guardians of the galaxy 2 (spoilers!)

Guardians of the Galaxy 2

There are spoilers in this post, so stop reading if you haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy 2!

Like I've talked about here and there, I got into comics as a kid in 1980 because of television -- especially the original 1960s Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hadn't started yet), and to a lesser extent the Hanna-Barbera Fantastic Four cartoon, the Adam West Batman, and cartoons like Superfriends, Shazam, etc -- and a set of Marvel trading cards that had a bunch of characters in it that I didn't know from the cartoons, like Dr Strange, the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. The trading cards intrigued me because you could tell just by looking at them that those three characters in particular weren't just variations on Superman or Spider-Man -- they didn't look like superheroes, but they didn't look like anything else in my pop culture line of sight either.

Unsurprisingly, those early exposures guided the comics I got into. In the DC comics, my favorite comics by far were the Superman comics that emphasized the weirdest tropes of that character: Mzyztplk, "imaginary stories," the bottle city of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, red kryptonite transformations, Bizarro World. At Marvel -- my default comics publisher until the Vertigo years of late adolescence -- I loved the weirdos, misfits, and the magical or cosmic stuff. The Defenders, Adam Warlock, Son of Satan, Howard the Duck, Dr Strange, the Thor and Fantastic Four comics that dealt with stuff like the Celestials or Galactus, Bill Mantlo's Hulk and ROM comics. I was also a big Spider-Man fan and obsessed with the Avengers, mind you, but I loved the weird little edges of the Marvel universe, the crispy fried-out bits.

The thing about those weird little edges is that they're not exactly superhero comics, but they have all the benefits and features of the larger superhero-centric setting, a setting that is well-trod and intricately detailed, heavy with history and traditions. That's what I loved about Marvel comics: this sense of a story too big for any one person to read in full.

So! That's the frame of reference I bring to the Marvel movies.

If you're not familiar with the comics, the funny thing is that this incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy is not the one I grew up with: the original Guardians was an Avengers-like team native to a thousand years in the future. This new Star-Lord-led team (with a Star Lord very different from the way that character was originally written) was introduced in the 21st century, composed of characters who had been introduced independently and kicking around the Marvel universe in various forms. I was more or less familiar with the new team, but they weren't the characters who came to mind when I first thought of the Guardians.

Turns out I loved the first movie, though, for the same reasons everyone else did -- it was funny, it was a good adventure story, it was a little bit Raiders and a little bit Star Wars (or at least the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc., bits in Star Wars' DNA).

I wasn't expecting to like the first movie nearly as much as I did -- I was just tickled that it even existed. But the second movie I was anticipating pretty heavily.

So how did it stack up?

There was a lot of good, some bad, some just hrm-worthy.

The best things about the movie were probably the visuals -- it's the most visually interesting movie out of any of the Marvel movies by far -- and the sense of humor. Those jokes are undoubtedly divisive for some people -- I don't know that the second movie is necessarily funnier than the first, but it definitely feels like Gunn responded to what people liked in the first movie and cranked the knobs a notch, so we get way more Funny Drax than Serious Drax, and how much the movie in general works for you may depend on how charming you find Pratt. It works for me (though I would've been happy with the same amount of Funny Drax but also a little more Serious Drax, i.e. just more Drax in general) but I get that it wouldn't work for everyone.

What's been most interesting about these movies is the changes they make to the characters. Pretty much none of them are the same as in the comics. The comics version of Drax is a human from Earth, not an alien -- because the comics universe is older and better established than the movie setting, he's still a guy who lost his family to Thanos, but this whole "Drax is from a culture that doesn't have sarcasm and so he's totally literal-minded" thing doesn't work with an Earthling Drax. The comics Rocket isn't a one-of-a-kind misfit, he's from a planet of animal-people like himself. Star-Lord is the son of an alien king, not an alien god planet. Etc.

So this trend continues in the new movie, for good and ill.

Ego is pretty different -- he's not a god, even small-g, in the comics, though I'm not sure this is a change that makes a huge difference, beyond his use of the word "Celestial" maybe being a signal that the MCU Celestials differ significantly from their comics counterparts.

But Mantis ...

Like Drax, Mantis in the comics isn't an alien, she's from Earth. She's half-Vietnamese and raised to be the Celestial Madonna. She's also a kickass martial artist. Sure, she's an empath, but these are not separate abilities exactly: her mystical powers also inform her combat skills, by letting her see her opponents' weak spots. Mantis has successfully beaten up Thor.

Making Mantis an alien instead of human is not too big a deal. But between Mantis in the second movie and Gamora's introduction in the first movie, this is the second time that a female character has been tweaked to take away or reduce her combat-related powers. Movie Gamora is no slouch, but she is noticeably less powerful than in the comics, and in particular less strong and more physically vulnerable. Comic-book Gamora would not need Peter Quill to rescue her. Comic-book Gamora is not just a Space Girlfriend. Comic-book Gamora could kick Drax's ass.

This is not great. It was already not great in the first movie, in which the Quill/Gamora subplot is one of the weakest elements. As a trend, it's hard to miss. (It's not super-great that Gamora's Quill-free scenes consist largely of fighting with her sister over who deserves Daddy's love, either.)

It also underscores that Mantis's main purpose in the movie is pretty easy to see as an example of the Submissive Asian Woman stereotype: she serves Ego, she pacifies him, she turns against him not so much of her own agency or for her own interests but because a rival man is nice to her.

I'm not going to downplay those problems. I really want to see an improved, less cringey Mantis in the third movie, or Avengers 7, or whatever her next movie is. I'd like to see an improved Gamora, but it may be too late for that.

All of that said, all in all it's a fun movie. It's an adventure movie, a spectacle movie, without most of the problems that have plagued the Avengers movies. The villain isn't nearly as boring as in the first movie, although villains are still the weak link in most of the Marvel movies -- and Ego as villain is more interesting than Ronan or what little we saw of Thanos in Guardians mainly because it's not immediately apparent he's the villain, which is a different accomplishment from actually portraying interesting villainy. (It does sort of make sense that an Earth kid who grows up to call himself Star-Lord after being space-kidnapped turns out to be the son of a god who calls himself Ego.) It feels like a comic book more than most comic book movies do, and is one of the only movies to capture all that What Is This Crazy Shit vibe I was talking about above -- in that sense, it's up there with Deadpool and the first Spider-Man movie as far as Getting The Tone Right. (Getting That Stuff Wrong is part of what made the various Fantastic Four movies so leaden -- there is no sense in those movies that the filmmakers have any understanding of what makes someone enjoy reading a Fantastic Four comic, and while those are the worst example of the problem, I have similar issues with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man and most of the Avengers movies.)

Little things:

I love Baby Groot, and Adolescent Groot cracked me the fuck up.

I love Yondu in the sequel, even if I'm not totally convinced that the new parts of his backstory are what Gunn had in mind while making the first movie.

Drax and Mantis's mini-romance is both more believable and more interesting than Quill and Gamora's in either movie, which mainly underscores how boring the Gamora-Quill stuff is.

Kurt Russell's head looks ENORMOUS in his digitally de-aged flashback; maybe they should've got Wyatt to play Young Ego instead.