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I liked
this movie. It does a lot to correct
what I think are some issues with how Disney has been managing Marvel, 1) most
of Marvel's animated properties are frothy mugs of poop, and 2) serious lack of
diversity on the macro scale, especially considering how many diverse Marvel
characters there are.
This movie
is colorful, has likable characters who have a lot of visual personality, with
clothing and costumes that give the audience quick insights into their
characters. He's precise (and works with
lasers), she is bubbly (and works with bubbles of strange chemicals), he wears
a beanie and is clearly the stupidest person in the film. It is all very clean and uncomplicated
allowing for them to put in a lot of action, gags, and cool inventions. And I really liked the robot, I like pretty
much all robots in fiction, but this one especially.
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| I love Baymax. I feel his existence is damn near an absolute good., |
That being
said there are a lot of little things about this movie that drag it down. The bad guy is so obvious that the red
herring they threw out seemed insulting to my intelligence. There is also some
clunky dialogue that tells the audience explicitly what they already knew by
implication, they live with their aunt so their parents are gone, he bult a
robot so he is really smart and wastes his genius... but one brother tells the
other brother, "Our dead parents would not want you to waste your super
smart brain, dur, dur, dur". That
is lazy writing.
There are
sections that I think missed a gag (at one point a character has to spin at
super speed to escape a slowly crushing space, she gets out and is then fine...
I wanted her to say, "Yeah, I am *Hurk*" and puke, that would have
been a good punctuation to the scene).
Even in a world of super science some of the things the characters do
stretch believability (the main character whips up about 7,500 lbs of tiny
robots in his garage in two weeks... Bull shit, even writing the soft ware for
such a program... THAT READS THOUGHTS would require more time than that) when
your movie starts to make Iron Man look like a drooling buffoon you might want
to dial things back toward reality.
And now for
some SPOILER discussion because I want to talk more about the bad guy. In them movie the college professor who I
consider to be too obvious a villain is a villain, he does this because his
daughter was ostensibly killed while testing a teleportation device. Except that is not foreshadowed, he is
working with numerous young geniuses and not once do you see him wistfully look
at them like they were his own kids, not once does he let slip a remark about
missing his daughter, and at no point do you see a picture or memento that
would hint to the audience that he had any personal tragedy. It is revealed at the end of act two. That is weak writing.
STILL
SPOILERS: Also, the professor is a weak pick for the bad guy. The main character only knew him for two
weeks, not long enough to form a bond, so when the opportunity for bloody
revenge comes along (the professor having caused the death of the main
character's brother) of course the protagonist attempts to kill him without
moral consideration... and in most instances he would be totally right, the bad
guy has a doomsday weapon and is a real danger to lots of people, and it could
be argued that he deserves to die for his reckless violent behavior causing the
deaths of others.
STILL
SPOILERS: Here is a better idea for a
villain: make it the main character's brother.
Have it so the fire at the beginning kills the professor and it is
revealed that the reason the brother went bad is that the rich guy of the movie
caused the death of he and the main character's parents in a reckless
experiment. So now you have the brother
(who built a healthcare robot) using the main character's robots as a weapon
for evil, and the main character using the healthcare robot to fight back. You have parallels, and a moral question as
to whether you stop you brother from avenging your family. There is complexity.
In a way
this movie fails the same way "Rise of the Guardians" failed in that
there is just a much better, deeper, richer movie that could have been made
from the same parts... and they didn't.
Overall: 7/10
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| I actually find this poster to be rather awesome. |
Bryan
Singer hated all the movies following his departure (with good reason) so he
killed them... and the original movies he made that spawned them. This thing has so much going on that I wrote
a trillion random thoughts down in a mild haze and am trying to connect them
together into a coherent whole... Like this movie tried to do with the rest of
the franchise.
(So are
spinal injuries a super power in this universe?)
It felt
like two movies... The final two movies for the franchise.
The first
was "Wolverine sent back in time to stop an assassination" it has the
stakes (multiple X-Men murdered by robots in the future), it shows the means
(psychic time travel to rewrite reality), it has the players (Magneto who is in
prison and Charles who has no powers will need to convince Raven from killing
Bolivar), Wolverine goes into the past, finds Charles, they gather allies
(Beast, and more importantly Quicksilver), they spring Magneto, go to the
assassination, stop it, and then the climax happens (Wolverine freaks out,
Magneto takes the practical unethical measures, Charles is the powerless
idealist, and Beast is a blue wolf man), then that movie ends, with the bad
guys getting away, the group broken up and the assassination stopped.
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| Think about this for a second. The cast is so large, that Emmy Winner Kelsey Grammer is an uncredited cameo. It is so big that Anna Paquin has an Oscar, but no lines. They got talent coming out of their ears and ass over here. |
(Why did
they kill all the villains from the first movie off? Why did they do that off screen?)
Then the
next movie starts. They show the stakes
(still killer robots), they have the means (Raven's DNA which will ultimately
make for deadlier robots), they have the players (Raven, Magneto, Xavier,
Wolverine, and Trask), they rally their forces (Xavier commits to using his
telepathy, Magneto gets his helmet and sabotages the original Robots), then
they collide, and then that movie ends with half the "bad guys"
getting away and the killer robots defeated.
Seriously,
its like they had two movies and just put them together. Like they were going to have trilogy of First
Class films and this is the last two of that series combined. It erases a lot of continuity (thank the
gods) and makes things smoother and all tied up. You could end the entire franchise here
because it shows the brighter world of tomorrow at the end, all of the sins of
the first few movies got resolved. There
is nothing left to say. Really, if they
wanted to shake things up they should have just killed Wolverine for real and
left the future up to interpretation.
That would have shaken the franchise to the core. Wolverine dying would have changed everything
and been a lot more ambiguous. Instead,
not only does he get a happy ending.... Everyone does including a lot of people
who died.
(Why were
there so few returning characters from "First Class" [Banshee is
gone, Moria is gone, White Queen is gone], and so many new ones that had
nothing to do?)
This movie
has the exact same themes as "Captain America: Winter Soldier". Drones in the sky killing extraordinary
people who would upset the status quo.
Wolverine and Cap are the heroes of different eras (though Charles is
really more the hero than Wolverine toward the end). Bucky and Mystique are the wild card middle
men who need to be stopped/saved. Beast
and Falcon are the ones encouraging the hero to just take out the bad guy
rather than save them. Black Widow and
Nick Fury take the role of Magneto, more ambiguous characters who are about
practical mission objectives.
(Why would
Mystique's DNA help make robots that can steal powers? She can't mimic powers... And ROBOTS
DON"T HAVE DNA!)
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| Just for your knowledge, this type of Sentinel is called a Nimrod. In the comics they were damn near unstoppable. |
Magneto's
plan would have worked better had he just covertly used the sentinels to kill
President Nixon, his staff, and a lot of civilians, and then just let the
humans eventually kill the robots.
People would have blamed the MUTANT TARGETING SYSTEM as being unable to
tell the difference between humans and mutants and then scrap the idea of robot
soldiers altogether. And he wouldn't of
declared war on behalf of mutants like a crazy asshole. Also, all humans are mutants, blonde hair,
dimples, webbed toes, and nearly any genetic trait is a mutation... so is
dwarfism. The main villain is a dwarf
and the idea that he creates a robot apocalypse because he got stunted growth
rather than laser eyes and well defined abs is an interesting idea left
bubbling under the surface of the movie, but it also asks the obvious question
of how a mutant detector would work and why it doesn't kill everyone.
(Why did
they write the movie to send Wolverine back to the past? Yeah he is a popular character but the last
movie did fine with only a cameo by him.
Why not send back some of the cool new characters and Ellen Page' Shadow
Cat? Would have done a lot to further
the idea of minority rights by having some characters who are minorities in the
picture.)
This movie
has both a great ending, and a bad one.
Because, they clearly want sequels, but you already know what is going
to happen ultimately as it shows a future with the X-Men triumphant in a
utopia... so I guess the next movie is not going to have any affect on
that? Is Apocalypse not going to do
anything? That is not good.
The movie
holds together so well though, and has depth and themes explored by skilled
actors with good effects, and a sense of scope and creativity that makes it so
good that I forgive the flaws (mostly).
Overall: 8/10
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| I would also like to point out that several of the predictions I made for this movie were right. Though I cast a wide net and thus was bound to catch something. (Poster) |
I do not
know why everyone thought this movie was going to be a huge gamble. Everyone kept saying that an obscure comic
book would never be able to carry a movie... But let's be honest, pretty much
99% of comics are obscure, and 99% of movies are adapted from books or TV shows
and other mediums that have audiences of less than 1,000,000 people. And original movies have no audience till release. So why would something like Guardians be seen
as so out of the box? Because it has
aliens? Shit, that has been around since
the silent era. Because it is more of a
comedy? I think there is a clear track
record in modern history that comedies can be about anything ("Galaxy
Quest", "Shaun of the Dead"... hell, look back to the 80's and
you have "The Princess Bride").
I was looking at it assuming it would be an interesting addition to the
Marvel movies and guess what: IT WAS!
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| Look at this. It is the severed head of a god that floats in space and is a city. How is my life not enriched by this? |
This movie
is gorgeous. The dialogue pops. It is funny.
It has heart. It has broad appeal
with a big diverse cast of characters traveling thru beautiful living
environments dealing with a villain that is clearly out of their weight
class. Leading a rag tag group in resistance
to a total planetary genocide. It is
awesome. Even the cheezy part where they
use the power of friendship to beat the bad guy like it is a freaking "My Little Pony" episode (Though I guess Nightmare Moon was more like Malakith in "Thor: The Dark World" with the eternal darkness and all).
I am not
going to say this movie touched me on some deeper level, but it did its job
well, and I am glad that Marvel feels that space is a much more creatively free
place for the Marvel universe to be silly and strange. I look forward to the sequel which I am sure
will be even better. (Here is my pitch
for it, they are employed to break into Asgard and steal the Tesseract in hopes
of keeping it out of Loki's hands... and inadvertently put it into the hands of
Thanos. It could be a heist movie,
"Guardians of the Galaxy: The Asgardian Caper").
Overall: 8/10
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| This is a third party poster. One of many alternate designs that these people whipped together. Check them out. |
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