Re: that article... Telling the "truest and most honest story possible" means replacing content with gags? It means having Drax crash through a forest with no armor, getting hit by 300mph splintering trees, landing without a scratch and shouting "That was awesome" ? It's Star-Lord warning them not to trifle with the golden people, then calling their high priestess "repulsive" ? That's the writer-directors idea of an honest story? This movie was a cartoon -- more specifically, it was a Family Guy episode. Maybe a quarter of the jokes landed, which was a lot of jokes because there were so many -- so many jokes! At the expense of realism or personality. Any cohesive center of the story was muddied beyond my ability to see it.
To top it all off, two out of three of the female characters are unforgivably mistreated by the script. Oh my god, the body shaming. First of all, a man making a woman feel ashamed of her body is not funny to me. Secondly, the "joke" relies on the audience buying into the magazine-idea of beauty, and we are to laugh at both the victim and her abuser, Drax, whose preference for women "with meat on their bones" makes him wrong and pitiable. And it's a recurring gag and one of the last beats of the film - even interrupting a funeral (there were a lot of gags interrupting what should have been honest moments: Hasselhoff's cameo pulled so much focus that I stopped caring about Quill's emotional turning point).
In the first GotG, they make a point of not-going-in-a-romance direction with Gamora and Star-Lord, which was (unfortunately) pretty ballsy for Hollywood and now I'm convinced that Gunn had nothing to do with it. Of course they get together at the end of this movie. She HAS to come around to him. He's the man! It doesn't matter that he's at his adoptive father's funeral, let's call-back to an earlier meta joke (ugh) about how romance over a franchise can threaten ratings. Thanks, movie. It wasn't bad enough that you couldn't stand to have people of opposite genders in a platonic relationship, you had to condescend to me as well?
What makes this worse is that after the original meta-joke (the *hurk* dancing scene) Star-Lord and Ego (hey I get it) are talking about Gamora when she isn't around, Ego referring to her as "your girl" and Quill failing to correct him - even though Gamora has up-until-that-point refused Quill's advances and stated that she only wants a friendship, which, even if that weren't true you should still respect her enough not to call her "your girl" behind her back. I was hoping beyond hope that Quill would have learned that his desire to conquer Gamora was just his (heh) ego, and that by opposing the magic goop-flower empire of his father, he would realize that he doesn't need to control other people in order to be happy... but nope. By having her slide into his arms at the end of the film, the film is teaching the men watching that it doesn't matter what she says or does, if you want her she is yours -- she just doesn't know it yet.
It's clear that Vol. 2 was written by a dude. I thought Nicole Perlman had returned to co-write but it became painfully obvious early on that I was getting untempered dude-thoughts.
I only saw the first GotG last week in preparation for the new one. I absolutely adored the first one. The mood whiplash here was intense. Vol. 2 suffers from the normal sequel-itis and I can't even fault it for doing the perfunctory mystery-dad plot -- paint-by-numbers though it was. I felt like all of the interactions were plastic and unmotivated -- and it wasn't the actors, it was the script, which Gunn designed as a vehicle for Fun! Jokes! and Action! It was manic, and exhausting to watch.
Baby Groot was fine. Why did teenage Groot have enough intelligence to play a game boy? Why did Quill understand what he was saying? Why did Baby Groot say "Welcome to the Guardians of the Fucking Galaxy"? Does "I am Groot" actually translate to things like wookiee language?? I thought Rocket was interpreting Groots meaning based on inflection/his own projection, not because each "I am Groot" is actually a complex sentence in another... language? I thought Groot was a plant intelligence. Why does Quill understand what he's saying? Because it's funny?
I felt like it had a pretty perfect blend tbh. Enjoyed the story and of course the characters, old and new.