High five, low five: Guardians of the Galaxy

First, a note from the management: Google tells me that people are reading this! Granted, Google tells me that sometimes 20 people at a time are reading this in Turkey, which seems implausible, but many strange and magical things are possible on the internet. While I enjoy declaring my opinions to the self-affirming nods of the masses as much as the next guy, loyal readers and Turkish spambots also are reminded that comments are welcome and encouraged from whoever has something to add on any topic (which probably rules out the Turkish spambots, but oh well).

My expectations for Marvel's latest movie were fairly high. Guardians of the Galaxy is rocking a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes (for the first twenty or so reviews, it was 100%) and I had several positive endorsements from friends and coworkers. I have to say, what I saw did not live up to those expectations.  It's not a bad movie - there are things it did quite well, and things it didn't - but overall, I came away unsatisfied. And I'm disappointed, not to mention a little bit surprised; I've usually been in agreement with the general degree of approbation or opprobrium applied to MCU movies, or even erred on the side of liking movies that other reviewers found blah, and it's puzzling that so many reviewers and writers are responding to this one so much more positively than I. Are we sure we're all watching the same movie?

I'm not a huge fan of the traditional 'movie review' - I enjoy reading them after I watch a movie because they sometimes catch things I missed, but they're generally far to short and subjective to guide one in actually forming an opinion - but I kinda liked what I did for the second HTTYD movie, a list of five successful and unsuccessful elements, so I'm doing that again. Read on for five things I liked a lot and five that I liked not so much at all in Guardians of the Galaxy, complete with exhaustive explanations and diatribes thereupon.

Poster a gift from my boss, who saw it in IMAX instead of working on a night the state
supreme court issued three major rulings. I might forgive him eventually.

And yes, there are **SPOILERS.** Duh. Consider yourself warned.

(I've also tried to avoid too much discussion of the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe and the greater interaction of comic books and movies, not because that's not an interesting topic, but because it's too interesting, and to complex, to try to tackle alongside my specific thoughts on GotG. Look for another post on that sometime soon.)

Things I liked quite a bit

1. The jokes

Damn, this movie is funny. I've seen in critical reviews and heard from others who've seen the movie that whereas the other MCU movies have been action movies with funny dialogue, GotG is a comedy with action scenes. With the exception of a few scenes around the climax, I think this is a perfectly accurate description. The jokes are clever and come at you from all sorts of unexpected directions; with one notable exception discussed below in problem #1, not a single one falls flat, and each character gets their own highly unique persona which is organically developed through the banter they exchange in a variety of stressful and unusual situations. Some of my particular favorite bits:

• No, I didn't need his fake leg; I just thought it would be funny! Wasn't that funny?
• To be perfectly honest ... <girl inserts name> Right! I, uh, forgot you were here!
• Groot grabbing Gamorra on Xandar and Rocket irately telling him to learn genders.
• The distraction by dancing sequence at the end.
• If someone does something that bothers me, and I remove his spine ...
• Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast.
• You just leave bombs lying around!? Well, I was going to put it in a box ...

And no doubt many others that I don't remember at the moment. The writing in this movie takes all the cleverness and wit that MCU is known for and ramps it up to 11. It works very well and is by far the strongest aspect of the film.

2. The first scene of treasure hunting

GotG is in sort of an odd spot, genre-wise. It's a comedy with action scenes, but occasionally it thinks it's a pure action movie. It's based on a comic book and shares a universe and a metaplot with the spectacularly lucrative superhero movies of the MCU, but none of the characters actually are superheroes (even in the non-superhuman Batman sense), and the actual setting and concept (inasmuch as it bothers to establish either) of the movie has much more in common with Star Wars than with Spiderman. I talk at length later on about how much I wish the movie had been more adventurous with its setting, crafting an expansive and mysterious galaxy in keeping with the imaginative space fantasies it clearly wishes to be. For the most part, it doesn't. The biggest exception, though, is the very first scene in the present, where a lone wanderer makes his way across a desolate and fantastic landscape to explore forgotten ruins in search of a fabled treasure. Perfect. Of special note is his little sensor doodad, which scans the scene before him, identifies points of reference and compares it to archived materials to determine whether it's a match for the place he's seeking. We could probably create such a device today, although it wouldn't display the scene holographically. What we couldn't duplicate is the device's other functions; it highlights the path he should be following on the ground in front of him, and it also creates holographic images of whatever people and pets were running around its area of effect when the original reference material was taken. So as he climbs the steps to this crumbling ancient structure, he's pausing to watch small children of bygone eras play with dogs or equivalent alien pets and couples walking past. It's a wonderfully immersive and somber touch and lends a very palpable sense of age and entropy to the space ruins. Why, why, why, WHY did the film not do more with this device and the corresponding motifs of forgotten history and ghosts of the past?

And in a very different but equally fervent way, I love the second half of the scene, where he has a one-man dance party on his way through the ruins. It perfectly sets the self-deprecating tone that the movie nearly always sticks to, toying with but always prancing away from the earnest seriousness most of the other MCU movies have exuded. One friend on Facebook commented that "Every time it threatened to turn into a serious movie, it undercut itself." With a few exceptions near the end, I think this is correct, and this gleeful scene gets the movie off to a great start of subverting its own expectations in a fun and unique way. And using the alien rat thing as a microphone? Priceless.

To explore strange new worlds, to seek out ... sorry, wrong franchise.

3. The soundtrack

I'm hardly an expert on pop music in general, or mid 80's pop music in particular. I consider myself to be doing pretty well to have simply recognized most of the licensed tracks in the film. But while I'm not qualified to comment on the specific choices of music they used, I can say with assurance that the overall package worked well. The soundtrack was dramatically different from past MCU films in a way that helped establish this one's identity right out of the gate; the songs were fun to listen to and frequently came with amusing or ironic contrasts to the action happening on screen; and the original music, a more MCU-traditional orchestral score, was solid enough that when I listened to the suite version that plays during the end credits I was able to hum along with most of the melodies. So overall a very creditable job scoring the film, and more importantly, a nice job giving the film a unique and memorable personality that separates it from the rest of the MCU.

4. Groot

I don't really know what to say here. Certainly I'm not the only one who responded favorably to Groot; even setting aside the dancing baby Groot fandom under development, a lot of people have mentioned that he is the heart and soul of the team, but generally don't try to explain why (other than that he is based on James Gunn's dog, which certainly would be part of it). He's just a very endearing creature, and I appreciated all the time we had with him (although I'm not sure the bit where they show him impale half a dozen mooks, knock the surrounding mooks to the ground and then spend a full 30 seconds of precious screen time having him bellow and flail around with his armful of already-dead ragdoll enemies is quite as funny as they seem to think). Am definitely game for more Groot in GotG2.

Even though he will probably be grown up and not dancing to Jackson 5.

5. Knowhere

Like the opening scene on the abandoned planet, the idea of a giant, planetoid-sized skull floating through space and being mined for its organic compounds while serving as a wretched hive of scum and villainy is a bit that suggests that the writers didn't completely forget they were writing a space fantasy. I suppose that in theory they might someday revisit the concept of humanoid celestial beings large enough to leave such cadavers behind, but I'd actually prefer they leave it as is; it's a small detail that hints at a much broader and more interesting history and cosmology that is sorely lacking in the rest of the movie. Bonus points for being the scene of some good jokes, a pretty decent exposition scene about Rocket's backstory, and a very fun and very pretty close-quarters aerial chase around the inside of the skull. I like all of these things. I also appreciate that the movie showed Peter being all sacrificial and noble for his lady love, building audience rapport with him, and then undermines it with his hilariously awkward and self-aggrandizing description of his actions to Gamorra once the Ravagers rescue them. Props to Zoe Saldana for a masterful eye roll.

Here there be dragons, bitches.

Things I didn't like so much

Before I launch into the list, let me lay down a general principle: if you're going to include a plot point or character trait in your movie, take the time to do it right. If you don't have the time or interest to do it right, don't do it at all. Seem reasonable? Good. Moving on:

1. Gamorra

Let me first say this first: it could have been worse. In particular, one of the trailers put out before the movie launched included a shot of green Zoe Saldana's very attractive and very unclothed torso as seen from behind, which didn't make it into the final cut. I'm grateful for that (although my lower brain functions might beg to disagree) because Marvel has enough issues with female representation without adding gratuitous stripteases to its rap sheet. But even with that particular calamity avoided, there are still a few things that bother me about Gamorra, helpfully delineated with bullet points below.

• "I was going to betray him." Right. Let's imagine that we're Peter Quill. A green assassin chick known to be working with the biggest bad in this corner of the galaxy, and who we KNOW is after the MacGuffin in our possession, has jumped him, beaten him up, and tried to steal said MacGuffin. Everyone around you is talking at length about how dangerous and scary she is. She says, in a 'you guys are so dumb for not already knowing this' tone of voice, 'I was going to betray him (Ronan).' Do you:
• A. Assume that this is a transparently obvious attempt to save face and disregard it completely.
• B. Assume that she is trying to put you off-balance by claiming to be on your side in preparation for future attempts to get the orb from your possession, assuming that at some point you HAVE the orb in your possession again, or else that she's planning to kill you.
• C. Reserve judgement until you have more basis upon which to judge her character and sincerity.
• D. Believe her absolutely to the point of risking your life by interfering with a large angry guy who is about to murder her, after which you unquestioningly trust everything she tells you about the deal she had lined up and place your life and prospects of escape in her hands.
• If you picked D, you're a moron; you also might be Peter Quill. Seriously, dude; you're not going to demand ANY corroborating evidence before you buy into her unproven and unprovable assertion that she was GOING to betray the bad guy, if you'd just not gotten in her way? How the hell have you survived 26 years on the seedy side of the galaxy? And even if we pick D and accept her profession of disloyalty to Thanos at face value ...
• Her conversion to good guy is implausibly quick and uncomplicated. It's clear that Gamorra dislikes Thanos, and it appears that she wasn't happy with the things she did in his service. I find that perfectly believable; there are a great many ways in which a villain practiced in emotional manipulation (or did you think it was a coincidence that he called Gamorra 'my favorite daughter' in front of his OTHER similarly warped adoptive daughter) might have kept her under his thumb. But by the same token, it's not at all clear what has changed so drastically that Gamorra throws off whatever bonds are holding her to Thanos and goes on her merry way with never a look back. Yes, Ronan's plot to use the gem to destroy Xandar will kill a whole lot of people, presumably on a scale greater than anything Gamorra has done in Thanos' or Ronan's service in the past. But she has killed people, presumably in considerable numbers, and we don't get any sign that she was ever less than perfectly diligent and faithful in the literal and figurative execution of her duties, which suggests that whatever hold Thanos had over her was quite strong. I'll accept that the prospect of escalating the death toll from the dozens of hundreds into the billions is enough for Gamorra to finally say 'no, enough is enough, I have to be free of this.' I don't believe that she could do so in such a short timespan, with so few repercussions or second thoughts or self-doubts or any of the other baggage of someone leaving an abusive and manipulative relationship. And yet that's what happens. If it was that easy, why didn't she do it years ago?
• Gamorra is clearly emotionally unsuited to being an assassin. "Well, duh," I hear you say. "That's why she's quitting." And it's clear that she isn't happy being an assassin. But it's equally clear that for quite some time, she has been one. All those prisoners threatening murderous vengeance upon her for the people she has killed bespeak a lengthy and active career in people-killing. Even if, as indicated above, she didn't enjoy it, I don't think it's possible to kill off enough people to earn the eternal enmity of an entire prison-full of hardcases - not to mention developing her considerably and clearly well-practiced personal combat skills - without developing at least some emotional callouses and defenses. (Or if it is possible, it would only because the killer in question is already certifiably sociopathic, which is clearly not the case for miss bleeding-heart we-have-to-save-the-fuzzies Gamorra). And yet the movie goes out of its way to show us her lack of such emotional infrastructure; in particular, where she is first taken to her cell in the asteroid prison, we can see her trying and failing to conceal her reaction - fear, dismay, regret - to the enraged inmates threatening her outside her cell. You'd think that she'd have learned some tricks to deal with this sort of thing by now. We see no signs of calculation or ends-justify-means or for-the-good-of-the-many attitudes, any of which I would have thought necessary for a reluctant assassin to try to rationalize their actions without going absolutely bonkers - on the contrary, she is by far the strongest voice on the team for benevolence and humanitarian responses, albeit apparently less persuasive than Peter - and for someone deeply versed in death, she reacts remarkably strongly when Yondu is about to kill Peter. Any of those on its own would be inconsistent with an experienced assassin; taken together, I can't see any way that this character could have already committed numerous murders. It just doesn't add up. I'm not going to say that EVERY assassin has the same reaction to the things they do, because that would be foolish; however, I feel pretty comfortable saying that any assassin who isn't certifiably insane will have to have developed coping mechanisms or attitudes that Gamorra simply hasn't. And even if she had somehow murdered her way through half the galaxy while still maintaining the kind of emotional vulnerability demonstrated in the movie, it would be even MORE difficult to accept that she somehow made a clean break from Thanos/Ronan's service, because that emotional vulnerability would have made her even easier prey for manipulation and left her even less capable of simply ending her relationship with adoptive dad without a whole hot mess of complications.
• Also worth noting: given her background and her repeatedly expressed concern for innocent lives, I would expect to see a quite heavy burden of guilt for actions she took, however, unwillingly, at Thanos' and Ronan's commands. If anything, her decision to finally betray them would only make it worse, because now she has to think about the last person she assassinated and know that he/she/it would still be alive if she had made the decision to rebel a little sooner. And yet, aside from maaaaybe the little flinch she shows when locked in her cell (I interpreted it as a person clearly not sufficiently hardened by a lifetime of assassinations being quite reasonably shaken by several hundred people loudly and profanely expressing the desire for her to die a bloody and painful death and showing every intention of enacting such upon her forthwith, but I guess maybe you could say there was some guilt in there) she seems not to give a second, or even first, thought to her numerous past victims. It's possible, of course, that despite her otherwise total apparent lack of emotional callouses, she's managed to lock all the guilt of her past killings up in a big old wad of denial somewhere, but if that's the case, it's a major failing of the movie not to show that to us. People certainly repress strong emotions all the fricken time, but never without consequences; those emotions will always cause some sort of leakage around the edges, and be all the stronger and gnarlier for having been so tightly contained.
• All in all, Gamorra's character feels riddled with inconsistencies. Why is that? I'm very much afraid it's because the writers didn't start with a clear picture of her emotional state, history, needs and goals; they started with Peter's feelings, needs and goals and then wrote Gamorra in such a way as to fulfill or conform to those needs as they arose. That's right: we have a clear case of a Strong Female Character on set. The story is about a manly man doing manly man things, but the filmmakers needed a warm body to occupy that percentage of the promotional posters reserved for skintight leather and spandex, and so Viola! Gamorra. It might be unfair of me to lay this on James Gunn and the other creators; like all of the characters, Gamorra is an import from the comics, and she may well be just as adjunct there as she is in the movie. But one way or another, the writers failed at what I've previously described as the most important benchmark: Is this character necessary? If you're going to include a badass action girl in your movie (ignoring for now the question of why you'd only want a female character in 5-person lead cast), take your time, think it through, do it right, ok?
• The whore joke. A separate Gamorra-related issue from all the problems detailed above is the bit after they board the ship where Drax is laboriously declaring his friendship for each of the team and he ends with "Green whore, you are my friend!" Gamorra rounds on him in irritation, only to be interrupted by Nebula, who fails her villain check by standing in front of them in plain view and insulting Gamorra until Drax shoots her with his rocket launcher and says something like "nobody but me is allowed to talk like that about my friends." Haha, funny, right? I certainly get the joke they were going for, but I'm afraid it fell rather flat for me, because it started out with Drax (who, remember, is incapable of figurative or exaggerated language, and therefor must believe that what he is saying is literally accurate) accusing Gamorra of sexual misconduct for absolutely no reason. At exactly no point prior to this in the movie has Gamorra used her undeniable sex appeal to manipulate anyone, or frankly for any purpose at all.* Since Gamorra hasn't done anything to merit being called a whore, I can only assume that Drax judges her to be guilty of sexual misconduct merely on the basis of her physical attractiveness. Do I need to explain to anyone why it's a problem to assume that attractive people (read: women) are automatically sluts?
• *Possible exception: when she first meets Peter outside the antiquarian's office.  However, A) Peter got flustered just seeing her leaning against a wall, which has more to do with her being attractive and him being a randy heterosexual male than any actual seduction on her part; B) when she does approach him, with an undeniable saunter, and tell him about how he's clearly a man of integrity, it seemed to me to be at least as much a case of her mocking his obvious discomfiture as actually angling for any advantage - after all, he's unsuspecting and she's a super assassin, so it would not have been all that much trouble for her to launch her attack from a few meters further back; C) even granting (which I don't) that using physical attraction as a tool to nonromantic ends is inherently unethical, that's a hell of a small infraction for which to label anyone a whore; and D) Drax doesn't even know about that scene. He doesn't appear in the movie until after they arrive in prison.
• I also asked the Googles about this one, and found this discussion and this article. The first suggests that perhaps the writers were going for an extended joke of Gamorra having to defend against baseless accusations, and while such a joke could in theory be funny, it isn't nearly clear enough to overcome the major ick factor of the insult. The second argues that sexism in the MCU always reflects badly on the user, both figuratively and literally, and while this is true, it's quite subtle and doesn't change the obvious frustration in Gamorra's voice when she rounds on Drax. Not terribly satisfied with either explanation.

2. World-building, or lack thereof

I have never seen a scifi/fantasy movie that left me less interested in the fictional world than this one. Never. It's a good thing the characters are generally likeable and funny, because aside from the aforementioned ruins on planet Morag at the beginning, there is absolutely nothing going on in the titular galaxy that makes me think 'hey, I want to see more of that.'

Let's take a look at what we're told. The Xandarrians and the Kree have been fighting a war for generations and have just ended it. Cool. What was the war fought over? Who won, in terms of getting better results from the peace treaty than the other? Which side makes the better claim to being the good guy? Were there notable atrocities on either side? What ships, weapons and technologies were employed by the combatants? How large were their armies, and how were they organized? How were the cultures of these two antagonists shaped by decades of fighting? Who exactly are the two sides - are we talking multistellar democracies, single-system theocracies, space communists, or what? Is Ronan representative of all the Kree in his equipment, motivations and priorities, or is he an outlier? Why has Thanos only recently intervened in this generational conflict by arming one faction and using it to seek an artifact that presumably has been floating around ever since that one world was abandoned? Oh, wait, you're not answering any of these questions? Well. That sucks.

It's just as whitewashed and pretty up close, too.

Let's look at this another way, then. The movie spends a fair chunk of time on Xandar, and the stakes in the climactic showdown is the completely annihilation of life on the entire planet, so clearly we should be sympathizing with the planet and it's people, right? Well, yes, ideally, but they sure don't give us much to go on; in fact, in every way I can think of, Xandar appears to be a carbon copy of the Capital of Panem. A suspiciously clean futuristic metropolis inhabited by people with bizarrely complicated hairdos (Nova Prime, looking at you), policed by identically-outfitted paramilitary forces with face-concealing helmets, and with a justice system apparently unburdened by anything resembling courts, trials or evidence? Wow, gee, let me hurry up and lay my life on the line to protect THAT sparkling utopia. (Note that I'd be fine with all this if anyone in the film universe acknowledged that Xandar is a bland or even downright creepy society, but it's definitely packaged and presented as a Good Place, and the movie just doesn't back that up.)

Pardon, Nova Prime, but I think your hair is giving birth.

Well, ok, so the major foundational events that underlie the main conflict are left entirely too vague, and the 'world' part of the 'save the world' premise is bland and unappetizing, but this is scifi! Better yet, Science Fantasy! Surely there are unique and fantastic worlds or alien races or technologies to capture the viewer's imagination! Actually, not much. Named characters aside, the inhabitants of the universe appear almost universally to be human-lookalikes (which demands some sort of explanation), humans with pink skin, or humans with blue skin, which seems like a damnable poor use for a $170 million budget. Of the two planets seen up close, one is generic utopian futuristic urban parkland No. 735936, and the most distinguishing feature we see on the other is that it has bigass geysers. Cool, but not exactly ground-breaking. They don't even mention any other planets that I recall, so we have no idea how large the explored/settled universe is, how many people, alien species or planets are in it, or just how impressive it is to be saddled with a title like 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' And as for unique technology ... well. We have Peter's nanobot face shield, which is a cool visual effect but doesn't really let him do anything that can't be done in any other space fantasy setting; and we have his cool past-reconstructer tricorder from the beginning, which (as previously mentioned) is badass, and with which the movie does nothing. We don't know anything about FTL travel, interstellar politics (aside from 'there was a war'), history, social attitudes and institutions, or anything else that would distinguish this from any other work of fiction. Even Star Wars, which is resplendently unconcerned with the plausibility of its science, at least gives its phlebotinum gadgets and unvisited planets names.

As mentioned previously, there are two elements of worldbuilding that I found not only not to suck, but to be actively interesting: the abandoned planet in the beginning and the giant space-skull of Knowhere. The latter, however, is pretty well covered by the movie; I suppose a sequel could return to Knowhere to examine the gang politics and black market chicanery that goes on there, but the wow factor - 'hey, there's a giant skull floating in space' would be gone. And while I did quite like the first scene on the abandoned planet, it's not like I can't find dozens of franchises featuring treasure hunters exploring lost ruins on forgotten planets, all of which would have far more personality and individuality than the setting of GotG.

3. Mommy issues

Look: I have no problem with predictable. You can telegraph your big emotional moments coming a mile away, and I'll be fine with it, so long as you do the work in between to make that emotion genuine when the moment of payoff comes. In the pretitle scene, when young Peter gets the present from his dying mother and then fails to take her hand before she dies, I knew right away, 'ok, he's not going to open that present until the end of the movie.' And again: that's not a problem. Indeed, having that sort of tieback to who he is should actually go in the plus category for the movie.

The problem is that they didn't actually do the work in the body of the movie to give that final moment the oomph it apparently was supposed to have. By opening the present that his mother gave him 26 years before, Peter is resolving a deep emotional scar from his childhood that was not at all evident in his character for 96% of the movie. Simply telegraphing the emotions I'm supposed to feel isn't actually enough; you have to earn them, too.

It occurs to me that the writers might see this differently; after all, they repeatedly show throughout the movie that Quill remains attached to and melancholy for his mother and his life on Earth, generally using the device of the Walkman and mixtape. The problem is that the Walkman is a suitable tool to show that he misses his mother and his homeworld, two very reasonable things for him to feel; it does NOT show any lingering guilt or unresolved self-doubt springing from his mother's death and his failure to take her hand in the moments before her death. The only hint of that in between his abduction and opening the present at the end is when he prevents Rocket from opening it after coming on board, which tells us what we already knew - the present is the symbol for his mommy issues - but doesn't actually show us how those mommy issues have affected who he is.

Because the movie fails to provide evidence to support the emotional conflict telegraphed by the present, the mechanism by which he resolves said conflict falls a bit flat. When he's in the process of dissolving after grabbing the infinity gem from Ronan and Gamorra tells him 'here, take my hand!', he has a flashback to - of course - his mother saying the same thing, and this time he does take her hand. This apparently is all that was necessary for him to resolve the issues that have plagued him for longer than I've been alive, huh? They aren't even parallel situations. When he refused to take his mother's hand in the prologue, he denied her comfort and solace in the moment of her death (and no, I don't blame him for briefly shying away from the tactile evidence of his mother's mortality and no, him holding her hand wouldn't have made any tangible difference for her, and no, none of that actually matters to either child- or adult-Peter); when he takes Gamorra's hand, not only is he not providing her solace or comfort for anything, but actively putting her life in imminent danger. Granted, she probably would have managed to get a hold of him anyway, but inasmuch as he had a choice, he chose the exact same option that he did as a child - the path that seemed least likely to cause him short-term pain.

(Interjection: I'm not saying that he acted selfishly by sharing the near-certain dissolution via infinity gem with Gamorra and the others. There were valid emotional and thematic reasons to do so. But 'this time, I can do what I couldn't do for my mother' certainly isn't one of them.)

How could the movie have handled this better? Make it a recurring issue! For God's sake, the man has been in the company of space looters for his entire adult life and much of his childhood, and it's reasonable to assume that much of that has been spent just as we saw in the beginning of the movie - climbing around slimy old ruins and treacherous terrain on bass-ackward planets and abandoned ships and stations. You can't tell me that in all that time, nobody has ever said 'here, take my hand,' whether that be because Peter has fallen and needs a pull, the speaker has fallen and needs a pull, or just because they're helping each other surmount some obstacle. Since the trigger for his flashback didn't seem to be any situational parallel (unless it's 'female I care a lot about tells me to take their hand in a life-or-death situation,' which is a mighty specific set of triggering conditions), lets assume it's the words. Because of the events surrounding his mother's death, and having been given no chance to resolve those emotional issues prior to his kidnapping, he has developed a mild flashback neurosis triggered by those particular words. And how do they show this in the movie? During any of the action scenes - my vote would be after Ronan arrives at Knowhere - do some trivial rescripting to have one of the other Guardians hanging off a ledge and tell Peter 'take my hand!' and Peter freezes and has a quick flashback just long enough to get punched out by a bad guy and force them to come up with another highly unsafe course of action, with all the physical humor your heart could desire. Show him afterward moody and reflective until the others (probably Gamorra, since she seems determined to take on ALL the archetypal nurturing female roles) draw him back out to have their big discussion about saving the universe. As simply as that, we've established that he has both larger emotional scars and a specific trigger related to that phrase. Then, when Gamorra tells him to take her hand at the end, he has the same flashback, reinforced by the fact that if he takes her hand, it's reasonable to assume that it will lead to her death. And he has to overcome that hesitation, reinforced by 26 years of guilt, to take her hand and let her help him save the day. And when all the dust has settled, he has faced and overcome his very personal demons, THEN he can open the present and we can feel the catharsis that the writers surely intended. Better, no?

"But wait!" I hear someone protest. "This is a comedy! Doesn't playing up the emotional damage of a child struggling with the death of his mother sort of dampen the mood?" Well, possibly; there are certainly examples out there of blisteringly funny stories that rise out of death and grief and broken family dynamics, but I'll admit that it's a lot harder to write a comedy like that. I certainly wouldn't want to try it. But the problem is, the emotional damage is there! They want us to see the present and recognize the emotional damage it symbolizes. They go out of their way to make sure we know he has some unresolved issues from his childhood. The problem is just that they do so badly. If they really wanted to avoid having to deal with downer emotional trauma in their lighthearted comedy, there's a very easy way to do that: don't give your main character unresolved childhood emotional trauma. If you feel you must include such emotional baggage, take the time to show how it authentically affects his behavior and emotions. Do it right, or don't do it at all.

4. Heroic sacrifice, turned up to 11

Like Gamorra, this could have been worse; several trailers (#3 in particular) had some very bombastic-sounding lines about how 'we're not going to let evil wipe out billions of innocent lives' that were thankfully cut for the final version. Still there's a lot of that kind of thing that gets mixed up in the climax, and it's a problem. The section that starts halfway through the sit/stand in a circle and ends when the Kree ship crashes still has jokes, but they no longer pertain to solving the problems of the plot, as they have before; now, the characters solve all their problems through unironic heroic self-sacrifice, which is sharply at odds with the rest of the film. While the decision made by the heroes to subject themselves to near-certain death for no personal gain to save people they don't know and don't like would be admirable in a Captain America film, it doesn't at all fit in GotG.

To explain why I wasn't terribly invested in the climax, I shall be comparing this with another - perhaps THE other - example of a great space comedy: Galaxy Quest. GQ relied on parody of classic scifi TV shows, while GotG is a straight-up action comedy. Both are very funny throughout. The difference, though is in how they conclude. Both follow a similar pattern: a climactic encounter between spaceships in which the heroes appear to win the day, only to unexpectedly encounter the true threat face to face. In GQ, both are resolved cleverly and with appeals to the particular absurdities of that film universe. In GotG, while the second and actual climax is resolved humorously, the first is resolved exactly the way it would be in any other MCU movie: with heroic actions unburdened even with ironic one-liners.

To break down the comparison further: in GQ, having completed various shenanigans running around in the depths of the ship under the guidance of the uberfan on the other end of the phone line, the heroes return to the bridge and set a course to intercept the vastly more powerful Big Baddie's ship. Big Bad Sarris taunts them, telling them  they fail to realize that his ship will tear through theirs like tissue paper. Nominal good guy Nesmith tells him "And what you fail to realize is my ship ... is dragging mines!" (collected during an earlier scene in a minefield). Which is a goofy and counterintuitive tactic that makes good use of a Chekhov gun without requiring absurd piloting or tactical skills (which the characters, being TV actors, assuredly do not have) or requiring acts of gratuitous self-sacrifice (which the characters, being TV actors, assuredly do not intend to commit). Package it up with a fun repartee and call it a wrap. The true climax comes shortly after, where Sarris (in disguise) comes on to the bridge and murders all of them, forcing the dying Nesmith to activate the Omega 13, a device that will either reset time to 13 seconds previous or destroy the universe - nobody knows, because the show was cancelled before the device was explained. While certainly a very tense moment, it also is inextricably bound up in the absurdity of this spaceship built to such exacting specifications that even the TV show's plot holes are replicated. And when it works, it's a relief, but it's also funny.

In GotG, one would expect that the heroes' more applicable skillsets (combat, piloting, derring-do) will be employed, and they are, but what doesn't necessary follow is the multiple acts of heroic self-sacrifice that are required to get them over the initial hump and bring down Ronan's ship. First, Peter's big gun fails to kill Ronan, requiring Drax to charge into a hopeless battle to keep Ronan from killing them all, and is very nearly killed for his pains. Then, Rocket crashes his fighter into the bridge, very nearly killing himself as well as everyone on it in a last-ditch effort to save Drax (assuming he knew exactly what was going on, which would be difficult from his position flying around the outside of the ship). Then with him injured and the ship (somehow; see complaint near the end) breaking apart and falling from the sky, Groot has to turn himself into a crash cushion, a course of action guaranteed to result in his death when the impact shatters his substantially weakened frame. There are no memorable jokes or wisecracks in any of this ('We are Groot' is heartwarming but not funny); in fact, it's tonally nearly spot-on to the climax of Winter Soldier this spring, which doesn't fit the rest of this movie at all. Only when they recover from the crash and Ronan emerges to destroy the planet once more does the movie remember that it's a comedy, with Peter's (hilarious) challenge to a dance-off with Ronan and Ronan's entirely understandable bewilderment. Then they do the whole touching the infinity gem together thing, which I have no real problem with (aside from Ronan just standing there and letting them do it), and then the crisis is past. So it's not a complete whiff, but they definitely could have benefited with some time studying Galaxy Quest for how to incorporate the humorous parts of your movie even in the most dramatic moments of the plot.

5. The (implied) body count

I'll admit that this is a challenge for Marvel: how to make big, high-stakes action movies without inflicting civilian casualties that would be offputting for the teenage (or more important, teenager's parent) portions of their audience base. I thought Captain America 2 did a great job of this: they showed the potential for massive civilian casualties and averted them by the narrowest of measures; and they had all the destruction porn a CGI junkie could hope for, but they scripted it in such a way that the 3-way helicarrier shootout could believably knock the bejeezus out of all three ships and the SHIELD HQ without causing major collateral damage to civilian targets. Yes, there probably were stray shots that landed somewhere in the DC area, but the vast majority of the destruction landed in the river or on the SHIELD campus. Contrast that with The Avengers, where alien invaders destroy large swathes of downtown New York in the middle of a work day, sending panicked crowds fleeing in all directions, and yet somehow we never see any evidence of actual civilian casualties. I'm no more a fan of gratuitous gore than the next guy, but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I'm presented with a situation guaranteed to result in innocent people getting injured and killed, and having that sanitized so that we can pretend that it's just fun and games and property damage.

I find that irksome in the Avengers, but at least I have some reason to care about New York; it's a real place, I've been there (albeit only driving through), and like all Americans older than 20, I have some emotional baggage when it comes to wanton destruction inflicted on New York skyscrapers. As mentioned above, I have zero investment in Xandar and its people and property. And at the same time they're dialing down my engagement with the people and property being gratuitously destroyed for dramatic impact, they're dialing up the destruction: whereas New York was hit with strafing runs, small arms fire, tons of Hulk-related cosmetic breakage and probably a few skyscrapers with non-catastrophic structural damage from the big flying worms, the damage to Xandar starts with high-speed kamikaze attacks from hundreds of personal fighter craft (most of which are destroyed by the Ravagers on the way down, but the vast majority of that mass is going to maintain its vector and velocity, which means a whole lot of partial impacts in addition to the complete hits) and escalates to a capital ship crashing directly into the city, completely wiping out one of the two skyscraper-sized structures visible as well as numerous smaller ones. And while at one point the heroes are told that the city has been evacuated, I'm skeptical; first, because that's a mighty short time period in which to completely evacuate the population of a major metropolitan area from a cold start, and second, because no sooner has the big ship crashed than dozens of pedestrians gather around the crash site. I see no reason to assume that the non-evacuated citizens were only present just outside the impact radius of the crash; it seems not just reasonable but highly probable to assume that many more pedestrians didn't get out the way in time. Another escalation is in the casualties suffered by defenders: none of the police or army troops seen fighting in New York are killed (although a few can be presumed dead since they were last seen fleeing in front of a wave of exploding cars), but in GotG, several Ravager ships are destroyed along with literally thousands of Nova Force fighter craft trying to blockade the big ship, along with their pilots.

Will make quite a dent upon impact.

And yet again, just as in The Avengers, no deaths or dead bodies are shown on screen (aside from the lead pilot of the Nova Force blockade), and no characters acknowledge the death toll after the fact. Avengers at least showed a quick newsreel shot of a wall of remembrance; GotG doesn't even have that. Also of note: there's no way to have a combined arms firefight in NYC without damaging buildings, and the kamikaze attacks are clearly designed to damage civilian targets, but there's no reason the capital ship had to crash into the city. There was a perfectly good waterfront not half a mile away from where it came down, and the writers could easily have directed the CGI crew to have the ship hit water and slide up onto the beach (possibly even with a light comedy gag of Yondu or one of the other ravagers standing in front of it and holding out their hands in a futile warding gesture, only to have it grind to a halt just before them, leaving them to look at their hands in apparent satisfaction a la Captain Hammer saving Penny in Dr. Horrible). Instead, they made a conscious choice to inflict as much damage (and, almost certainly, death) on the city as possible without actually admitting on screen that they were doing so.

I've discussed above how the movie struggles a bit at the end to balance comedy and action movie; the implied body count is a big part of that. Avengers was a fairly lighthearted romp, but it was first and foremost an action movie; death and destruction were not contrary to the overall tone of the movie, as shown by the very well-executed and regrettably temporary death of agent Coulson. GotG is a completely different beast; there is a dramatic tonal disconnect between the comedy that makes up the core of this movie's DNA and the considerable destruction (even just of property) inflicted in the climax, all the moreso when the movie immediately reverts back to comedy immediately afterward. And that's a big pity. As mentioned above, this isn't an action movie, and most of the time, it knows that. But at the end, it forgets and decides it needs to be a PG-sanitized Independence Day, which is an unworkable concept even when it doesn't fly in the face of everything the rest of the movie stands for.

Honorable mentions:

Like in HTTYD2, there were a couple things that stuck out at me that didn't merit a spot on either of the lists above. Make of them what you will.

• Good: The prison. It's not a terribly ground-breaking sci-fi concept, but the asteroid prison scenes were well-executed and contributed a lot of the best lines in the movie. I approve.
• A little odd: The colored fluids. When they arrive in the prison, one of the slow-mo shots that plays during whichever 80's song they use is of a shirtless (and how!) Peter getting doused with some orange liquid. Disinfectant, perhaps? It colors his skin for the next few shots, even after he gets dressed, but none of the other characters appear similarly oranged and it fades away soon after. Which wouldn't be a big deal, except that during the fight between Drax and Ronan on Knowhere, they make a point of leaving Drax submerged for a while in a vat of yellow liquid, which likewise colors his skin for the rest of the scene once he's been fished out. Is there some sort of motif in the repeated use of slightly viscous colored liquids? I don't get it, but it seems a little too purposeful to be a coincidence.
• Disappointing: Inconsistency with the figurative language thing. I like the jokes about Drax not understanding or using figurative language; that's a clever gag. However, I have the sense that the writers only thought about it in conversations where they intended to use it for a joke. In particular, during the sit/stand in a circle conversation before they fly off to the climax, Peter says 'This is our chance'; Drax asks, 'Our chance to do what?'; and Peter replies 'To give a shit.' Remember, Drax doesn't just misunderstand figurative language; he doesn't even recognize when it's being used. To him, Peter Quill just told him with great passion and conviction that this is his opportunity to give someone else a piece of poop. How did the writers not notice that and have him react accordingly (or better yet, change Peter's line to eliminate the confusion)? Inconsistent gag is inconsistent.
• Eye-rolling: How exactly do they destroy Ronan's ship, again? When Rocket crashes his fighter into the bridge of the capital ship, it certainly does a number on the decor, including smashing the two dudes with the holographic spheres who appeared to be actually controlling the ship. However, it does NOT do any major structural damage; nor does it explode or cause any side effects other than a few small secondary fires. And yet when we switch to an exterior view, we see explosions ripple across the flanks of the ship (and I think a fireball issues from the bridge window where he went in, which is even more out of place) and large parts of the ship start literally falling off. It's one thing if killing the bridge crew causes the ship to go out of control, but where are all these explosions coming from? Did anyone at Marvel stop and think 'does this flashy CGI actually make sense in the context of the story?' before sending it to the art team to render?
• Falling at the speed of plot: The very drawn-out rain of kamikazes. When Ronan orders his pilots to divebomb the city, all of them we see on screen immediately swing toward the ground and roll out. A few hit, Rocket blows up one, and then forms a scratch AA battery using the Ravager fighters. Not only does this imply that the Ravagers (who had been engaged in close-range dogfights at the same altitude as the Kree fighters) were able to get down to ground level and aim themselves up to shoot at the kamikazes far faster than the kamikazes were able to fly straight down, but the fact that they're still plugging away at diving fighters several minutes later suggests that many of the Kree fighters either waited until the defenders were good and ready before starting their dive or else flew way the fuck up to get some momentum on their way down. I suppose the kamikaze order might have specified that the fighters space out their suicide attacks - maybe trying to create more fear or panic, whatever - but if that's the case, I'm not sure why we the later-wave kamikazes don't spend their time in the queue taking potshots at the back of the defenseless fighters making up the containment shield. It's also a little odd, given the demonstrated capabilities of the Kree ships and the fact that they've been at war for generations, that Xandar has no native antiaircraft defenses and relies entirely on its paramilitary police forces, whose tactical doctrine emphasizes containment more than combat; that said, it makes a little more sense that Ronan would have his craft kamikaze a few at a time if he thought there was no need to use numbers to soak the nonexistent AA defenses of the city.
• Lacking in context: The Ravagers. While not as glaring as the lack of context on the Kree v. Xandarrian conflict, I could use a little more background on these guys. They appear to be your standard semi-legal space renegades, but with rather more impressive resources and organization than usual (two large and heavily armed ships, apparently under unified command, and several dozen fighters that appear markedly more capable than the Kree fighters opposing them), and the name 'Ravagers' is a pretty loaded word. As in, I would use it interchangeably with 'Reavers', and we all know what to expect of Reavers in a ragtag gang of outlaws space adventure story. I'd be very curious to know where that name came from.

And how serious exactly were they about eating people?

• Clever: Why Peter survived grabbing the infinity gem. Peter survives holding onto the infinity gem on his own much longer than the pink slave girl in the Collector's showroom did. As described above, this is clearly a movie in which important processes are allowed to take place at the speed of plot (disintegrating at the speed of plot, I suppose), so I was quite pleasantly surprised after the climax when they retroactively justified his partial resistance to the gem's effects: his father is some sort of unspecified ancient being, which throws a whole new light on his mother's dying comment that 'your father was an angel.' It doesn't cancel out the numerous cases of plot armor throughout the movie, but at least this one case shows that they are aware of the phenomenon and had a bit of fun subverting it. This time, anyway.
• Bizarre: Who are Ronan's goons, anyway? I mean, the MCU has given us the Dark Elves and the Chitauri, two textbook examples of faceless mook armies, but I don't even know what to make of these guys. I didn't catch a name for them, but I'm pretty sure I heard the prefix 'necro' a few times, and their appearance (dessicated and almost mummified, during the scene where Yondar punctures all of them with his floating stabbything), would suggest that to be justified. If Ronan has the capacity to create a zombie army, I would think that to be worth a mention as part of the overall justification for him being a villain who must be stopped. If that's a technology shared by the Kree in general, it likewise should have been mentioned (although no moreso than the many other undisclosed details of that war, as mentioned above). If that's just what the Kree look like, why doesn't Ronan? If they're not Kree, who are they and why are they slumming around with a fanatical Kree ultranationalist? And while neither the Dark Elves nor the Chitauri seemed terribly possessed of instincts toward self-preservation, neither of them are depicted as being cool with committing mass suicide, by kamikaze or otherwise. I just entirely don't understand what's going on with these guys.
• Uncomfortable: this is now the second movie I've seen this summer where Djimon Honsou plays the only character of apparent African descent who also happens to be one of (if not the) irredeemable primary villains and who opposes the relentlessly Caucasian 'good guy' society. And I've only seen three movies this summer. Can we stop this, please?
• Meh: The villains in general. Presented without further comment. 

I seem to have had a lot more to say about the things that bothered me than the things I liked, but I think it's just the nature of a comedy that the good parts will be pretty self-explanatory and the not-so-good parts sometimes a little harder to find. The last time I did one of these posts, my final word was to tell everyone that HTTYD2 was a fantastic movie despite its flaws and that they should see it. This time, it would be more accurate to say that if you're a fan of previous MCU movies or action comedies in general, you'll probably enjoy GotG too. I don't regret seeing it, but this isn't one that I'm going to feel any real need to get on DVD. As for the sequel? ... We'll see. A lot of water is going to flow under the MCU bridge before GotG 2 gets here, so we'll see how the landscape changes between now and then. If nothing else, I strongly suspect GotG 2 will be required watching just in terms of metaplot-critical information about Thanos and the infinity gems. But that will come in its time. For now, I'll content myself with looking forward to Age of Ultron and all the pretty, pretty explosions to come ...