Yondu - Guardians of the Galaxy

Quick painting of Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy. 
Watched the movie yesterday evening and felt compelled to do a correlated painting. 
Now, while I enjoyed Yondu’s character arc this movie (perhaps largely because blue-skinned characters appeal to the me demographic) don’t mistake that for me holding a banner for the movie and recommending it to you.

I loved the first Guardians of the Galaxy, it was quirky, took my by surprise, kept me laughing and had an overall tone that was unique and different compared to many of the other superhero movies at the time. 

Unfortunately the second one didn’t evoke quite the same feelings in me. Overall the movie felt a little more blunt and brazen. It didn’t respect my intelligence quite as much, the jokes felt more low brow 

(yes, even more low brow than Quill winding up a bird to flip off the guards) and the plot felt quite out of place. 

Now while the first movie wasn’t particularly nuanced, when put beside it’s progeny it feels much more graceful in it’s comedic delivery. n Volume 2 each joke, while funny felt a little contrived. my companion put it very aptly by saying “it felt a little like a laughter or applause sign. Every time Drax spoke it was like -alright this is going to be funny, we better all laugh.”

I think the main thing that killed the movie was that there simply wasn’t enough “quiet time” in the same sense that rests in music are almost as important as the times when the musician is playing, quiet pensive scenes are important to offset the comedy. To make each joke really hit you need to show us some seriousness to give the levity a tone to contrast. 

but we didn’t have any of that. the movie was filled to the brim with dialogue, almost never did we get a scene where someone wasn’t speaking (or something wasn’t exploding).
Which by consequence means that many of the major themes were banally spelled out for me. rather than letting the audience figure anything out, characters instead just told us. 

Most insidious of which was the scene where Yondu goes into a major diatribe explicating his character and ends the monologue by turning to rocket and declaring “we are the same person” 

Did we really need that? Really honestly, could we not have derived that though our own intellect by simply hearing the monologue and seeing Yondu give rocket a knowing glance and having perhaps our contrite raccoon giving a disheartened scathing comment? 

Did I need peter to say the “unspoken thing” line so many times.

Did we need peter to tell us that Yondu was a father figure during his funeral? Was that not the point of the movie? Could we really not have figured that out? 

And this is just my short list of tragically blunt expositive scenes. 

even if the movie wasn’t explicitly explaining it’s plot and motives to me there was a constant underlying message that assumed the viewers were incapable of basic inference, which permeated every facet of the film.

Even so, while the movie perhaps didn’t impress me as much as the first, or many of the other members of marvel’s cinematic library, I still enjoyed it, it was a fun ride and did have some genuinely funny moments. Just don’t expect to have anything left to the imagination.

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