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So I finally saw Guardians of the Galaxy in a Friday afternoon matinee. It was a very fun and very very pretty movie and the plot even mostly made sense, which is a sadly high standard to hold action movies to these days, but sadly I can no longer watch a movie without noticing all the times it takes the lazy way out and could have done better. (Note : never read "Save The Cat" if you want to be able to enjoy an action movie ever again.) Anybody still interested in talking about that movie? About how Rocket's thing with prosthetic limbs was simultaneously a one-note disablist joke and a really deep commentary on prosthetic as disability vs. cybernetics as enhancement, and on the concept of the social model of disability in a massively polymorphous society? About Groot growing his flowers around little girls and how CREEPY that is when you think about it? About how they apparently couldn't resist throwing out all of Drax's literalism out the window in favor of a snappy one-liner (is that a rule for Marvel movies now, they have to do that to at least one character.) About how, for a movie with only .5 of a human character, it managed to be SO FREAKING WHITE that I have to come home and re-read all three Saga trades to get the taste out of my mouth?

(about how Saga needs to be a blockbuster movie okay)

(about how I maybe wouldn't even have noticed it if I hadn't just come off Pacific Rim - which has its own issues, whoa boy - but which never ones depersonalizes a woman in order to make a characterization point about a man - and it wasn't even OOC for the characters in GotG the way Tumblr lead me to believe, but as Pac Rim proved, it's just so freakin' unnecessary, when you're building a world from scratch, to build it on the bodies of disposable women.)

Anyway yes it was a really fun movie but I think the only fanfic I came out of it wanting was a) something about what the little girl did with the groot-flower, and b) Bucky and Rocket bonding over being torn apart and then woken back up as a different person in a body that's not yours.

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I have a thing lurking in drafts where Rocket and Gamora bond over their cybernetics, so we're halfway there. Also I am here for all discussions of ableism and transhumanism, including transraccoonism.

I actually came off of GotG and started doing a critical reading of my tabletop gaming group, in which the only white guy also is continuously speaking for the group even though his character is the youngest and least competent. "Why would he do that?" I thought to myself. "He is surrounded by soldiers abd assassins with way more life experience! He's basically a farm boy!" And then I thought about GotG and its surrounding genre and went oh.

It's just SO MUCH INTERESTING about that kind of transhumanism especially when mixed in with the multispecies society, and then you add in how Groot treats his body as a transformable, disposable tool (which is totally in line with thinking about how plants do embodiment!) and line it up with Rocket's *really evident* trauma and anger about his mods, and the way Gamora isn't even letting herself go that far, and then the way Quill - who actually kind of STANDS OUT in the movie for having no body mods, but treats his gadgets as an extension of self (and is somehow immediately identifiable by everybody in the galaxy as Other, despite looking exactly like most of the Nova people) --- in a way all of MCU is about transhumanism and yet it never quite lets itself actually ask the hard questions, it just gets halfway there and then decides to be an action movie instead.

....and yyyep in terms of the farmboy and the genre...

and the sad thing about Guardians of the Galaxy is that it's *almost* there! Like there was a bit where Drax actually got reamed out for his manpain! And Quill never actually got the girl! And three of the five leads were played by POCs, more-or-less! It *wants* to transcend its genre, it really wants to. AND YET

Peter actually has a mod that shows up on the screen when he's being intook for space jail - he has an implant that translates languages for him. But it's very minor compared to Rocket and Gamora, who had all their bones replaced and substantial parts of their nervous systems overhauled (the same screenshot told me that Gamora's eyes aren't original - they've been replaced with an improved broad-section version, which is probably the in-universe reason for the circular scars above her cheekbones? Just, jeez.

I'm also trying to write a thing about how Groot wasn't an I until he left the Groot ecosystem, which is why his choices of first-person pronoun are significant, but then I rewatched the movie and he eats food and stuff so now I'm sidetracked into reading about carnivorous plants.

And yeah,the thing is that I even like a lot about Peter Quill - I know his relationship with his mother falls under the broad rubric of fridging, but I still think her ongoing influence on him is interesting, and he's vaguely lovable in a scrappy kind of way. But, like, I hope now that we've established the worldview through the POV of the (white dude) human, it would be cool if the next movie was more of a true ensemble film. Also now I have a lot of Feelings about whether Sam Wilson should be the next Captain America, where before I was pretty moderate on the subject.

Ah! I didn't manage to look at those screens that closely enough to catch all that. (I was mostly enjoying the fact that it made so much more sense than the version in the previews.) That's interesting because it strongly implies that mods like that are just standard equipment in the galaxy - so what does a prosthetic even mean in that context?

Sadly, it was telegraphed PRETTY HARD that the next movie is going to be about Peter Quill's daddy issues. (I even am vaguely okay with the next movie being about Peter Quill's daddy issues, because the alternative is probably it being about Gamora's daddy issues, and I'm almost as bored of Sexy Female Assassins with Daddy Issues as I am bored of white farmboys with daddy issues. Alas.) I don't think Hollywood knows how to make ensemble action movies any more; it takes too much actual effort to make a true ensemble film fit the Save the Cat formula.....

I actually have a dollar on Peter Quill's daddy issues being the same as Gamora's daddy issues in this 'verse, and that they would do this just for the cheap Star Wars joke.

Yes, it wanted to transcend its genre. And yet….

I can't figure out why the move left me so cold. Because I was all ready to like it. And my reaction was, "fun but so forgettable."

As you said, I really liked it when Rocket wouldn't let the manpain take over.

Edited 2014-09-12 23:55 (UTC)

I actually don't mind it being fun but forgettable! I like being able to watch a fun movie that doesn't DEVOUR MY SOUL for months. And it did a really good job at being fun. But it... didn't really have anything else to say, I think, and none of the characters really had any personal stake in the plot - like, Gamora *should* have had personal stakes in the plot? But they never really let her do enough to sell us on it (I actually found myself siding with Nova in the Gamora/Nova fight, because we actually understand Nova's motivation - survive until you find someone powerful enough to kill Thanos, which is a pretty relatable motivation - in a way that Gamora's never really coheres.) Drax sorta has a personal stake except that it's just manpain, so, whatever. Quill and Rocket and Groot don't really have any personal stake at all.

Which is fine! I wish we had more action stories these days that didn't require everyone involved to go through wrenching personal crises every week - that's part of what made it fun, that the motivation was people doing good things just because they needed to be done and they wanted to help their friends, yay. And I really like that Quill's relationship with the pirates, for all its fucked up ness, didn't end up defining him at all, it was just another sucky thing in his life. But admittedly doing awesome stuff with no massive personal stake doesn't make for the kind of story that sticks you hard where it hurts.

I think you have summed up why I was meh about it.

Also the first scene where Quill dismisses the girl he just slept with kind of made me not like him much, even though I enjoyed the actor very much.

I went into it expecting to hate that scene because I'd seen un-spoiler-cut stuff complaining about it, and I didn't actually mind it as much as I'd expected? I mean it established Peter Quill as an asshole, but it was meant to do that (and it also sets up the scene later where Gamora rejects him because he's got a reputation of being an ass to women, yay). And he doesn't actually dismiss her, he has breakfast and friendly conversation with her and lets her use his comconsole and presumably drops her off on Xandar and there was no slut-shaming at all not even by context nor was she treated as hysterical or over-attached.

Admittedly my standards are VERY LOW and I wish they could have, you know, not brought in a woman as a disposable sex object in order to establish a character point at all, as they did REPEATEDLY over the course of the movie, but in terms of Peter's actual behavior with her it didn't seem all that dickish?

Like, if that scene had been America Chavez stealing an artifact from an alien temple and then fleeing full--speed back to her ship and then being confronted with her one-night stand wearing just her jacket, whose name and existence she had momentarily forgotten in the heat of running for her life, and then they have breakfast and bid each other farewell at the next port, I would have thought it was an awesome scene and America was awesome. So it's not Peter's actual behavior that bothers me, I guess, just the lazy and stereotypical narrative choice involved in them using that scene.

(It would also have been a 10000x better movie if that scene had been America Chavez and Kate Bishop, but that's a given.)

(but oh god I forgot I also want fic about Billy Kaplan counseling Peter Quill on how to dealing with occasional incidents with transuniversal supreme power. And then Peter Quill turning out to be slightly gay because everyone who hangs out with the Young Avengers turns out to be at least slightly gay.)

"Look, sometimes you get incredible cosmic power and warp reality with your subconscious thoughts, and it's okay to be a bit scared by that. I mean, were you always slightly gay, or are you slightly gay because you met me and my friends? You can't even answer that because if it is the case, you will have always have been gay. Uh... always would have been gay? The point is I try not to think about it too much, because that would mean I might have turned Captain America gay, and that would be so embarrassing that'd I just burst into... you do know who Captain America is, right? I think I'm getting off topic."

Edited 2014-09-13 02:42 (UTC)

YOU ARE NOT MAKING ME NEED THIS ANY LESS

oh god MCU!Peter Quill having a gay freakout in the same room as Billy Kaplan having a freakout over whether he accidentally turns people around him gay and they both completely forget about the vast cosmic powers part it would be the bessst

Definitely I"m for more Slightly Gay characters!!!

Young Avengers is definitely the place to go for that! (Okay, some of them are more than slightly gay.)

There's a thing I kinda want to talk about with Gamora, and how I think her character is meant to be the ingenue, but due to genre conventions, she kind of ends up being the femme fatale? But I'm not sure enough of my argument to really trot it out on the front page.

Edited (^my) 2014-09-13 15:49 (UTC)

I don't even really know where to go with Gamora. I think you're right that's she's kind of uncomfortably stuck between several character archetypes. I suspect my knowledge that the script was written by an awesome woman and then heavily revised by a sexist asshole is coloring my interpretation of this, but I almost feel like what happened is we've got a well-realized character Gamora who's been sloppily and only partially overwritten by a Girl In Action Movie Gamora, and Girl In Action Movie Gamora is just a collage of different things they needed The Girl to be. IDK. She's almost a lot of things, but not quite any of them, she flips between a bunch of different story roles.

..Maybe that actually says something really interesting character-wise about her, but I'm not sure what.

Yeah, I mean, Guardians is a movie about how all of the Guardians are giant assholes, so I think the conversation about the movie, if we're going to have a high level intellectual conversation about what was a colossally stupid and colossally fun movie, ought to be about the ethical quandary for the Novans of making an alliance with such morally repulsive people and the ethically quandary for the viewer of rooting for such morally repulsive people.

Basically Guardians, and the scenes you're talking about in particular, is what would happen if we actually saw Han Solo dealing drugs in ANH.

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