Saw it the other day with a bunch of my kids/nieces/nephews. I liked it, although the element of novelty from the first film was missing and I thought splitting up the team into two separate plots was a mistake. I liked the development of Yondu, and Baby Groot was great. That reminds me, I loved the opening credits scene focusing on little Groot while the rest of the team fought the giant space monster in the background and just off-screen.
The soundtrack was alright but not nearly as brilliant as GotG1.
My daughter’s friend was a little traumatized by the huge amount of impaling going on.
Saw it yesterday and I liked (But didn’t love) the movie.
It seemed that it was trying just a bit too hard to be, quite literally, Guardians of the Galazy Vol. 2. The comedy was trumped up, the action was trumped up and the movie had a “You liked this? Here’s MORE!” attitude.
I’m probably in a the minority, but I like the tear-jerking aspect of it as something different in a Marvel movie. I was definitely sniffling at the ending, but I like that a superhero movie can make me feel like that.
This one might have to sit on me a while, and I’ll definitely have to see it again when it’s on video in order to get the full effect of the movie…but in the day after I saw it I can say that I liked the movie a lot, but didn’t completely love it.
I wish Yondu’s death was saved for GotG 3. His story was too condensed in this one. They brought up the whole “Exiled from the Ravagers” background just to have it resolved at the very end. I think it would have had more impact to have him redeem himself in this one and sacrifice himself in the next. Plus, I would have liked to see him on Earth.
I loved it. I thought it was easily as good as GotG1. It was absolutely hilarious. The action sequences were done well. And Yondu’s funeral was emotional for me. I’ll probably go see it again in theatres in a couple of weeks and I’ll buy it when it comes out for sure.
As for the “tearjerking” aspect, I thought Logan did a much better job of showing and eliciting from the audience real emotion. Partly this was because Logan was a much smaller scale story.
This about sums it up for me too, except I wouldn’t call it “terrible.” I’d add that it was 45-minutes too long – I was getting restless. It took too long to get to the McGuffin.
I agree. I would have liked to see Yondu really become one of the team, for his death to have more meaning. This was the death of a secondary character who wasn’t even a good guy in the last movie.
Loved it. Probably the best movie I’ll see this year… Although, in the interest of full disclosure, the only other movies I plan to see this year are Wonder Woman and Ragnarok.
Also, if Michael Rooker doesn’t at least have a cameo in the rumored upcoming Mary Poppins movie, I shall be disappointed.
I honestly thought the way Yondu ended the mutiny was very much fitting with the tone of the first movie. Yondu’s not a good guy, per se. The Ravagers aren’t good guys. They’re space pirates. “Cartoony violence happening in large amounts while the protagonists engage in badass procession to the command center/captain’s launch/etc” is James Gunn, Marvel director, all the way.
Loved it. Prior to that scene we never really got an idea of just how powerful the arrow was. There was a lot of cringing around it and plenty of scenes where he stopped it jussst in front of somebody, but watching him kill a hundred or so Ravagers without a care in the world was awesome.
In the first film, Yondu killed a ship full of Sakaaran soldiers in the first movie by impaling with his arrow, Quill kills a bunch of Sakaarans while entering the Dark Aster (“Just like Kevin Bacon!”), Groot also impales and brutally smashes others, and of course Ronan and Nebula murder everybody on the Kyln prison station (albeit all we hear is some offscreen shooting and yelling). Gamora is apparently known galaxy-wide as a mass killer, Rocket and the former Groot were bounty hunters who reveled in causing pain(“Yeah, writhe, little man!” after shooting Quill in the back), and Drax the Destroyer just likes smashing and killing for fun. For their part the Ravagers are not scruffy ragmuffins but professional thieves and mercenaries who eat people as delicacies; fuck those guys. The off-Earth Marvel universe seems to be a pretty brutish and largely lawless place where you can get your arm hacked off just for looking sideways at somebody in a remote desert world tavern…oh, sorry, that’s Star Wars, but the same principle applies. And for Gunn, horrific injury and death played for dark comedic sensibility is kind of his métier. That the particular tone of Guardians is one of casual violence is not new to this film, and the language, tone, and depth of the film clearly indicate that its intended audience is not children.
That this film wasn’t as “fresh” as the first film was kind of inevitable, especially given how stylistically different the first film was from all of the other Marvel properties that came before it. Gunn could have tried to do something completely different, but instead he followed through in building up his universe and focusing the story on character development. Sacrificing Yondu gave some depth to the film without compromising the core Guardians team, and frankly I can’t think of another actor better suited to play Quill’s father than Kurt Russell, though I did find the final battle between them to be somewhat drawn out. He certainly made a better villain than Ronan (not Lee Pace’s fault, the character just didn’t have enough development or menace to get too worked up over), and along with Loki and Pierce gives one of the more memorable appearances.
My two criticisms of the film is that I thought the soundtrack was not as memorable as the first film (all I can remember besides “Brandy” was “Southern Nights”, “The Chain”, and “Bring It On Home”, and I find it hard to believe that Gunn didn’t work “Papa Was a Rolling Stong” in there), and that we didn’t get to see much else of the wider off-Earth Marvel universe. That is presumably coming with Infinity Wars, Thor: Ragnarok and maybe Captain Marvel but I really like James Gunn’s 'Seventies influenced fluorescent disco space opera vision of galactic empires and wanted to see more alien cantinas, space stations, and ancient Celestial relics. He provides the most fantastical vision of a space opera milieau since Star Wars, and I could spend two hours just looking at the production design of his universe. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with on Vol. 3, and what new music Quill finds on his Zune.
In the first movie he used it to kill about thirty or so bad guys who were already pointing their guns at him, that seemed a bit more impressive to me.
