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Vintersorg posted:Jesus Christ I actually welled up with tears at the end. How... that song is way to powerful and once Rocket says they all came - I lost it. that bit with the other Ravagers really took me out of it, actually. the movie can't make up its mind whether they're an honorable outlaw kingdom or a pack of vicious, idiotic cutthroats, and in the latter case why are we supposed to care about their respect? It works in the first movie because they're firmly the latter and Yondu doesn't give a crap about respect, actually, they're barely-manageable extensions of his will that he steers around at whim through fear and outsmarting the mooks. I mean, the real answer is 'because Gunn didn't feel like his reconciliation with Quill was enough on its own' but it just comes off feeling cheap, trying to pile on unearned pathos to make it all about sad dead dad because the movie ostensibly about family can't deal with actual uncomfortable family dynamics A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 03:49 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 03:46
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The Dave posted:I think many people, myself included, believe that his love for Peter's mom was real, which is why Peter had 'the stuff'. This seems to be stretching the word 'love' past its breaking point. Like, yes, he's a space god, but he's also a fictional character who's meant to be analogous to real everyday people you might know in a movie ostensibly about people. Real hosed-up narcissists torment and kill their families all the time, what they don't do is sit down and coldbloodedly calculate "I love this woman, authentically and truly, maybe even more than myself; I must destroy her so my grand master scheme is never tainted by the human emotion of Love". And then tell people about it. That's some Skeletor poo poo, that's the world-conquering supervillain spending his afternoon stealing lollipops from babies because it makes him more Evil. There were plenty of ways to package the same basic events if the movie wanted Ego's "love" to ring somewhat true (I liked the suggestion of the poster who said he could've seen the cancer coming and just cut and run rather than deal with it, say), but as presented it's pretty clearly more of Ego's bullshit and he's a Fake Dad ruthlessly trying to emotionally manipulate Quill just like he did all those women, and failing because his ability to comprehend love extends only just far enough to sweet-talk his way into a girl's pants with a few cliches. Peter has The Stuff because he's the protagonist, the film is about him and not any of those thousand other kids, and it's a movie that cheerfully acknowledges running on narrative convenience. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:25 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 18:19
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Because it's presented as part of his plan that he reasoned through? Because he's a superhero stand-in for an actual deadbeat dad come back to mooch off the kid, not some totally ineffable cosmic force outside of human reasoning, and he committed to the decision for the decade it took to kill her and clearly hasn't regretted since? He doesn't take decades to make up his mind or have momentary emotional responses in the movie, and Ego doesn't actually exist outside the movie.
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:42 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 18:40
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Sylvester Stallone walks on screen during the grand plan reveal and tells the audience "actually Ego was a loving father who just has a hard time managing his work-life balance"
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May 24, 2017 18:45
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the worst thing about Peter's dog is that it's hairless, can't play fetch, flies through space, is made of metal, and he lives in it, but it's a dog authentic and true. I just don't understand why they asked Rocket to do surgery on it when it got sick, he's no veterinarian.
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May 24, 2017 19:20
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SourKraut posted:Ronan didn't really feel dangerous though? I mean, yeah, they set it up that way similar to how they set up Ego, but he mostly watched as others carried out what he wanted. His only real actions were killing Thanos' spokesman, fighting Drax, and destroying the Nova net. Otherwise, he got distracted from his goal of destroying Nova Prime by... a humming/singing Starlord. (and even then, his whole anger at Nova was because his people signed a peace treaty with them...). Which isn't to say that I didn't like him, but they spent the entire movie building him up as the villain, while they spent over half of Vol. 2 trying to walk a line between showing Ego as the father Peter is missing, while also setting up the disappointment of him being bad. From the moment he appears on screen Ronan pretty clearly comes across as an angsty school shooter writ large, he's a petulant moron who's got hold of something dangerous and most people are pretty familiar with the type and how much trouble they can be, the whole 'blowing up planets' bit is just a thematic sci-fi spin on a story that wouldn't really read different if he was plotting to fly a 747 into the Twin Towers. Ego, on the other hand, is presented as a literal space god with a plot to transform the whole universe into himself through secretly seeding the galaxy with mini-mes (what?) and performed by Kurt Russel as basically a small-time grifter. His real immediate danger in the movie is that he's going to indoctrinate Quill and make him just like him, and there's never much sense Quill's all that susceptible to his fast-talk; that fight begins and ends in about thirty seconds and after that it's all over but the special effects. He's both a less menacing presence and on paper a threat that pretty much comes off as superhero sound and fury with no weight behind it, no matter how high their in-universe power levels are or which would totally kick the rear end of the USS Enterprise. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 06:45 on May 28, 2017 |
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May 27, 2017 23:47
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Phylodox posted:Dude, seriously, I've never seen someone flail around so strenuously trying to convince someone (yourself?) that good movie is really bad movie. You just keep popping up at random doing your whole "This movie is banal! Have I mentioned how banal this banal movie is? Banal!" schtick, then, if anyone actually engages with you and explains why you're wrong this time, you pivot around from argument to argument trying to make some point that only you understand. I guess it's that action movies' callous disregard for the lives of their minor antagonists is somehow unsupportable now? I guess meekly surrendering to people who very obviously mean you ill should be everyone's go-to move. Or completely forgetting someone you very recently had sex with even exists is totally normal, healthy behaviour? God, what kind of goon thinks that's unhealthy?!? how old are you that you get this far into an "I'm not flailing! You're flailing! YOU'RE FLAILING!!!" meltdown without stopping yourself and stepping away from a keyboard for a minute, about a comic book superhero movie of all things. do you have a family BravestOfTheLamps posted:When asked why a character killing people in order to make money doesn't count as characterization, "it's just an action movie so it's not important" is not an actual answer. The thing about action movies is that they foreground violence. Violence is the point. It's what's entertaining about them. fighting Ronan isn't an extension of Quill's maturing. It's a thing that happens, but Ronan is explicitly and repeatedly shown to be a petulant child much like Quill trying to throw his weight around with hazardous materials he doesn't understand or control. He doesn't represent a more mature threat he's just a rumble in the sandbox with a bully, and Quill is onboard with stopping him (if not necessarily a straight-up fight with the bigger kid) the instant Gamora suggests it; it's what he does. The point of Quill growing up is that he starts making efforts to accommodate other people in the Last Starfighter fantasy he is trapped in instead of just treating everyone like NPCs and discarding them as soon as they stop offering him instant gratification. He's still stuck in the world of his childhood fantasies, but he's able to let other people take the wheel or even, god forbid, be unpleasant to him, without an immediate reward. Quill's character arc in the movie has little to do with the nominal antagonist, except by contrasting what Quill would look like if he stayed as he was at the beginning; it's more like a lighter family-friendly version of the central tension of Westworld. This is sort of forgotten by the second movie, but the second movie is pretty lazy generally and I guess the Marvel franchise formula doesn't allow for a movie about a space pirate who retires peacefully to his space trailer with his space ninja wife and raccoon space son A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 16:13
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Yeah, the basic problem is that there's no moment of reversal or epiphany about how stupid the whole fantasy life thing is, especially because the movie's universe actually ends up reflecting that fantasy life. Thus you end up with the bizarrely non-satirical story of a manchild living out a fantasy life of a space adventurer being rewarded and validated. it's not really attempting to reject it, so much as it's a "self-aware" rehash of the previous generation's action movies that points up how silly they are while going through the exact same strokes. It's a Marvel comic book space opera, it's not going to condemn living in a fantasy world because the whole reason it exists is to cater to an audience for whom that is a lifetime aspiration. It is opposed, specifically, to being a dick about it, and to a lesser extent being uncool, unselfaware, and unironic, which are the things that make living in a childish fantasy world acceptable to adults. There's plenty of character development and moral instruction in the movie, it just comes from a place where Peter Pan's problem wasn't hiding out in Neverland forever, it's that he treated the Lost Boys thoughtlessly. Inescapable Duck posted:I mean, 'escapism' implies he's not in touch with reality or perceiving the world inaccurately, when Star-Lord pretty much knows how to look at the world and his main issue is accepting an ensemble cast rather than being a loner. I think he was compared to Ronan, who as a religious fanatic has his own self-centred, myopic view of the world where he's the hero destroying evil, and he is foiled when he is distracted by something that confuses him because it doesn't fit into his worldview (his enemy suddenly breaking into a dance). Star-Lord survives, even thrives, because he knows exactly what kind of universe he's in, but that knowledge also makes him come off as crazy. Like a lesser Deadpool. It's not accidental that the real, mundane Earth with its real problems and real people who aren't freaking space pirates is still there and Quill has had no desire to return to it since the death of his mother, when he can remain in his campy day-glo mishmash of space opera and consequence-free violence. People in touch with reality don't have problems like "accepting an ensemble cast" and don't solve their issues through an encyclopedic understanding of movie tropes. SuperMechagodzilla posted:To put things even more simply: why, when you can imagine doing literally anything, do you imagine killing people for money? Like, that's the best you can come up with? this is what really creeped me the holy hell out about Inception. there's some incredibly empty people in Hollywood A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Aug 31, 2017 |
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Aug 31, 2017 21:12
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You shouldn't have indicted my politics and belittled my movie
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Sep 4, 2017 04:36
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effortlessly and with ballerina grace I pirouette and - in a single, fluid motion- strip my sociologist costume to reveal my guise as Cletus the Hillbilly, jeering YEW CAN'T FOOL ME WITH THEM FANCY rear end COLLEGE WORDS BOY
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Sep 5, 2017 04:33
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I like toxic masculinity because it's a middle class concept that basically demands a blanket condemnation of the working classes. No argument about the IRL function of "toxic masculinity" but thieves and kidnappers are lumpenproles; they produce no value with their labor and marxists as a rule aren't big fans. Their machismo is that of the thug, it doesn't distinguish them as blue-collar. GOTG is a fantasy of a world without a working class; nothing is ever made except garbage bombs, the only jobs that exist are "cop" and "corpse scavenger", economics and commerce are effectively erased; the galaxy simply passively exists to be blown up by children. Hell, Ego is a straight-up god who can simply will anything he imagines into existence, and uses this power to create... a couple balls and a fake shrine to his dead ex-girlfriend to scam a guy A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 16:32
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