In terms of the overall plot, this story feels a little bit empty. One trick some writers try to do in order to make their writing better is to follow a basic, yet complicated structure. "Because of and in doing so, instead of And then". Allow me to explain with an example. "Tony Stark builds the Iron Man suit because he saw the actions his weapons were doing, in doing so, Stain tries to create his own Iron Man suit because of the potential such a suit has as a weapon". Broad strokes of Iron Man 1, but you get the general point, actions have consequences. Don't get me wrong, actions have consequences in GotG Vol. 2, but there are two stories in play that don't feel like they mesh together until the end, at least to me. At the start of the movie, the Guardians are fighting a pink tentacle monster (seriously Disney, does someone working for you have a thing for tentacle monsters?), and after defeating it, Rocket steals some powerful and expensive batteries, which then cause the people they were working for, The Sovereign, to want the Guardians dead. And then out of nowhere, an entity known as Ego shows up, revealing himself as Peter's Dad, and the story splits off into three (kind of) stories. One story where Peter, Gamora, and Drax, along with soon to be newcomer to the Guardians, Mantis are on Ego's planet (to spoil it, the villain of the story is Ego the Living Planet), while Rocket, Baby Groot, and Yandu are dealing with Yandu's crew turning agains Yandu, and while all of this is happening, the Soverign are trying to kill the Guardians and hire Yandu to bring them back to Soverign (yes they named their planet after themselves), and then show up in the final battle against Ego.
That being said, the reason why this movie is loved for the writing is the character interactions, more so then the events causing them. It is the character moments that sell this movie. The way the characters work off each other is really interesting and does put this film in the league of Winter Soldier as one of Marvel's best sequels. Do I think its better than Winter Soldier? No, because while the character interactions are great, and a lot of the jokes are funny (a personal favorite of mine being Groot's quest for the prototype fin for Yandu), there are some other flaws with the film aside from the way events play out. One of which, for many, could be seen as the two main themes: Ego (no, not the planet, the character trait), and father figures. That comment I said at the start of the review, that is where the theme of Ego comes in, from things like Star-Lord and Rocket fighting over who flies the ship through an asteroid field, to the fact that Ego's plan is to turn other planets into extensions of himself (for truly, no ego can match that of Ego's). The other big theme of the film is that of fatherly figures. There are notable critics who have been mentally affected by this movie due to the relationships they've had with their fathers around the time this film came out and... I'm not one of them. While we don't see eye to eye all of the time, I do have a good relationship with my father, and he's also still alive, I haven't had that kind of experience yet (nor would I like it any time soon!). The execution of the theme itself is great in the film, but it doesn't have that hard emotional impact for me, simply because I haven't been in that situation... ignoring the fact that my father isn't a living planet, nor is he a blue alien who controls a space arrow by whistling.
While most of the CGI is really impressive, and Ego (the planet) looks amazing, there is one trick this movie does with CGI that I'm personally not a fan of when I see it. There are times when Ego's human form is being reconstructed and... it just looks weird to me, in an uncanny valley way. I'm not sure what the technique is called, but it is something I saw on Youtube ads a while ago for an (I want to say) Amazon Prime show. It uses the CGI to make adjustments to the human body, things like cubes coming out of one part of the face, or in this case, having a living skeleton slowly turn back into a flesh and blood looking human. It's weird for me to say that I find the clearly fake looking things like the Bayformers robots looking more realistic than this technique (the exception being the Age of Extinction Decepticons cause I think they used it too). Heck, Baby Groot looks more realistic in this movie then that trick, and that's a tiny angry tree that only says (with meanings varying) "I am Groot". I'm not really exaggerating when I say that it takes me out of the experience when I see something like that. It just feels wrong.
The final issue I have is with the characters. Oh don't get me wrong, I love almost every character in this film. All except for one, Drax. I hate how he's portrayed in this film, unlike all the other assholes in the film, even after his "oh woe is me" moment, he still feels like an asshole, especially to Mantis. There's a level of sincerity to it, he doesn't mean to be an asshole about it, but intention and actions are two different things. Still, though, all the other characters are great and the actors pull off both the serious and the comical moments perfectly.
At the end of the day, the faults don't harm this movie too much for me, it's still a great Marvel movie, but in comparison to other films throughout cinema, it does come to a middle of the road film for me. Solid, but with some cracks, and a movie where circumstances will easily affect your view of the film, a lot more compared to other MCU films at least. Up next is Kirby Star Allies (theoretically, I might have to postpone that due to some recent schedule changes), but what's locked in is the next Lego Set for the Toybox, where Thor gets his new weapon. As for the next MAYvel review next week, we spend more time with the web-slinger... cause three movies last month wasn't enough for him.
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