reveal in a later film.
That comic readers already know Thanos’s endgame does not make it “fanboy stuff,” any more than “Song of Ice and Fire” fans knowing that the Red Wedding was coming made the buildup of Robb Stark’s interactions with the Freys in “Game of Thrones” into “fanboy stuff.” It’s simply plot that hasn’t arrived yet.
In any case, *Ronan, * not Thanos, is the villain of GOTG, and his motivations *are *explained in the film - he’s a Kree militant who broke with his government when they signed a treaty with Xandar. I have absolutely zero familiarity with the comics, and that seemed perfectly clear to me. And since Ronan’s method of exercising his militant fundamentalism is attempting to blow up an entire planet of his enemies (who, I should note, the film goes through some effort to establish as peaceful, even if they do have sticks up their butts), I felt fairly comfortable rooting against him. If that isn’t sufficient to convey that “these guys are evil, these guys are good” in your book, then… erm… I think the problem may be on your end.
