What Did You Think About Guardians of the Galaxy 2?

I almost didn’t write a blog post about one of my most-anticipated of 2017.

Why? Well, I typically write about things I love, and I didn’t love Guardians of the Galaxy 2. A ton of time, creativity, passion, and money went into making the movie–I know how it feels when someone casually dismisses all of that effort. Plus, the director is awesome.

But I’ve decided to write about the movie anyway, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I have both positives and negatives to share. Also, I’d still recommend the movie to anyone.

The Good: The movie is beautiful, and the soundtrack is great. Most importantly, even though it’s big, flashy space opera, it’s about relationships. A lot of directors try this and don’t pull it off; James Gunn is not most directors. He wrote on Facebook, “They’re a group of heartbroken misfits whose lives have been bereft of tenderness and connection and who have a nearly impossible time trusting themselves or others. But they’re learning, one step at a time.” I love that!

The Less Good: I mentioned that the music is great. It is. But I feel like way too much attention is drawn to the music. Instead of serving the scene and the characters, it becomes the scene. In the first scene, a character is shown singing to a song playing on the radio. In the first battle, a character literally plugs in speakers and dances for 4 minutes. In another, two characters talk about the meaning of a song playing in the background. In a third, there’s a good 2-3 minutes of characters listening to a song while watching something spoilery.

I understand why the music plays such a big role in the movie. The main character’s last connection to his mother is through music. But I felt that the movie itself was much too self-aware of its own soundtrack (and even, at times, the camera itself).

The other big thing is that the movie felt long. I was originally excited to see that it had a 135-minute running time, but while watching it, it felt like a good 15 minutes could have been cut. The main character spends a good hour of the movie just waiting around for something to happen.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is a success on many levels, and I’ll be there on opening weekend for the third movie in 2020. But I’ll be hoping for a tighter movie with less self-awareness of its own soundtrack.

What did you think of the movie?

6 thoughts on “What Did You Think About Guardians of the Galaxy 2?”

  1. I agree with you especially on that opening, I think it suffers from SNL symptom. Bascially its a good joke, but it needs to be cut down by 1/3 or 1/4th of the length. It worked for the first movie as it showed Peter going somewhere.

    The 2nd one where the two characters talk about the meaning of a song, just felt disjointed as it was hard to hear the song over the commentary, or listen to both to tell where the differences were.

    I don’t remember where the third one is, but agree with you on the movie as a whole, the first one was good on pacing as each bit was developing the characters, this one just felt a bit stretched out. When I described it for friends I said it was an above average Marvel Sequel, not as good as the first, but still good enough to go see in theaters.

    Reply
    • The last one was the funeral scene. It wasn’t the worst offender, but it went on for a while. I like to choose to care about characters, not have the movie tell me in a really heavy-handed way that I must care about them.

      Reply
  2. I agree with all of your points but still thoroughly enjoyed it. When a series (TV or movie) does a good job developing characters I want to spend time with, I don’t really care what they’re doing.

    Reply
    • I’m glad you enjoyed it! I absolutely agree that it did a great job of developing characters that you want to spend time with.

      Reply
  3. I agree with the opening scene; it simply felt geared to play a good song in the movie. However, while watching the movie, I never once thought it was long or that it was geared too much towards the music. I thoroughly enjoyed it for the kind of movie it is. Then again, I’m an easy man to please by movies!

    Reply

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