Also, am I recalling wrong or did Ego make himself into human form BEFORE he went out looking for other life?
I noticed that too.
According to his story, he definitely gave himself a human form before encountering any life in the universe, much less humans which had to have happened thousands of years later.
[Quill is] neither obscene nor is he a womanizer. He had an attractive and powerful woman hit on him and responded positively to it, then retracted when he realized, "oh the girl I really like doesn't like this." Outside of that his only romantic focus in the movie is Gamora. That's neither obscene nor womanizing.
Yes he is. The first movie repeatedly references how promiscuous he is with female aliens (the "Jackson Pollock Painting" joke is the most obvious example but really it's everywhere all over the movie) which is reinforced by him flirting with the Gold lady, but Gamora being there causes him to knock it off when she gives him the "I'll kill you" look. Sure, he chose to settle down with her, but if she wasn't around and/or had she not been in the vicinity you can be sure it would have gone further. Maybe not all the way, but further than it did, for sure.
He's definitely still obscene though, he directly admits he'd "create some fucked-up shit" using his god powers and that's just one example of many throughout both movies. He's not malicious about it or anything, but he is definitely obscene with his humor and thoughts.
[Rocket has] always been a "jerk on purpose." Even throughout the first movie. He also was very subconscious about what he is as a creature, in the first movie. He's still the technical expert here as they showcase him rigging up the sound system, repairing the ship, and rigging the batteries to a bomb. AND they actually chose to acknowledge his defense mechanism of pushing people away this time. "Stop being a jerk on purpose" is a gross simplification of a legitimate character fault that psychologically makes perfect sense given the characters past.
You aren't necessarily wrong, but it wasn't done very well. In the original movie I felt that Rocket was a well-rounded character who even though he was a raccoon had a lot of potential and backstory to go into. This movie just has him kind of moping around a lot and pushing people away and while they do make some allusions to the scientists that caused him to be that way, there would have been infinitely more payoff had they actually done flashback scenes showing what caused him to become so angry or in some way had Rocket be able to strike back at the people who experimented on him or use his skills to overcome his issues or something.
Instead it's just kind of "you push people away, stop that" and he's like "oh i do, huh" and ...that's really about it.
There wasn't much of a payoff with his conflicts with Quill throughout the movie either, they just kind of stopped arguing.
Drax is exactly the same character here but he has less personal stakes since Thanos isn't even in the periphery of this film. In both films, he comes across dumb at times not just because of his missing social cues but also because his values are generally the exact opposite of the rest of the crew. In both movies he's shown to have more depth when he has moments to explains his logic and is given the chance to showcases his emotional depth. He does it more in this film as opposed to the first as well (Some people are dancers/some are not, better to be ugly on the outside, Mantis' revealing the depth of sadness he carries due to the loss of his family). Finally, the enemies in this film provide almost zero opportunities for hand to hand combat, so what exactly should he be doing? He takes part in the first fight and after that supports his crew.
That's the problem, Drax's only real scene of any substance in this movie was the one where Mantis felt his sadness for his family. I just remembered the scene where he flies behind the ship with the gun and that was kind of cool, but it still felt like a waste of potential overall. During the opening fight where there WAS hand-to-hand going on they could have at least had him do some cool brutal warrior stuff to take down the enemy but they reserved that for Gamora instead since he took the comedy option. I feel like it would have been better to have Gamora's big scenes be the fights with her sister nd Drax could have been given the kill on the big bad at the beginning to balance it out a bit, but instead they make him look like an idiot for laughs. You do have a point in that there wasn't much hand-to-hand going on but they could have tried to maximize it where possible, y'know?
Otherwise it was just HA HA HA LOOK AT ME I MADE A FUNNY and when it worked it worked well, but when it didn't it fell hard.
Given how unique your views have been on other characters, I think you should explain because I really have no idea what your interpretation of Groot is.
What do you really even want me to say that hasn't been already said? They wasted too much time on Groot-centric scenes because he was the popular character from the first movie. It was 100% pandering. "But it was only three scenes!" Yeah and they were all long and had no real overall substance to the story and were only set up for laughs.
Groot was mostly a joke character in the original as well but still managed to have legitimate characterization which wasn't present in this movie. They made him worse and turned him into a moron.
Gamora doesn't have goals in this one other than trying to keep the Rocket and Peter from butting heads to all of their detriment and dealing with Nebula. To that extent, neither does Drax, Rocket, or Groot. However she does see development through Nebula, in coming to the realization that, again, keeping everyone at arms length with stoicism doesn't serve anyone well. Doing so in the past made a rival and eventually enemy out of a sister who could have been an ally and doing so in the present primed Peter to be manipulated by Ego even moreso than he already would have been.
I can't argue with this, I didn't actually have a problem with Gamora or her arc in this movie outside of the fact that not much really happened.
(your next paragraph was fine)
And none of that has anything to do with whether or not the film is a comedy. Why you're connecting character development gripes with the amount of jokes made I have no idea because one does not supersede the other. You can have neither in a film, you can have both in a film, or you can have any mixed percentage in a film. If you think there were too many jokes, cool. That's a reasonable critique. But your stance that they sacrificed or removed existing character advancement for the sake of jokes doesn't pass muster.
It absolutely does. The movie only has X amount of screen time and X amount of budget. The more time they dedicate to shoehorning in jokes as opposed to giving the characters actual characterization, the less time there is for this characterization to take place, meaning it'll hen have to be squeezed into future movies.
I have no problem with the movie having jokes, nor do I have any problem with comedies; as I said before, I greatly enjoyed GotG1. What bothered me is that the movie came across as though they specifically tried to fit in as many jokes as possible, often to the detriment of everything else that was going on.
I feel that the comparison I made to Portal 2 was pretty apt: Had the game spent most of its script making callbacks to cake jokes it'd be boring and annoying, but instead it went to do new things and made its own jokes and references (see: Potato memes). GotG2 on the other hand feels like it tried to rehash what GotG1 created while upping the percentage of it as far as possible, as opposed to building on the base that the first movie created with its own original stuff.