#end credit scene since this is a marvel blog and endgame sucked | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nothieflike · 1 year

Text

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (2023)

★★★★☆

Written and Directed by: James Gunn

Based on the Comic Book series by: Marvel Comics (Arnold Drake and Gene Colan)

The last film I reviewed for this blog before I sort of let it peter out was 2012's The Avengers. Obviously a lot of Marvel Cinematic Universe... er, stuff occurred in the intervening years. All three Spider-Man movies, for one thing, but also any mention of Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man, even the Infinity Stones. Heck, the first glimpse of Thanos came during the mid-credits bonus scene at the end of The Avengers. And, of course, in between that review and this one, we got two Guardians of the Galaxy films.

I won't get into my thoughts on those two previous films except to say that I understand why these films have been so frequently emulated in the years since the release of the first one. It's a formula for an ensemble movie where the characters are (probably) not known ahead of time, but by the end there is enough work put in to make the audience genuinely care. So with James Gunn apparently signing off from the MCU to take the reigns on a new chapter of DC films, Vol. 3 exists here in a space where the MCU has floundered a bit (or a lot, depending on your point of view) since the conclusion of The Infinity Saga and we see what Gunn's Guardians franchise is going to do to right the ship.

The answer, it turns out, is: nothing. Guardians Vol. 3 does not make any effort to "fix" The Multiverse Saga, Phase 4, or the MCU. Well, except in one specific way: Vol. 3 returns to a strategy that served the MCU extremely well in earlier eras which is that it sets out to make a solid action/adventure film first and leaves all the inter-connected broader universe stuff either to the backstories, the post-credits scenes, or just other franchises/films. And it's fairly obvious that is absolutely the right move to make. Guardians has been a bit of an outlier in the MCU for some time in that they are team movies but not team-UP movies. But the fairly minor flaws of this film don't have anything to do with it feeling distant from any of the Kang/Thunderbolts/Celestials nonsense going on elsewhere. That's a feature, not a bug.

So, what holds Vol. 3 back from true greatness? Mostly it comes from a trend in the cinematic universe model that has been in place since Avengers: Endgame, and that's catering to the most indulgent excesses from the comic book arm of Marvel. See, in the early days of the MCU, Marvel Studios rightly recognized that movies based on comic books needed to do several things simultaneously: firstly, appeal to broad audiences mostly by focusing on being self-contained and well executed films in their own right but secondly, they needed to also be as unassailable as possible by the hardcore comic book nerds who constituted the very core of the movie's audience. Plenty of earlier "successful" comic adaptations (Byran Singer's X-Men films from the 90s, for example, as well as edgier adaptations like Batman Begins and 2003's Hulk) seemed quite often to be embarrassed by their brightly-colored source material. They downplayed the elements that had originally endeared some of the characters to comics fans in favor of mass appeal, often in ways that quickly dated them. Marvel Studios though decided that the thing holding super hero movies back wasn't flashy costumes or somewhat trope-y, goofy fantastic elements but rather a self-seriousness that sucked the inherent fun out of escapism. And, ultimately, they were right.

Very, very right. The problem though? They were almost too right. For about ten years Marvel Studios stuck to a particular formula for making their movies fun and approachable and true enough to their funnybook roots that they avoided hardcore nerd outcry while gaining huge amounts of new fans who maybe otherwise had little to no use for comics themselves. But no one can keep a streak like that up forever. So what happened?

My theory is that Endgame happened. And it didn't just happen, it was (and still is as of this writing) the biggest MCU film in terms of box office grosses. It crushed. Looking at the overall plot of Endgame, it really did feel more like a direct adaptation from a Marvel Comics summer crossover event: time travel, alternate realities, key character deaths, the whole shebang. Up until this point Marvel Studios had been smoothing over some of the more comic-book-y elements of their storylines, running a riff on their Ultimate line where popular, foundational elements of the modern myths they traffic in were given a fresh pass under the guise of expanding the audience. But it worked so well, pleasing core comic fans with it's rootsy takes while gently easing moviegoing audiences into their world, they learned the wrong lesson.

The lesson they should have learned: don't stop doing that.

The lesson they did learn: if everyone loves every risk we take (galactic setting? portal wizards? funny Thor? yes, please!), we got so much more where that came from!

Which starts the straight line that leads us past unmentioned-afterward canon including: dueling myth-gods, literal Zeus, half-hatched god eggs, robot K.E.V.I.N (Feige), alligator Loki, and a giant popped-out eyeball in New York City. Oh and, like, Kang.

Now, to be fair, most of those things would feel a lot more at place in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. As in, it's pretty weird they aren't the excesses Vol. 3 is guilty of. Rather, Vol. 3 reaches into the vault of dark, over-expository sorta-allegories straight from the fashionable grim-n-gritty late 90s era of the comics. It decides to push boundaries even beyond what a Sam Raimi MCU film felt inclined to push. And it does it all while daring to have a happy ending.

Vol. 3 picks up somewhere after the events of the Disney+ Holiday Special, which is (I believe) where we learned the Guardians had inducted Kraglin and Cosmo the dog and set up shop over in Knowhere with a bunch of... friends? Locals? Refugees? It's not clear. What is clear is that Guardians' leader Peter "Star-Lord" Quill (played with an unexpected complexity by Chris Pratt) is still struggling with the loss of the teammate Gamora (played here with as much nuance as possible by Zoe Saldana given the disservice the script pays her) he'd fallen in love with, particularly in light of the fact that a version of her lives on somewhere out in the universe, at best hostile toward him and at worst indifferent. A gold-skinned guy arrives, wreaking havoc, seeming fixated on Rocket (voiced with a lot less wise-cracking than usual by Bradley Cooper) and manages to mortally wound the mutated raccoon. When they try to heal him, they discover Rocket's creator put a kill switch into him and if they try to operate without removing it, he'll die.

This sends the Guardians on a desperate quest to find a way to save Rocket by digging into the past of his creator, a being who calls himself the High Evolutionary (played with a vulnerable gravitas by Chukwudi Iwuji). As the team crosses paths with Gamora and the Ravager faction she's been running with for the inevitable awkward reunion between her and Star-Lord, the film then begins cutting back and forth to the time when Rocket, well, became Rocket.

It's here that the film makes a choice to swerve hard into the pitch black in tone and visual aesthetic. The scenes of Rocket's creation and the introduction of his fellow discarded experiments are harrowing, ghastly things that might as well flash a bright yellow, all-caps title card: "ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IS ANIMAL CRUELTY!" Or maybe just, "HURTING ANIMALS IS EVIL!" It's a lot, in all honesty and I was very glad I pre-screened this before taking my kids to see it.

Eventually the Guardians track down the High Evolutionary on a planet called Counter-Earth, which he created as part of his quest to fabricate a perfect utopian society. Here, again with the dark, we get essentially a genocide that occurs without much more than a passing mention by the main characters. And, y'know, narratively it mostly serves as a ticking clock and bit of chaos to keep the team from forming Voltron and making short work of the film's conflict before we can wring a bit more pathos out of the audiences' greater concern for a computer-animated raccoon than an entire planet of sentient and uncomfortably human-adjacent animal hybrid people.

The rest of the movie takes a few more dark swerves which really felt like the movie was setting me up for a huge gutpunch of an ending. I was thinking, fool me thrice, or whatever but I see where this is going. And then it swerves again and says, "actually no, you know what, sometimes things really suck a lot but then it turns out to be some flavor of all right." And it sorta turned out I was right because while I was waiting for the inevitable slug to the breadbasket, I got a different, gentler strike and dammit if it wasn't even more effective because of it.

I know it sounds a lot like I have some pretty major gripes with the film and I did find it's brazen and ballsy approach to the MCU as a bit off-putting. Buuut... the last several tentpole MCU entries that have been trying to stick with "the formula" have been pretty off-putting as well so even if I didn't say anything else positive at all, I'd still have to give it to Vol. 3 for at least failing to stick the landing in a novel fashion. And I genuinely do have a lot of positive things to say about this movie. The dynamic between the characters is loose and feels lived in, no matter what configuration is on screen at the time. I'd go so far as to say the acting is all best in Cinematic Universe for these characters. Not only do Pratt and Saldana do a fantastic job with adding new layers to their performances that carry the backstory in a way that means they have to do only minimal "as-you-know-bob"ing to sell their scenes. Unsung heroes abound as well from Pom Klementieff's smooth portrayal of a woman growing into an affinity for compassionate leadership to Karen Gillan's deft and subtle arc of "How Nebula Got Her Groove Back." Even Cooper manages to deliver a stellar vocal performance, really dragging the audience that extra few feet across the finish line to genuine concern for... well, for a computer-animated raccoon.

The stakes are smaller than expected but the satisfaction of the resolution is so rewarding it feels like it's been a bigger journey than even saving the universe with a dance contest. The soundtrack adds the same kind of welcome texture to scenes as ever, the visual effects are great, and though there are fewer jokes than earlier entries, when they do come they mostly all work. I could cite a few more minor bits of both nitpicking (Groot's regeneration ability seems very ill-defined and at this point amounts to "it's just whatever we need it to be for the current scene") and complimentary (the way they handle the lampshading on Groot's signature dialogue is super satisfying and wonderfully subtle), but I think I can summarize it all with this: it's not perfect, but it kind of feels like exactly what we needed right now. And if that doesn't summarize the Guardians of the Galaxy, I don't know what does.

I recommend Vol. 3, with the minor warning that it has some squirmy, uncomfortable scenes and subject matter. If you have some younger kids who have enjoyed previous Marvel films or if you're a squeamish type who generally finds nothing distasteful about these films, tread carefully because this one takes even some of the shocking moments from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and more or less says, "hold my beer." But if you can stomach it, it's one of the best Marvel features in a long time and well worth the wait.

#guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-3 #full-review #movie-days #four-star #action #adventure #2023 #space-opera

1 note · View note

jillmckenzie1 · 5 years

Text

The End Is The Beginning

“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” That quote comes from the under-loved Avengers: Age of Ultron. Upon its 2015 release, we were 11 films deep and there were two schools of thought about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a sprawling epic of interconnectivity.

Eager nerds like myself were excited. Comic book creators and imagination machines like Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko used these characters, perhaps unwittingly, as a kind of modern mythology. There were lessons of tolerance, justice, decency. You could take something of real value away from the adventures of a bunch of people running around in spandex.

The other school of thought was a kind of horrified fascination. You might have a very real feeling of superhero fatigue, and if so, I pity you, because Marvel movies ain’t going away any time soon. Estimates vary, but there are at least 7,000 characters in the Marvel Universe alone. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that, as a franchise that’s earned billions, the MCU is a cinematic Terminator. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. With its legions of characters, it will go on. When the heat death of the universe approaches, someone somewhere will be getting excited for a trailer for Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.*

But what difference does it make if the MCU continues, yet the quality sucks? Sooner or later, Marvel Studios is going to release something bad. Something that makes us cast our eyes fondly back at the not-good Iron Man 2 or the stunk-up-the-joint Thor: The Dark World. When that happens, I recommend closing your eyes and finding your happy place. That place being Avengers: Endgame.

We pick up where Avengers: Infinity War left off, with a snap. The finger snapping belongs to the Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin). Why is he mad? Welp, he collected the Infinity Stones, artifacts of limitless power scattered throughout the cosmos. Brought together, the Stones grant the wielder control over the fundamental forces of the universe. Thanos’s plan is to cull fifty percent of all life, allowing the other fifty percent to live in comfort and prosperity.

His plan worked perfectly, and The Decimation** happened. After that, does Thanos lord over the rest of the universe as a conqueror? No. He retires to a small planet, hangs up his armor for use as a scarecrow, and becomes a farmer. In his own way, Thanos is content.

Things back on Earth are considerably less content considering billions of people were dusted out of existence, including a number of the mighty Avengers. The survivors are, by and large, not doing awesome. Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) lead efforts to try and put the pieces back together. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and the cyborg assassin Nebula (Karen Gillan) are trapped within deep space in a starship that’s low on fuel.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) grapples with his failure to definitively kill Thanos when he had the chance, while Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) the marksman grapples with general existential horror. Only Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has achieved a kind of balance. It seems that they have no choice but to move on. Then the astonishing Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) comes calling. He has an idea, one that’s definitely crazy, and that just might be a game-changer.

From there, we have triumphs, tragedies, narrow escapes, thrilling heroics, and fan service, all in a bladder-punishing three hour run time. Avengers: Endgame is a very real achievement, and one that even serial dislikers of the MCU should pay grudging respect. Does this all mean that Endgame specifically and the MCU, in general, should be placed on a cinematic pedestal next to films like The Godfather? No, and it shouldn’t be.

However, we dismiss the skill it takes to craft a well-made blockbuster at our peril. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have made a gargantuan epic where stuff gets blown up real good. Their action scenes are muscular, and the special effects are, unsurprisingly, top-notch. They also made a film that has considerably more focus on a smaller cast and thematic elements than Infinity War. Even when massive action sequences are going on, the Russos never let us forget we’re watching a group of people dealing with failure in very personal ways.

Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have been with Marvel Studios since nearly the beginning. Their script for Captain America: The First Avenger is one of the foundational elements of the MCU in terms of setting the entire tone. Their screenplay for Endgame is written with intelligence and wit. They don’t just start things off with a somber first act, transition into a wildly creative second act, and enter the third act with a scale and stakes that are huge. They also pay off character arcs and themes from other films, tying off the majority of the MCU’s concepts in a neat bow. In terms of the structure and creativity alone, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that their script is Oscar-worthy.

The cast makes a meal out of their script. If we talk about everyone, we’re going to be here forever, so I’ll focus on three performances of note. As Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr. is the heart of the entire MCU. He began with a character who was casually selfish, and who learned a painful lesson about selflessness. Over a series of films, we’ve seen his character believably change. Here, that change achieves some touching grace notes. Downey has always been a talented performer, and when he lets real emotion escape from his armored shell of snark, he makes it look so natural and so easy.

If Downey is the heart of the MCU, then Chris Evans is the soul. He took a character that could be insufferable and made him a decent man who operates according to his principles. Whether it’s the Nazis or space warlords, Steve Rogers won’t tolerate bullies, but he never stoops to their level. It’s refreshing to see a character who does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.

If you’re literally anybody else in the cast, how are you supposed to compete with these two? Karen Gillan as Nebula does it, and she does it covered in prosthetics and with a quietly intense performance. As one of the daughters of Thanos, we see a woman who’s suffered years of abuse, who only ever wanted to please her father, and who painfully sets herself on the harder path of finding her worth. The easy choice would be for her to have a big speech renouncing Thanos. Instead, Gillan uses subtle facial and vocal expressions, implying a seismic change within her without it becoming showy.

This era of the MCU ends with Avengers: Endgame. The MCU is far from over. If you wanted to tap out here, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s a good spot to close the book, and unlike a number of other franchises, Endgame sticks the landing.*** There’s a beauty in its finality, something wonderful about when and how the period is placed at the end of the sentence. The MCU will go on, for good or ill, but we’ll always have this.

*Seriously, that’s a thing.

**Or The Snapture, if ya nasty.

***So much so that there isn’t even a mid or post-credits scene.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/the-end-is-the-beginning/

0 notes