Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

Every once in a blue moon, there's a sequel to a decent film that takes everything that was good about the first and elevates it to an art form. From Russia With Love. The Empire Strikes Back. Aliens.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

As you may recall, I had some rather... unkind things to say about the original. Basically I refused to put it on a pedestal. When you consider that Guardians 1 came out around the same time as The Winter Soldier, you're going to have to forgive me for declaring GoldenEye With Superheroes the undisputed victor of that particular bout.

There's one thing I want to mention that I apparently didn't put into either review, and that's that I was confused in the first film as to just how competent Star-Lord was supposed to be. I had assumed from the marketing and the early scenes that he was a fish-out-of-water guy with way too big an estimation of his own competence, but he actually knows what he's doing. In Guardians 2, I never had any doubts as to the film's tone or what the characters are capable of. The opening credits capture the tone of the film perfectly (I will not spoil this if you have not seen it yet).

Now, one of the big problems I had with the first film - its struggle in introducing the setting - is taken care of here because, you know, there was a first film. Yay! Another problem that I had with the first film was that it spent too much time yammering about Thanos and the MacGuffin Mitten. This one does not. Thanos is relegated to being something for Karen Gillan to seethe about. Another complaint I had was that Karen Gillan was wasted in G1. Not so here. It is like somebody got a direct line to my brain and sorted out every single nitpick I had about this first film. Villains whose characterization and motivations made sense! New characters who didn't feel pointlessly shoehorned in! Baby Groot! Sylvester Stallone is in this movie for some reason! (Okay, I did have to read les interwebs to figure out what that was about.)

And let the record show that this film featured what is without a doubt the most quintessentially perfect use of "Come a Little Bit Closer" by Jay & the Americans. That is all.

In which I rant about something only tangentially related to James Bond, Post I

Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn't really a superhero film, is it? It's more like a political-thriller-slash-Bond-film, right?

Well....

Let's think that one through. The Bond stories TWS borrows the most from are GoldenEye (baddie is an old friend back from the dead, they end up fighting as a signal's about to go out), Quantum of Solace (evil organization has penetrated deep into the "good" governments, easy to get the good guys and the bad guys mixed up), and the novel version of Moonraker (a new super-defense program is actually a plot to destroy freedom, the super-patriot in charge of it is actually a Nazi).

Well, Quantum is hardly "a" Bond film, innit? (Might be why I like it so much in spite of itself.)  Moonraker's elements didn't make it to the screen, and GoldenEye's plot isn't entirely original (cough The Third Man cough - and note that there are a bunch of dots ready to stop moving near the end of TWS...)

But still it does feel like it's really not A Superhero Movie.

I suppose part of that is because - and this is basically true throughout the MCU - there are no secret identities. Everyone knows who Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff and Sam Wilson (and Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and, well, Thor) are. Captain America's mask is there to protect his head, not his identity. There's none of that "you can't know who I am because you'll be in danger" stuff that infects the Batfilms and Spiderfilms. Cap is a smidge broody but not because his parents/uncle were murdered or his city is hunting him or whatever the reheated Spiderangst was, but rather because the world suddenly got a lot more cynical while he was on ice.

So what do I mean by "Bond film?" Maybe that's a good place to start. Cap doesn't seduce a lot of women or drive expensive gadget-cars or even visit exotic places; The first film took place in a studio backlot the Western Front and the second largely unfolds in D.C. There's a fair amount of covert ops going on in TWS, but James Bond ain't exactly covert. Cap never visits a casino, and his super-constitution basically precludes him drinking expensive martinis since they're not going to get him drunk.

Hrm.

Guardians, Take 2

The movie's lighthearted. That's fine. Men in Black and Spaceballs were both pretty lighthearted. So was the Hitchhiker's Guide film. (Come to think of it, Hitchhiker's wasn't utterly awful in its own right, it was just a poor adaptation of the radio show/novels.)

Since I compared the heroes protagonists to the ones in Farscape (and on re-watching Guardians I realized I made a colossal mistake in comparing Gamora to Aeryn - Gamora's probably the most morally "good" member of the team for at least the first half of the film, whereas Aeryn takes a long time to snap out of Evil Soldier Mode) I thought I'd better compare the villains to the ones in Star Wars as well. This might make my point better. Both films have a Big Bad, a Dragon, and a Bigger Bad.

The Bigger Bad is the most evil guy in the setting, but he's really kinda beyond the scope of the plot. That's the Emperor in the original Star Wars film (he never shows up, but Tarkin and Vader are running the show in his name), and Thanos in Guardians (we see him, but he personally does nothing).

The Big Bad is the primary villain of the story, the one with the plan that the heroes need to stop. Tarkin in Star Wars, Ronan in Guardians. Usually - not always (think Blofeld, or Vader in Empire) - the Big Bad will be killed off at the end of the story.

The Dragon is the Big Bad's greatest asset, either the biggest or second-biggest physical threat to the heroes (depending on how physical the Big Bad is - that's one difference between Tarkin and Ronan). Vader in Star Wars, Nebula in Guardians. (They both happen to be cyborg pilots with familial connections to one of the protagonists, but that's just a coincidence.)

Guardians of the Galaxy: the Best Star Wars Film Ever Made, or a Farscape Homage Gone Very, Very Wrong?

The argument for the former is here. This is a retort.

The Winter Soldier review, take 2

Take 1 having been written under the influence of an extraordinarily negative fellow critic.

Captain America The Winter Soldier does one thing utterly and totally brilliantly, and it really needs a name for this sort of thing.

(Spoilers)

Some thoughts on the SHIELD finale

Bear in mind 1) I've only seen the "Uprising" arc (or, to put it another way, the episodes that aired after The Winter Soldier came out), and 2) there will be SPOILERS

The Winter Soldier

This review contains politics. It's a review of Captain Jingoism: Edward Snowden Saves The Day, for f*ck's sake, what did you expect?

Well, let's start with the low-hanging fruit. It doesn't run for half an hour after its main character arc is concluded, so it starts with one up on The First Avenger. 

The film is more than two hours long, but unlike either The First Avenger or The Avengers, it doesn't really feel it. Maybe that's because it's juggling two villains and three heroes, all with ample to do, even if nothing ever quite comes to fruition.

It definitely has a political allegory... and a lot of shakycam... and some character threads to tie up from previous films. Quite a bit like Quantum of Solace, but better. Also, just because of some plot elements, quite a bit like GoldenEye.  And there's an oblique visual reference to The Third Man during the climax.  And, per TvTropes, apparently ran with some elements from the novel version of Moonraker.

Okay, I really appreciate that you don't need to see the first film - or The Avengers - to see this one, because everything you need to know is fed to you.  Once again there's absolutely no mercy when it comes to absorbing key plot elements, but this works as a standalone film in a way that The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World don't. It also has a lot less of the obvious CGI that plagued The First Avenger.

The spoiler-free bottom line is that I liked enough of it to consider it the third-best MCU film (after Thor and Iron Man).  But that's mainly because the rest of the competition kinda sucks.

It was only after I posted my review of The First Avenger that I realized the most basic problem with the Captain America character: the man is not allowed to have a character arc. The entire point of him is that he's the same guy before and after the super serum, he just has muscles now. So you would think that the logical thing to do is to send him up against a bona fide government conspiracy, force him to choose whether to be lawful or to be good, and watch his character unravel.

(Spoilers from here on out.)

Thor: The Dark World

I want to destroy the Universe.

Captain America: The First Avenger

Or rather, Captain America: Where Can This Movie Possibly End?

Okay, so I really liked Joe Johnston's other comic-book superhero offering, The Rocketeer, alias The Most Underrated Superhero Film Ever Made.

This one, not so much.

See, the human eye is remarkably good at detecting fake stuff. Either that or Hollywood has lied to us for so long that we've gotten really good at it.  The basic idea is all right, but when Gollum!Steve is on the screen I just can't take it seriously.  In fact in basically every scene - including, weirdly, the final bits in modern-day New York - I'm always looking for some bit of conspicuous CGI that bugs me.

Also the notion that someone born without (x) is capable of inherently using (x) responsibly seems positively... questionable at best.  But that's not the biggest problem with this film.

Oh, another reason I liked Thor to the degree that I might - might - just be willing to call it the best g*dd*mn superhero movie ever made was because its politics weren't really shoehorned in there. I just stopped and said "what" when I was watching The Avengers and all the heroes were upset because Samuel L. Jackson was making weapons. Because it's okay for Tony Stark to have an Iron Man suit, but woe betide the United States whenever he has a hangover. (And I know Joss Whedon has a hangup about guns from how they're treated on Buffy, but they're how us mortals like to protect ourselves, thanks very much.)

Thor didn't bother trying to pull any of that crap on us.  The Ice Giants that Thor protects at the end were by no means innocent, but there was a peace, one that Loki spent the entire film trying to undo, and one that the Ice Giant leadership didn't seem to have an interest in breaking (until Loki appeared to hand them victory on a silver platter, at any rate).  Thor saving the Ice Giants was less a political message and more a necessary part of his character arc, and I'm not going to dispute the notion that peace is a worthy goal.

Thor

Hey, remember what I said about The Rocketeer? It never took itself too seriously, it was mostly lighthearted fun, it was a great retelling of a story type that's been done to death? Good, then I don't really need to say much more about

But I will anyway.

James Reviews: Marvel's The Avengers

Joss Whedon has had a lot of luck/skill (although it's diminished in recent years) getting awesome television shows made. However, his one film prior to this one was essentially a flop, and it's thus rather surprising to me that he got to direct

Let me explain what I mean by that.  Serenity was a film with a pre-established cast who already know each other, who team up to fight an oddly-compelling villain even though most of them end up being cannon fodder, because it's really down to one guy at the end.  Take out the "already know each other" part and that's The Avengers.  Or possibly Marvel's The Avengers, which I feel compelled to call it in order to distinguish it from that show with the spy chick who beat up bad guys while wearing a skintight outfit.

I don't know why I bother trying, though.

Anyway, the film itself is... well, it's not perfect, and a surprising amount of the flaws seem to come in at the script phase.  Joss got his start as a script doctor, patching up other people's messes into something workable (including the original Toy Story(!)), so it's surprising to me that a basically solid concept - a bunch of superheroes come together into a genuine team - had such a muddled execution.