Guardians of the Galaxy What you didn't like about Guardians of the Galaxy - Flaws/Critiques

[Mister J]

The 'modern' soundtrack bits were hit and miss. The songs are enjoyable enough on their own, but at times, seemed to strike out of place.

I could have gone for more substantive villain efforts. They had some guns with sizable acting chops between Ronan, Nebula and Korath, yet they didn't really tap into the talents. Part of it is having to give the protagonists their due, but there could have been more done in 2+ hours. Maybe I was just a little too jacked for Ronan and Nebula.

 

[justanotherguy]

So my gripes about the film as follows:

Story lacked heart - My biggest gripe about the film. It does a great job of introducing the characters, but it stumbles in trying to make you care for them. Granted, there are some great emotional moments here and there, but none of them emerged organically from the story. In comparison to the emotional roller coaster that was Days of Future Past, Guardians kind of fell short.

Gamora - For someone with the title of "The Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy", I thought Gamora was kind of tame. Zoe Saldana is capable of being fierce onscreen, so it's sad to see her talents kind of wasted like this. I wish they hadn't watered down her character from the comics to make her relatable.

Ronan - Eh. I thought Lee Pace played the part with menace. But aside that... he was hardly memorable and kind of lame.

Thanos - To be honest? I was underwhelmed. I saw nothing of the menacing presence or power that makes Thanos such a feared being throughout the cosmos. That cameo he had at the end of Avengers was a much better scene than the one he had here.

Wow, DFOP was a souless, vapid film compared to GotG. You must have some serious X-Men fanboyism going on. DFOP was a distant third of the Marvel movies this year.

 

[Mad Ones]

Also, as an addendum, what's up with some movies now thinking light-hearted irreverence means sociopathy *cough*cough*TASM 1&2*cough*cough*? Rocket enjoying another guy's pain or almost psychosexually enjoying receiving a big gun by which to kill people felt more disturbing than fun. Rocket wanting a poor man's prosthetic leg or another poor guy's eye for no reason at all didn't feel funny in the least. It felt nasty and vile, and not relatable at all.

I agree 100%. I enjoyed the movie more than you did, but this is the reason why I didn't like Rocket Racoon at all.

 

[piccolo]

I am absolutely astonished how critics are rating this higher than TWS and DoFP. I'll probably be a heretic with my opinion, but this was seriously disappointing on so many levels. Actually kind of depressing even, haha. Depressing if it is regarded as some sort of high water mark for modern blockbusters.

The movie got off on the wrong foot with the rather cynical-feeling opening tearjerker. Cynical because we don't know who the hell these characters are yet we are supposed to be emotionally invested right off the bat. It felt completely unearned and dishonest compared to, say, TWS's Steve-Peggy scene. Also, its later usage at the end didn't make much sense to me in context, so the movie basically used up valuable time to manipulate us to feel sympathetic towards a character we know is going to be a hero anyway. This to me is poor screenwriting, simple as.

But even worse was/is the inexplicable Quill dance sequence on the Indiana Jones planet with the awful CGI creatures. Why the hell do we need this scene for anything? We couldn't just roll the credits in the already questionable opening scene?

After that it's pretty much exposition dump after exposition dump. Now, TWS and DoFP also have an exposition dump at the beginning but they manage to take it under control relatively quickly and spread the rest of it more evenly throughout. For whatever reason, GotG just decides "what the hell; more is more" and piles on the expo without any mercy or moderation. The unmoderated expo is made bad especially by the fact that the world-building in this movie is severely lacking.

Yes, we get several exotic-looking places, but we barely scratch the surface of these places. They feel more like placeholders for plot points rather than genuinely real worlds. We barely have time to 'breathe in' what makes these places 'them' in particular. That needn't be the case, though. We could have cut all of the above-mentioned crap and a few needless gags here and there. Hell, there could have been less slow-motion to increase the time allotted to world-building.

Knowhere is a good example of the inelegance of the world-building and storytelling in this movie. When we arrive there, the characters' reactions confirm to us this is a big deal. An emotionally logical follow-up sequence for the audience would be to explore the place patiently in depth (even though it might look like a relatively uninspired mashup of Blade Runner and Nar Shaddaa), but again, the movie just decides to rush up to the next plot points, even though on a meta level absolutely everyone in the audience knows we are dealing with yet another boilerplate MCU magical MacGuffin plot. Bewildering stuff (and no, not in a good way).

It is made even more infuriating in Knowhere's case by the lazy and nonsensical plot points:

1) A contrived in-team bickering moment that comes completely out of nowhere (no pun intended, haha). It is apparently justified due to drunkenness, but that in itself makes very little sense for a group of characters in possession of an extremely valuable artifact in a possibly hostile and unpredictable place (said by themselves, no less!).

2) Coincidentally ironic or not, but the fact that possibly the most interesting combo of visuals and expo - The Collector showing and explaining the all-powerful MacGuffin(s) - ends prematurely in an inexplicable plot point and results in yet another explosion is pretty emblematic of the whole movie's problems.

3) Drax just decides to call Ronan, because... why the hell not. And of course he is contrite afterwards; he just got affected by the Idiot Ball, one of the laziest forms of screenwriting.

Yondu and his gang also felt not only boring but pretty superfluous to the overall story. They only show up when it is plot-convenient for them to show up (in another bout of coincidental/meta-irony, the script has Quill freaking call them to show up!). Not only that, but after Yondu is forced to crash-land on Xandar and informs he will rendez-vous with Quill - thus bound to happen anyway - we still get a scene with Yondu and his magic-whistle-arrow thingy which, while cool in itself, has absolutely no bearing on the plot whatsoever. And the final, inexplicable shot of Yondu - all grinning with his faux-artifact - apparently means none of this was that big of a deal for him in the end? Eh? So what the hell was his and his gang's point in this movie beyond a convenient plot carrier?

All in all this movie felt like some sort of reverse Occam's Razor, wherein you get lots of unnecessary crap that not only bugs the living fudge out of you but also prevents far more important aspects of the story from coming up. We could have dislodged all of the opening garbage (even Morag altogether, because it's just perfunctory stuff for Quill to get his MacGuffin which we knew he would get anyway), dislodged Yondu and his boring gang, and get a more relaxed pace of expo, better world-building, and actually something substantial from not only Ronan but also from the criminally underexplored relationship trifecta of Gamora, Nebula, and Thanos. There probably was at least some endgame dialogue between Nebula and Gamora on the Kree warship, but it seems it was cut, resulting in the awkward editing where Gamora arrives to Nebula's location seemingly out of nowhere and they proceed immediately to have that lackluster fight.

I've heard of the main notion of 'fun' for this movie. I hope it doesn't become some sort of ubiquitous excuse for major issues with script, pacing, editing, world-building, etc. There is a good film in here somewhere, but there are so many inexplicable decisions that render the overall taste foul for me.

Also, as an addendum, what's up with some movies now thinking light-hearted irreverence means sociopathy *cough*cough*TASM 1&2*cough*cough*? Rocket enjoying another guy's pain or almost psychosexually enjoying receiving a big gun by which to kill people felt more disturbing than fun. Rocket wanting a poor man's prosthetic leg or another poor guy's eye for no reason at all didn't feel funny in the least. It felt nasty and vile, and not relatable at all.

Rocket shooting holes into beer barrels to facilitate a creative escape from a bar (happened in a comic) is relatable and fun. We needed more that kind of fun.

Thank you for more depth-fully articulating my problems with this movie. It is so emphatically and universally lauded right now that i've started to digress objections in the name of "what's the point?", but the profound jolts of disappointment I felt every 1.5 minutes during the film all came rushing back reading your post.

You're literally the only other person i've seen who didn't think this movie was good, let alone a masterpiece. I'm ridiculously easy to please when it comes to movies, especially comic book ones, so I found myself questioning my approach to watching this when 99.9% of the universe approved.

And it did have all the elements of a 'fun' movie - big sets, unique characters, comic relief, beautiful scenery - but I felt like Gunn made a fun movie at the intentional expense of a well-written one. Porn operates on the same principles, aka high-intensity action with beautiful visuals, extended to its allotted run-time by using disinterested writing to accelerate the natural development and deterioration of relationships and projecting sympathy for and understanding of each characters' motivations onto the audience.

When Yondu crash landed on Xandar and was taking out Ronan's forces with his arrow, there was a short moment toward the end of the scene when the arrow had taken out all of them except for a single soldier. All of them had stayed perfectly still so as to allow the arrow and the sequence to play out the way it was intended, but this particular soldier was even more conspicuously wooden, not moving an inch or lifting a finger even as the arrow circled him and eventually struck. Followed by Yondu's satisfied grin, which was the point of the scene of course.

That sequence was, to me, a metaphor for what this movie was. An indulgent action sequence that used characters mostly as a vehicle to justify and initiate conflicts that were explained with exposition-confined character development. Which was delivered using landfills of cliche-ridden dialogue.

But aside from that it was great haha

 

[piccolo]

Yeah that's true. The only thing I can say is maybe this is a point in the Nova Corps before they begun empowering some of the members. I don't know.

It didn't really bother me all that much, to be fair. On my list of complaints, this is further down the list.

I'm less disappointed that there "should" have been powered Nova Corps members and more disappointed in that it just would have been awesome to see.

I mean, some human rockets? Count me in for that anytime.

 

[SuperSanchez]

[YT]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxb7b0jGZvc[/YT]

 

[StarLord]

The 'modern' soundtrack bits were hit and miss. The songs are enjoyable enough on their own, but at times, seemed to strike out of place.

Gunn specifically picked those songs based on the scenes so perhaps the day will come where he fully explains his reasons for doing so.

I didn't have a problem with the chosen songs, but I wish we had heard more of them at times. Like ''Escape (The Piña Colada Song)'', that wasn't played for very long at all.

 

[Sexy Magician]

The movie got off on the wrong foot with the rather cynical-feeling opening tearjerker. Cynical because we don't know who the hell these characters are yet we are supposed to be emotionally invested right off the bat. It felt completely unearned and dishonest compared to, say, TWS's Steve-Peggy scene. Also, its later usage at the end didn't make much sense to me in context, so the movie basically used up valuable time to manipulate us to feel sympathetic towards a character we know is going to be a hero anyway. This to me is poor screenwriting, simple as.

If you ever experience the pain and outright misery of losing a parent to cancer then the opening scene would mean more to you, you are of course entitled to your opinion, but if you went through something similar, it wouldn't matter if you knew the character or not, you would be emotional. Cancer is an evil disease that has the power to steal loved ones from you quite easily, I would suggest you haven't been through something like that or else you wouldn't have said what you did.

 

[Ghostcrow13]

If you ever experience the pain and outright misery of losing a parent to cancer then the opening scene would mean more to you, you are of course entitled to your opinion, but if you went through something similar, it wouldn't matter if you knew the character or not, you would be emotional. Cancer is an evil disease that has the power to steal loved ones from you quite easily, I would suggest you haven't been through something like that or else you wouldn't have said what you did.

I don't even think you need to have lost someone, it is not hard to empathise with a kid losing his mother.

 

[Sexy Magician]

i don't even think you need to have lost someone, it is not hard to empathise with a kid losing his mother.

exactly!!

 

[Asharad]

If you ever experience the pain and outright misery of losing a parent to cancer then the opening scene would mean more to you, you are of course entitled to your opinion, but if you went through something similar, it wouldn't matter if you knew the character or not, you would be emotional. Cancer is an evil disease that has the power to steal loved ones from you quite easily, I would suggest you haven't been through something like that or else you wouldn't have said what you did.

I cried a river at the opening scene.

 

[Sexy Magician]

I cried a river at the opening scene.

Me to! The ending got me going for the same reason to.

 

[DA_Champion]

Excellent post Marathon.

Thank you for more depth-fully articulating my problems with this movie. It is so emphatically and universally lauded right now that i've started to digress objections in the name of "what's the point?", but the profound jolts of disappointment I felt every 1.5 minutes during the film all came rushing back reading your post.

You're literally the only other person i've seen who didn't think this movie was good, let alone a masterpiece. I'm ridiculously easy to please when it comes to movies, especially comic book ones, so I found myself questioning my approach to watching this when 99.9% of the universe approved.

And it did have all the elements of a 'fun' movie - big sets, unique characters, comic relief, beautiful scenery - but I felt like Gunn made a fun movie at the intentional expense of a well-written one. Porn operates on the same principles, aka high-intensity action with beautiful visuals, extended to its allotted run-time by using disinterested writing to accelerate the natural development and deterioration of relationships and projecting sympathy for and understanding of each characters' motivations onto the audience.

When Yondu crash landed on Xandar and was taking out Ronan's forces with his arrow, there was a short moment toward the end of the scene when the arrow had taken out all of them except for a single soldier. All of them had stayed perfectly still so as to allow the arrow and the sequence to play out the way it was intended, but this particular soldier was even more conspicuously wooden, not moving an inch or lifting a finger even as the arrow circled him and eventually struck. Followed by Yondu's satisfied grin, which was the point of the scene of course.

That sequence was, to me, a metaphor for what this movie was. An indulgent action sequence that used characters mostly as a vehicle to justify and initiate conflicts that were explained with exposition-confined character development. Which was delivered using landfills of cliche-ridden dialogue.

But aside from that it was great haha

There are a handful of us who gave this movie ratings of 6/10 and 7/10 in the user review thread. I gave it a 7/10. I think it's a good movie, not a great one.

 

[The Endless]

The opening scene is kinda manipulative.

But you have to be a pretty cold person if you don't feel for the kid. You don't need to know them. Losing someone to cancer is something that anyone can relate to.

 

[Colossal Spoons]

I'm a bit confused by 2 of Marathon's points though. Meredith dying generated no particular feels yet you felt bad when Rocket wanted those dudes' leg and eyeball for no reason? One of those is roughly 40000000x sadder and horrible than the others. And I say this as one of the least sympathetic people I know.

 

[StarLord]

It sounds to me like he just didn't ''get'' a lot of the humor.

Rocket's fascination with the leg and the eye were two of the funniest moments.

 

[The Endless]

The guy with leg got paid 30,000 credits for it too

 

[Colossal Spoons]

It sounds to me like he just didn't ''get'' a lot of the humor.

I'm always hesitant to say that b/c that's what I was told by the entirety of the internet after I expressed my disappointment in IM3

 

[StarLord]

I'm always hesitant to say that b/c that's what I was told by the entirety of the internet after I expressed my disappointment in IM3

I liked the story and the characters in IM3, but I can't remember anything too funny happening.

Apart from Trevor, of course.

 

[R_Hythlodeus]

The Aether though is really vague. Can't quite pin point what it is.

Since it was used to alter reality, I'm 100% sure it's the reality gem

Apart from Trevor, of course.

He's the comedic highlight of the whole MCU

 

[NHawk19]

The movie was good, but for me it had a similar feeling to IM2 in the amount of stuff they crammed in. Seems like they were building up the Marvel Universe so they could explore specifics later in GOTG2 or a NOVA movie or even a Kree movie that was a prequel and dealt with Ronan's story.

Gamora seemed really underutilized. Even in how she met Star Lord outside the shop. She says something to Ronan then boom she's there. How did she find him? Rocket, Groot, and Drax at least happened by accident but she was specifically looking for him.

Quill's dance at the end sort of made me cringe. Why did Ronan fall for that? He was pretty menacing up to that point, even if they didn't explore his motives. If they hadn't done that I think they could've made him a better villian with a prequel tie in. Similar to how Avengers made IM 2 a better movie.

Just hope that now that most of the "setup" is out of the way that we can get a more focused story in the next one.

 

[Dark Raven]

I didn't like that Spirit in the Sky was cut from the movie. I think it would've worked well playing during a battle scene or something. Also, I wish that Hooked on a Feeling was used a bit more, and also with that machine-gun-like drum beat that was used in the trailer.

Would also have liked to have seen Gamora's bare back in the movie too, like in the trailer. And wasn't there a scene of Groot inspecting Quill's cassette player that was also cut?

 

[piccolo]

I thought the opening scene worked. It was a little out of place considering the tone of the movie, but it was one of the only scenes that served a real purpose imo. Establishing Quill's tragic relationship with his mother to explain actions he took later, and explaining how he ended up in space in the first place. Though the latter was never really explored as much as it should have been.

I was crushed when he didn't take her hand.

And Rocket was my favorite part of the movie. His crass, tortured, and sadistic personality explained his blasé attitude toward other people's well-being, and I liked that he was somewhat of an opposing voice for the literary cliches Gunn utilized during the film. Like when the crew all started standing up after giving their "you have my sword!/and my bow!/and my axe!" LOTR speeches in Quill's ship, all conveniently willing to sacrifice their lives for each other shortly after trying to kill everyone to further their self-serving agendas, and Rocket acknowledged how incredibly cheesy it was after he acquiesced to the plan.

Bradley Cooper did a great voice job with him and the character had the most depth of anyone in the group imo.

 

[Marathon]

I stand by my conviction that the opening scene is exploitative. It is not really related to the overall story in any tangible way, and it is not even really related to Quill's adult character, as in the immediate scene afterwards, he jarringly kind of abuses CGI animals, kills a couple of guys, and is shown to treat women as disposable sex objects. It seemed the whole Quill's mom died - thingy was simply meant to excuse almost anything Quill did as an adult. In another words, it was exploitative, bad screenwriting.

I don't judge these movies as moral obligations to "feel" something or even to have "fun". These movies and their narratives have to earn it, not the other way around. Incidentally, despite being "serious" movies, I felt more and had more fun with TWS and DoFP.

 

[Marathon]

Thank you for more depth-fully articulating my problems with this movie. It is so emphatically and universally lauded right now that i've started to digress objections in the name of "what's the point?", but the profound jolts of disappointment I felt every 1.5 minutes during the film all came rushing back reading your post.

You're literally the only other person i've seen who didn't think this movie was good, let alone a masterpiece. I'm ridiculously easy to please when it comes to movies, especially comic book ones, so I found myself questioning my approach to watching this when 99.9% of the universe approved.

No problem - thank you! That's why I felt it necessary to post such a long text in this thread instead of the main review one. It seems people are high on the Marvel Studios kool-aid, even though TWS flatters the overall MCU phase 2 beyond belief. Without TWS I would go as far as say "the emperor has no clothes".

I've heard bullish comparisons to Star Wars. I'd say they are bull****, haha. If anything, flicks like GotG make me realize Star Wars (the 1977 original, that is) is very underrated in many aspects. GotG has none of the careful and elegant handling of exposition or coherent world-building which made and still makes the original Star Wars so remarkable.

And to add another grumble about GotG's world-building... take Quill's ship: it has a sort of plasticky exterior sheen, seemingly primitive rusty innards but with extremely high-tech, "clinical sci-fi" looking screens and whatnot. It is again interestingly symbolic of not only this movie's but most modern corporate blockbusters' problems: unsure of what to focus on, throw a bit of everything in there so that something might stick.

And it did have all the elements of a 'fun' movie - big sets, unique characters, comic relief, beautiful scenery - but I felt like Gunn made a fun movie at the intentional expense of a well-written one. Porn operates on the same principles, aka high-intensity action with beautiful visuals, extended to its allotted run-time by using disinterested writing to accelerate the natural development and deterioration of relationships and projecting sympathy for and understanding of each characters' motivations onto the audience.

Yes, that is a very good description of the movie's narrative (and its problems).

When Yondu crash landed on Xandar and was taking out Ronan's forces with his arrow, there was a short moment toward the end of the scene when the arrow had taken out all of them except for a single soldier. All of them had stayed perfectly still so as to allow the arrow and the sequence to play out the way it was intended, but this particular soldier was even more conspicuously wooden, not moving an inch or lifting a finger even as the arrow circled him and eventually struck. Followed by Yondu's satisfied grin, which was the point of the scene of course.

That sequence was, to me, a metaphor for what this movie was. An indulgent action sequence that used characters mostly as a vehicle to justify and initiate conflicts that were explained with exposition-confined character development. Which was delivered using landfills of cliche-ridden dialogue.

But aside from that it was great haha