So, Guardians of the Galaxy. I've been waiting for this movie since I saw the first trailer, and of all the Marvel movies that got released this year, it'd be second on my list, right after Captain America: The Winter Soldier. GotG got a lot of hype and positive reviews, from what I recall it got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, so this post may end up a bit of an unpopular opinion. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it quite a lot and would definitely go see it again but there are some things I need to get off my chest.
I'm going to go right off the bat and talk about how the movie slut-shamed Gamora and yet put Peter Quill on a pedestal for his record of sleeping with women. It was pretty uncomfortable to be watching a movie where the man openly admits to another male character that he's slept with all these women to the point where within the first ten minutes of the movie, when he encounters one such woman still on his ship, he can't even recall her name and she's more or less just a notch in his belt. He is congratulated by his male colleague for bedding all these women and we're positioned to be in awe of Quill's prowess with the ladies. In contrast, when it comes to Gamora (of whom we never really discover the details of her sexual past), the male characters continually use the term "whore" in order to demonise her and put her down, to make the audience dislike her because how dare she sleep with multiple men. Gamora for most of the movie barely has her name mentioned by one particular character in favour of the term, and to be honest, it got a bit old. This is space, with technology beyond earth's wildest dreams and yet slut-shaming is still taking place in every single culture in the galaxy? It would be nice to see that role reversed, as unlikely as that would be, or to have slut-shaming erased completely when it isn't necessary.
Continuing on with Gamora, since she's the only lead female character in these Guardians, was the damsel-in-distress moment. The movie sets up Gamora to be a highly trained and elite assassin, who had little problems taking down a group of people by herself and supposedly never failed in her attacks and had a perfect record. So why is it that once she's met Peter and lands herself in prison that she is suddenly defenceless when cornered by a group of four men with knives. Surely as an assassin (and as shown in the movie), she's expertly trained in hand to hand combat much like Black Widow. She could have easily taken them down and disarmed them herself without needing the heroes intervention before Drax showed up. It diminishes her character in some respect by saying that she's not as good as Peter and needs saving. I'm not saying that sometimes it isn't unrealistic for women to occasionally needing help in some situations, but when you have a super assassin character, who is often on solo missions, it seems a bit ridiculous. Again, it's probably set up to make the viewers sympathise with Peter and his hero role, and to make Gamora more appropriate for viewer consumption; diminishing her power so that she doesn't become too macho or threatening, which is a shame. It's also strange because when they're breaking out of the prison, Gamora effortlessly takes out several inmates/guards, so why did she need saving again?
The interaction between the female characters of the movie adds up to only being five minutes of footage. Gamora and Nebula are introduced as being sisters and daughters of Thanos. Their first conversation basically only talks about Thanos and who is better for the mission in terms of skills. In their final conversation, Nebula reveals that she prefers Gamora to the rest of her "sisters" because she likes the others less. There was so much potential to flesh out the relationship between the two women and it was wasted. It also makes the female role in the movie so much more disappointing, especially when it comes to Gamora. From the way that it is made out, Thanos only abducts women as young girls and raises them to become his daughters and trained assassins. If this is the case, why are the women diminished in such a way? There must be a reason for only choosing women to be his assassins and they're all made out to be highly capable and a force to be reckoned with given that Thanos is a fairly "big bad" in the Marvel Universe. Given the success of the movie, I'm hoping the sequel decides to actually do something with them and not have them revolving around the male characters for their own development.
The thing that stopped the movie from taking the number one position from Winter Soldier was the fact that after viewing it and getting all the post-movie hype out of my system the movie felt a bit flat emotionally. The characters aside from Peter were given little to know proper back story and I felt for the most part unable to invest in them emotionally. Part of this may be because the movie was only about two hours long and divided between several characters, but aside from Rocket and Groot, I felt nothing. It says something when I have a greater emotional connection for a tree that only has the line "I am Groot" and not for the humanoid characters. Drax had the typical storyline of his women being murdered and thus motivating his revenge against Ronan, Peter had his rogue-ish charm and wise-cracking attitude with mother issues and Gamora was abducted from her planet as a child and brainwashed into becoming an assassin for her captor. Rocket and Groot, you genuinely felt their friendship in the movie and Rocket actually had a back story that affected me (although I'm not sure if that's because animal stories always get me). I'm hoping that in the sequel that they decide to flesh out the characters more now that they've been established. It could be because all of the Avengers had all their own movies that you could feel an emotional connection for them in The Avengers. Even the main villain Ronan was pretty two dimensional and absolutely no back story was given for his motivation aside from a two minute voice-over, it made his death fairly anti-climatic and a bit disappointing.
These points aside, Guardians of the Galaxy was pretty good. The action sequences were great, the script was funny and hit the right notes. The soundtrack was amazing, I had to come home afterwards and listen to it again as soon as I had loaded YouTube. The special effects were fantastic and it was good to finally leave Earth for a bit and look at the other members of the Galaxy once we had a taste of what was out there in the Avengers. It added another layer to the Marvel Universe and another group to look out for in the future movies or possible cameos. All-in-all, I would definitely go and check it out for yourselves and I'm looking forward to watching it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment