Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: Is Blood Really Thicker Than Water?
If you don’t know this by now, you will never, ever… no, wait. That’s a song. If you didn’t know, I’ve been challenged by a good friend to watch all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and then go see Avengers: Infinity War in the theaters. This is number 15. Three more to go.
Woohoo! Been a long road, but a good one :) And, as always:
SPOILER ALERT!
Dear V,
I have to admit — this one, I did to myself. Hubby and I went to see this one in the theater and we loved it. Loved it this time around as well. And I’m going to admit that, yes, I’ve seen the video about this movie from Lindsay Ellis, so I’m going to mention a few things, but try and come up with my own interpretation rather than use hers. I think she hit the nail on the head a few times most definitely.
I wonder what tech they used on Kurt Russell to make him look young again. I guess he’s been in more than enough movies, they could have stolen his image from there.
The beginning credits are great with Baby Groot strolling and dancing around all the fighting going on. Lindsay mentions that she believes the theme of the movie is parenthood and I don’t disagree but I think it’s more than that as well, as hinted to by the title of this article.
So we see that everyone takes a moment — even Drax — to check in with Baby Groot as he’s dancing around the fighting ground. It’s interesting to see that Gamora has decided to use a gun rather than a blade which Quill mentions. It’s also interesting to hear how he mentions it.
The death of the interdimensional monster is a job for a race called the Soverign (at least, I think that’s their name) who are extraordinarily sensitive with regards to how they are treated. Their payment for killing the monster? Nebula. The plan is to turn Nebula over to Nova Prime for the bounty… at least, that’s what Gamora tells her.
We do get to see Chris Pratt change shirts so we get a bare chest in this one. I think the only ones in which we haven’t seen a bare chest are the Iron Man trilogy and Captain America: Civil War. I’m still a little bitter about that one.
Rocket steals some of their batteries and this sets the Soverign off after them. Well, their drone ships, anyway, piloted by the Soverign from what looks like old arcade game fixtures where you would get on a motorcycle or in a car and it would seem “more realistic.” Their guns sound like old video game guns if you listen to them.
Oh, cameo alert: Ben Browder from Farscape and, I suppose, Stargate SG-1, is in this as one of the gold people. He’s using his Peacekeeper accent — I wonder if that’s the only one he knows besides English ;) If you haven’t seen Farscape, it is completely and utterly worth every second of your time. No kidding. Probably one of my favorite sci-fi shows ever.
Quill and Rocket argue over who’s the best pilot and everyone still takes time to take care of Baby Groot and make sure he’s not left out (or squished, perhaps). Then, because Quill and Rocket are arguing, they lose control and end up crash landing on a planet, but not before Drax sees a 1-inch guy riding an egg help them escape.
And just to get it over with… I absolutely love Drax. Period. He is my favorite character from this movie.
When everyone gets out of the ship, it’s not just Rocket who’s kinda twitchy about pushing people away. Almost everyone seems like that to me. The conversation on the new planet feels very much like they’ve got cabin fever and they need some time away from each other stat. I don’t get cabin fever now (thanks, computer!), but the times I have, all I wanted to do was to escape and get away from the people I was around.
When Ego introduces himself as a suave Kurt Russell, coming to get his son, Quill, I think that time apart is more necessary than it seems. They say “absence makes the heart grow fonder” (which, for me, is “absence makes the heart grow more and more obsessive” (laugh, damn you! :) ) ), and that can be extremely true. I have a friend whom, if I contact every day, gets after me for what else I could be doing. And that’s okay because if I talk to him every few days, he’s missed me enough that we can share in what we’ve done and play games together and all that. I have another friend who I would talk to daily if I could, but the moments (far and few between sometimes) when I do get to talk to him mean the world to me. And that’s okay because sometimes the other person has to set the conversational pace.
Yay, rambling!
Anyway, Ego sweeps Quill, Gamora, and Drax off to his own world titled, “Ego’s Planet.” And we’re not going to discuss how different this is from the comics a friend of mine pointed out because we’re interested in the movies, right?
But before we run off to Ego’s Planet, we learn a few more things about Yondu that we didn’t know in Volume 1. Because of his mission to pick up Quill (not sure about missions before that), he was kicked out of the Ravagers and we find out what was mentioned at the end of Volume 1, that Yondu was sent to pick up Quill and take him to Ego. Sylvester Stallone tells him he’s out and there will be no Ravager funeral at his death (foreshadowing?).
While at this ice cold planet I don’t have the name for, the Soverigns show up and make a deal with Yondu to get Quill and the others for stealing their batteries.
Back on Ego’s World, Peter is questioning whether Ego is really his father and having a hard time with this, as anyone would when their long-absent father comes around and claims that he’s a god. It does explain the end of the first volume and as to why Peter was able to hold the Infinity Stone by himself for so long with it destroying him as well as the observation by Nova Prime that there was some DNA (or something similar anyway) in his blood that they had never seen before.
But Gamora encourages him to learn more about the man. She reminds him of when he used to pretend his father was David Hasselhoff (in his Knight Rider phase) and keep a picture of the Hoff on him, telling the boys at school who asked that Hoff was his father.
Her best line in that: “What if this guy is your Hasselhoff?”
On the planet, with Rocket, Groot, and Nebula, Yondu’s men have set up and approach the ship to attack. Fortunately, Rocket is already ready for them with a number of traps and explosives he’s got rigged for just this type of situation. Naturally. Isn’t that what you would do — set up a perimeter and wait for the enemy to approach?
And when he and Groot get captured, it’s Nebula who shoots Yondu, enabling them to be captured. Yongu’s crew decides to mutiny because they think that he’s too soft when it comes to Quill. And their leader? TASERFACE! Which is hilarious in its own right.
Back on Ego’s Planet, before we even get to know about TASERFACE!, there are four different representations of time. Ego represents what could be, with all his own plans and desires and ideas for Quill. As his name states, he is Ego: it’s alll about him. He wants Quill to fulfill what he has decided is Quill’s destiny.
Quill represents the past. He’s listening to his mother’s music from the late 70s and early 80s on Earth and hasn’t moved on. His past still haunts him, whether he lets it show or not (remember the Hoff story from earlier?), whether it’s thinking about his mother or thinking about Yondu and how he was treated with him. When Peter plays “toss the energy ball” with Ego (Dad), he’s living in the past because that’s what Ego is giving him: what he wanted in the past, a father to play with.
During this time, Gamora is trying to contact Rocket — she’s got a bad feeling about this (to borrow a phrase) and she wants to leave as soon as possible. She represents the future in this scenario. Moving on, past the present. And in a sense, she represents what Quill wants to be his future, if you look at it that way.
Which leads me to Drax. Have I mentioned how much I love Drax lately? Drax is the present and he’s always the present. While yes, he remembers the past, he remembers it fondly and then lets it go, to come back to the present — and for a lot of people, including myself, that can be very hard to do. We’re either Quill or Gamora, stuck in the past or trying to live for the future, that we forget to be Drax and live in the here and now.
Let’s talk a little more about Drax because, really, he’s worth talking about. I’ve already made the comment that he’s my favorite character. Part of that is because his point of view on life, sex, violence, everything that the West (er, at least, puritan America) thinks you should be quiet about, he thinks it’s no big deal to talk about it. I love when he starts talking about how his father told the story of his conception every year, or how Mantis (we haven’t talked about her yet, have we?) is physically repulsive to him whereas, to us, to our Earth eyes, she’s quite pretty.
Most of the reason he’s funny stems from that he’s so different than we as Earthlings are and so we laugh at him. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Laughing at someone quite different from us. But Drax doesn’t really care. It’s part of that “living in the moment” that he’s got going on — he lets a lot of things slide off him (like water off a duck’s back, my grandmother would say). When dealing with Ronan in the first movie, he wants vengeance for his wife and daughter, but that’s not the all-consuming thought in his mind.
Nebula also represents the past, but a very specific one: her own. When Nebula and Gamora fight, we finally hear why Nebula hates Gamora so much. She was not only jealous of Gamora’s fighting, but because Thanos loved her the best because she was the best at what she did. We hear that the reason she looks the way she does is that, every time Gamora won, Thanos replaced one of Nebula’s body parts with machinery.
Mantis seems to be in the story to be Drax’s comedic straight man. She’s the one, for the most part, who gives Drax lines that he then uses to make all of us laugh. But she also confirms that something really isn’t right with Ego and what he wants. She states that she’s a “flea with a purpose,” when she talks about who she is on Ego’s planet, in Ego’s life.
Back to Yondu, Rocket, and Baby Groot. Baby Groot trying to find Yondu’s headpiece for his arrow is hysterical while, if you’re human, you better have had a mess of sadness and anger at his treatment by the crew. It doesn’t matter what/who you are — if you don’t feel sympathy for a child being beaten by an adult, movie or not, fiction or not, I’m not sure you’re human after all. Here’s where we learn Yondu’s not really telling us the truth as to why he kept
Quill — he may have said it was because he’s skinny and good for thieving, but it’s the same line as he’s given before. The exact same words. One would think that if that truly was the reason, perhaps different words would have been used at some point. He essentially tells us his story: Sylvester Stallone (Rambo — can you see it?) rescued Yondu from the Kree and told him all he had to do to fit in was to keep the code of the Ravagers. He was exiled because of the job with Quill.
Once Baby Groot gets the headpiece and Yondu puts it on, the crowd goes wild. No, seriously, it’s a killer few scenes with Yondu killing everyone on the ship, simply by whistling to command his arrow. Of course, this lends to the thought about how powerful someone would actually be with that headpiece and arrow. If he can kill everyone on board that ship in a few minutes with just a whistle and an arrow, I’d think that was pretty damn powerful.
A little later, Yondu’s speech about how Rocket’s putting up this big tough appearance because inside, he’s scared to death and then him pretty much saying that’s what he’s doing as well is well done.
Back to Gamora and Nebula. Gamore tells Nebula her side of the story — she just wanted to stay alive and she believed Thanos would kill her if she didn’t win. Nebula says, “I just wanted a sister!” This is a bit of characterization that I really like — I like coming out as sympathetic towards Nebula, but this statement seems a bit weak in the face of everything else that has gone on. I wish they’d put more of this idea into Nebula’s actions instead of making her a Gamora-focused killing machine.
So, come to find out, Ego has a purpose (going back to Mantis’s comment as well) for himself and for Quill. He wants to remake the cosmos, he wants everything to be him, but he doesn’t want to be alone in doing this. He wants someone on his own level, which is where Quill comes into play. As Quill is his son, he’s, at least, partly his equal.
The idea that breaks the deal for Quill, more than his friends, is that Ego put the tumor in his mother that killed her. Remember — Quill is the past and has been focused on the past as long as we’ve known him. This info breaks Ego’s spell and leads to the fight between the Guardians of the Galaxy (what they’re actually called in the movie — heh) and Ego the planet (no relation to the one in the comics).
Besides showing Gamora and Nebula the skeletons of Ego’s children, Mantis does one other thing I’ll point out that caught my attention. When talking about Baby Groot (I think — I don’t quite remember), she says, “It’s so cute I want to kill it.” Now oddly enough, I’ve heard this phrase before as said by a Brazilian friend of mine and she says that it’s normal to pair something that’s cute with “I want to murder it” or “I just want to kill it.” Yup, just walking away now.
The Mary Poppins comment was awesome, of course. And so was Yondu’s final sacrifice. It’s the difference between biological and choosing. He finally touches Peter like a daddy would — like he was proud of his son. Yondu chose to save Quill after he saw what Ego was doing with the children. And, in the end, Yondu chose to sacrifice his life so Quill could survive. And the Ravagers came and gave him a Ravager funeral.
“Sometimes that thing you’re searching for your entire life is right next to you.”
Before Nebula sets off to kill Thanos, Gamora reaches for her and she jumps — she’s not used to being touched kindly. They hug and off goes Nebula.
Rocket: “He didn’t scare his friends away.”
And that was what Rocket was afraid of all along. That he would get to know them and then they’d leave him. This… this is something I understand.
And of course, David Hasselhoff sings the end song, “Guardians Inferno” which reminds me of another song Hasselhoff sang from another movie called Kung Fury.
