Ooga shaka ooga ooga shaka
Aww, GotG was a lot of fun! 
kaydeefalls was super generous about letting me cackle through it in her ear. It felt sort of Thor 2-ish to me a lot, and it is in no danger of displacing Winter Soldier as my favorite/the objective best MCU film so far. But a lot of it was just greatly entertaining.
Some real gripes: The pacing felt off and weird to me, and I felt like some things were overexplained and others completely left on the cutting room floor. Ronan was a pretty thin villain, and the other villains (Karen Gillan, Djimon Honsou) were criminally underused. I wished Gamora had actually been more ambiguous throughout. I didn't really feel the stakes in this one, even though they literally, like, dropped a spaceship all over a big, highly populated city?
Also, I'll just quote
whatistigerbalm on this part: I really, really wish somebody had told me, amidst all THIS FILM IS SOOOOO MUCH FUN!!!!!11 that the opening scenes were nothing but Death of Cancer Mom. I was SUPER NOT PREPARED FOR THAT, and was -- pretty discomfited. (I can imagine reasons why this would have happened, and I'm sure the mystery of Peter's father &c &c &c has something to do with it. If she died of cancer because of having a half-alien baby, though, ugh.)
I'm not sure that super troll-y after credits scene was entirely worth the troll. I enjoyed Peter a lot but am not sure I care about him? Groot, of course, was marvelous; I enjoyed Drax a lot more than I expected ("I am not a thesaurus!"), and heh, yeah, Rocket was creepy but sympathetic and fun. BLUE BOUNTY HUNTER GUY (Yorbu? Yondu?): LOVED HIM LOTS. I'd not seen anything about him in pretty much any of the promotional materials I'd seen, and DUDE, that guy and his crew were GREAT.
But wow, I laughed a lot; as a string of great dialogue, it was a real success. The visuals were beautiful, overall; I'm still really curious about how it'll all tie together with the rest of the MCU, beyond the obvious. I'm glad they explained the Infinity Gems for us! I wish we'd seen more of the Collector (Chip the Space Dog!), even if the destruction of his slave girl and his lair were... pretty nonsensical, unless we get more explanation about which gem, precisely, the purple one was? (And I'm trying to remember what it was that Sif and Volstagg brought to him in their after-credits scene... was it also another gem?)
I think overall I wish I'd seen the film I saw in the trailer, but this film was fun enough that I'm glad I saw it with a bunch of other people there to have fun with it.
Now we have to wait for Whedon to drop his load, I guess. May seems a very long way off, but we've got a reinvigorated Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter in general before that, so -- at least it won't be as bad as the wait for Cap 3!
This was originally posted on Dreamwidth, where it has
comments. I would love to hear from you at DW! If you can see this post, you can comment here using OpenID. Thanks!
kaydeefalls was super generous about letting me cackle through it in her ear. It felt sort of Thor 2-ish to me a lot, and it is in no danger of displacing Winter Soldier as my favorite/the objective best MCU film so far. But a lot of it was just greatly entertaining.
Some real gripes: The pacing felt off and weird to me, and I felt like some things were overexplained and others completely left on the cutting room floor. Ronan was a pretty thin villain, and the other villains (Karen Gillan, Djimon Honsou) were criminally underused. I wished Gamora had actually been more ambiguous throughout. I didn't really feel the stakes in this one, even though they literally, like, dropped a spaceship all over a big, highly populated city?
Also, I'll just quote
whatistigerbalm on this part: I really, really wish somebody had told me, amidst all THIS FILM IS SOOOOO MUCH FUN!!!!!11 that the opening scenes were nothing but Death of Cancer Mom. I was SUPER NOT PREPARED FOR THAT, and was -- pretty discomfited. (I can imagine reasons why this would have happened, and I'm sure the mystery of Peter's father &c &c &c has something to do with it. If she died of cancer because of having a half-alien baby, though, ugh.)
I'm not sure that super troll-y after credits scene was entirely worth the troll. I enjoyed Peter a lot but am not sure I care about him? Groot, of course, was marvelous; I enjoyed Drax a lot more than I expected ("I am not a thesaurus!"), and heh, yeah, Rocket was creepy but sympathetic and fun. BLUE BOUNTY HUNTER GUY (Yorbu? Yondu?): LOVED HIM LOTS. I'd not seen anything about him in pretty much any of the promotional materials I'd seen, and DUDE, that guy and his crew were GREAT.
But wow, I laughed a lot; as a string of great dialogue, it was a real success. The visuals were beautiful, overall; I'm still really curious about how it'll all tie together with the rest of the MCU, beyond the obvious. I'm glad they explained the Infinity Gems for us! I wish we'd seen more of the Collector (Chip the Space Dog!), even if the destruction of his slave girl and his lair were... pretty nonsensical, unless we get more explanation about which gem, precisely, the purple one was? (And I'm trying to remember what it was that Sif and Volstagg brought to him in their after-credits scene... was it also another gem?)
I think overall I wish I'd seen the film I saw in the trailer, but this film was fun enough that I'm glad I saw it with a bunch of other people there to have fun with it.
Now we have to wait for Whedon to drop his load, I guess. May seems a very long way off, but we've got a reinvigorated Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter in general before that, so -- at least it won't be as bad as the wait for Cap 3!
This was originally posted on Dreamwidth, where it has
comments. I would love to hear from you at DW! If you can see this post, you can comment here using OpenID. Thanks!