Finally saw this a couple of nights ago. I have been Marvel'd out like a lot of folks, but I knew this film would at the very least be a good time. After marinating on it a bit, I did enjoy it. First movie came out of left field, as everyone knows, and the follow-up (and other GOTG appearances) have all been handled well enough. I really enjoyed Suicide Squad so I figured this would likely be a fitting swan-song to the franchise that brought Gunn's career to the next level.
First of all, they went really hard with this movie, in a lot of ways - particularly, with the emotional beats (from the very beginning) all the way down the line, I was surprised to see them go there in a film like this. I have a lot of respect for a filmmaker who can take a basically goofy space-series with lots of crazy looking talking cyber-animals and aliens and really tug at the viewer's heartstrings like this. It felt very carefully handled and respectfully done, but it was definitely a surprise I wasn't expecting.
Secondly, the movie looked as good as any that you'd expect from top-tier Marvel these days. Really trumpeting the whole "we make SO much money with these things, so we are going to go the whole nine yards," the sets and costumes and everything were just so overboard. A lot of it looked crazy and goofy, obviously, but I loved that it went really into the 70s, 80s comic book vibe which I'd expect would traditionally be really difficult to translate to the big screen. Here they did it and made it look - well not effortless, but again very professionally handled. They also spent tons of f-you money on Ant Man 3, but whereas I felt everything was.. NEEDLESSLY overboard in that film, they really put things together properly in this film by comparison. Growing up with sci-fi, superhero films decades ago, you had exactly NONE of that stuff at such a level, you'd get crazy matte paintings or insane creature effects, which were always cool but still reminded you constantly that things were only able to realize a fraction of the vision that they would love to convey. As a viewer you'd kind of need to use your imagination a lot and let things slide (this wasn't a bad thing at all, mind you - but things are VERY different now). Anyway it's shocking to see what Gunn & his team can put together given such a massive budget and tech.
Problems - too many characters. I understand that it's a team film, and they have to put in a few new characters to keep it lively, but for me I felt like all the main characters were barely there for much of the film. They had plenty to do, and it was constantly action-action-action which is fine, but this series has always had some (relatively) charming/interesting chemistry with all of the players involved and here you mostly saw a lot of that get chopped up and delivered in little bursts. It felt like if they scaled back a bit of the cast/things for them to do and gave them some breathing room, it would give the characters a little space to be a little more HUMAN. I can appreciate that the people who make these things are mostly concerned with moving from setpiece to setpiece, but perhaps if there was less for them to do they could just have expressed themselves some more. This connects directly to the next problem I have, likely the other major issue really..
The film was way too long. I don't mind a big picture, and cramming a lot of stuff in there, but that can be hard to achieve and a film like this is just pushing to do too much. I am sure Gunn got carte blanche and was going to take such an opportunity to flesh out everything as much as he'd like, but I wish someone would have reined him him and got him to just gut the movie to some considerable degree. "It had to all be in there, this was all necessary" sure, but even as good as it is, when you have this long between installments, things just feel overloaded, sometimes simpler is better, easier to digest. At this point I don't care which, they could have probably cut "pick any major extended sequence" out from the film and overall it would have been better for it, no matter which one it was. I mean the Counter-Earth stuff was fascinating and it was really a treat that they just even WENT there, but to make a real impact with the weirdness of that stuff I feel like they would probably want to lanquish in that world some more rather than just stretch a weird joke out as long as they did. They didn't need THAT whole segment plus the body-fortress in the same film, as much as I love them both for going as thoroughly invested with both as they did.
Anyway this was the last Marvel movie that I was sure I "needed" to see, besides whatever is coming down the road in however many years with Secret Wars (perhaps.. perhaps..) so I feel satisfied to have seen how this trilogy has closed out, and happy to be mostly done with superhero films for a good little while personally.
