#don’t really like Chris Pratt Starlord that much so I’m going of some comics and the game mostly

[blueboobutterfly]

Look, if y’all haven’t figured it out. I enjoy gender bending characters. So with this revelation I will present you with a headcanon.

BUFF FEM!PETER QUILL. BECAUSE YOU CANNOT TELL ME THAT WORKING ON A RAVAGER SHIP DOING A BUNCH OF WORK ON A MERCENARY SHIP WOULDN’T GIVE HER MAD MUSCLES. From working on ship, to training with other ravages, to literally being strong enough to go toe to toe with Yandus crew and their enemies would give her abs & biceps to drool over. Idk if this is me projecting on my ideal woman (cough *someone to snap me in two* cough) but I think a buff fem!star lord is needed. For her to break me in two.

Like not that she can’t be less built, but buff women are my dreammmmm. And she’s perfect, scrappy human trying to survive a ship full of alien men stronger than her and also earning her keep while not dying is a perfect setup for buff star lady to be born. I’m just saying 🤷‍♀️

[howyoucouchit]

Okay…for real, guys. Guardians of the Galaxy is as good as most people are saying.

So, I missed opening weekend, but I got to see Guardians of the Galaxy last night. If you have NOT seen it, do not keep reading, because SPOILERS. Also, if you have not seen it, what are you waiting for? It's freaking great!

I have a very limited set of knowledge about comic book superheroes. I know your big ones on both sides of the Marvel and DC aisles--your Supermans, your Batmans, your X-Men, your Spider-Mans, etc. But only so much as I know that they exist, and in a few cases, what their basic powers are, or who their love interests are, or their main villains. It doesn't go much deeper than that for me.

So when I heard about GotG, I was like, honestly, "What the ever loving fuck?" A raccoon? A tree man? What even is this? And you know what? Having now seen the movie, I'm super glad I didn't know anything about it. I had no expectations. At all. No idea of what should or could happen to these characters. No sense of what ancillary characters ought to be popping up. No eye for any of those classic Marvel Easter eggs. Props to the comics fans who can and will enjoy it on that level, but for me, given what these characters are like, and what this movie was about, it was just really fucking fun to go along for the ride.

Chris Pratt, as always, is incredibly likable as Peter Quill, aka "Starlord." In fact, he may be giving Paul Rudd a run for his money for most likable, attractive and funny leading man. His Peter Quill is not an intellectual, but he is quick on his feet, funny, open and, as he says himself, "not a 100 percent dick." He has fun chemistry with Zoe Saldana, whose Gamora is more of the heavy in this movie. (She is not funny in the way Peter is, though some of her reactions to him are pretty great. After he flirts with her, she has an awesome line about "pelvic sorcery.")

The biggest surprise to me, hands down, were the non-human Guardians. Rocket and Groot are both fantastic, fully realized characters. This is pretty astonishing when you consider that one of them is a raccoon, and the other is a tree who can only say three words. ("I am Groot.") And yet the script writers and the actors manage to infuse them both with personality and give them actual stakes. I don't mind saying that Bradley Cooper's Rocket has a couple of scenes that were downright moving…something I never thought I'd say about an anthropomorphic raccoon bounty hunter. And Rocket gives Peter Quill a run for his money as the funniest character in the movie.

If GotG had one weak point, it was the villains. Lee Pace's Ronan was run of the mill at best. A lot of shouting, posturing and chasing the MacGuffin (an "infinity stone") that was the central plot point, and not much personality. None of the charisma and charm that Tom Hiddleston brought to Loki. (The Thor movies rank as high as they do, in my estimation, largely because of Hiddleston's Loki--an example of what a villain CAN be, when done really well.) 

The other thing worth mentioning is the sound track. A lot of other reviews have been citing it, and with good reason. The movie is scored with a lot of 70s and 80s top 40 hits--classic radio tunes that would seem out of place in a space fantasy…except somehow they're not. They work perfectly, injecting even greater levity and entertainment value into the film, and they are even tied into the plot line (albeit loosely). They're more than worth it for Chris Pratt's opening scene alone…a dance sequence I won't even try to do justice to in this review.

So, go see it, please. There's only one response to someone who doesn't want to see this movie.

Golly…where are my manners?

[awed-frog]

tl;dr: nope

I got a couple of anon asks about this, and I’m also tagging @twist-shout-and-shells because they asked me to, but I have to say - I don’t know anything about comics, I don’t know Marvel at all, so this review is just a meaningless rant. Like, I know so little about this universe that the first superhero movie I ever saw in my life was Thor, and the only reason they got me was because my mythology-loving ass assumed this would be about the actual god, you know?, so that was a very confusing two hours. Anyway - after this, I’m done with them. The ridiculous hype campaign they created around Infinity War actually activated my crow brain, which means I rushed to the theater because I was sort of expecting this would be a shocking masterpiece and any spoiler would ruin it for me, and - yeah. Never doing that again. Because, whatever - they do manage to come up with some good writing from time to time, and Black Panther’s success had made me hope they’d finally recognize that a solid, coherent and meaningful story is really the first thing you need, but apparently not? 

Ugh.

Anyway, here are main reasons why I didn’t like Infinity War.

1) No, we don’t need a new plague

Problem number one with this movie is that it fails to take into account that our IQ as a people has dropped about twenty points over the last thirty years (and I’m not even joking) and that means even a guy nicknamed ‘Mad Titan’ is actually given the benefit of the doubt (I don’t remember anyone thinking Hela might have had a point, but then again, women are known to be emotionally compromised at all times, right, so all that rage was probably PMS and crazy bitches, amirite?, can’t live with them, can’t live without them). And here, predictably, is the result:

I even checked Breitbart so you wouldn’t have to and while they seem confused as to whether they should support this movie or not (don’t watch because Captain America is played by ‘Comrade Communism’, do watch because Chris Pratt is a Good Christian Man), it’s still clear to everybody over there that Thanos, “an environmentalist wacko obsessed with salvaging the natural resources of the universe” is “espousing liberal jibberish”.

So, I’m going to keep it short and mostly sourceless because I saw a lot of people discussing this, but just to be clear: yeah, it is worrying that human population has basically tripled in thirty years, but the correlation ‘more people = more damage & fewer resources’ isn’t as clear-cut as some like to think. Also, research shows that women being recognized as human beings - that’s the actual way to solve this problem (see also x, x), which means that if Thanos had meant business, he could have used those frwaking stones to build schools and family planning centres. 

2) Your plan against evil can’t be just saying no

This is probably what bugs me the most both in fiction and IRL: saying ‘Trump is a moron’, ‘capitalism is bad’ or ‘genocide is wrong’ is not a political program. It’s a moral stance, and kudos to you, but if you want to make the world a better place, you need a lot more than that. But, nope - IW fell into this trap with such relish I can actually believe no one saw this as a problem - at all. When Thanos pointed out, rather smugly, that decimating Gamora’s planet had led to a new era of happiness and prosperity, she didn’t react in any way. We never saw Tony or Shuri mentioning the outlandish, extravagant idea that better and greener technology could actually save us all. We never saw anyone point out that when the richest 1% own half the world’s wealth, wiping out half of a Nairobi slum isn’t likely to do much for the environment. I guess it wasn’t relevant to the plot?

3) Turning your audience against the good guys = dick move

That said, our planet is objectively in bad shape, and writers and artists who are (or like to think of themselves as) engagés are more than welcome to discuss this - for all her faults, JK Rowling did that to perfection in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, focusing on the importance of conservation and taking a clear stance against animal trafficking. Other movies, of course, went a lot farther than that: my movie rec of the day is Okja, a masterful and soulwrenching look at how capitalism manages food production. But IW, on top of everything else, manages to be an anti-green movement movie? As if that was needed in any way? Apparently comic!Thanos’ goal was to impress Lady Death or something, and maybe they should have gone with that, because to me, movie!Thanos’ plan sounds like an ill-conceived and unfortunate parody of the green movement. In fact, eminent biologist E. O. Wilson’s Half-Earth explores this exact possibility - which is not about killing off 50% of the population, thank you very much, but about improving agriculture and urban structures so we can leave 50% of the world to the rest of the ecosystem. And maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit weird the book came out at about the same time when IW’s script was being written? I try not to be a paranoid nutcase, but come on. Because what the movie does is that it turns Thanos into a sort of green Hitler whose only focus is the environment (“But he was a vegetarian!”), cue the creepy final shot of him going all ‘Schwarzy in the forest’ surrounded by clean-water creeks and happy animals while we are left counting our dead. The metaphor couldn’t be more obvious, and to be honest it is most unwelcome. Time and place, guys? I really haven’t seen something so revolting since I got to the end of the Da Vinci Code and realized atheists were the true monsters all along.

4) Being a hero doesn’t mean saving your friends

So this is starting to become a trend, and seriously, enough. If you’re a hero, then you need to think of something greater than yourself, and this is why your life will suck and suck and suck until your untimely death. Deal with it? And I can understand Loki giving up the Tesseract for his brother, because he’s always been more of an anti-hero than a hero, and his morals are shot to hell in any case, and I’ll forgive Dr Strange because he clearly saw something we didn’t, but what the hell was Steve thinking? Seriously, I keep seeing posts about how Pure and Noble Steve is, and guys, did we even see the same movie? Bringing Vision to Wakanda meant endangering an entire nation, and thousands of people there paid for that choice with their lives. It’s because Steve insisted in not seeing the big picture - or accepting Vision’s own wishes - that Thanos even succeeded in the first place. If they’d destroyed the stone, Thanos would never have gotten his hands on it, and Wakanda would not have been attacked by a horde of alien demons. Sacrificing hundreds or thousands of nameless (black, African) warriors to keep one (white) man safe is not heroism - it’s cowardice. It’s assuming your own feelings and your friends’ lives count more than the lives of strangers, and this is the exact opposite of how a hero should think. Not that I’m surprised, since Steve already condoned the destruction of half of Bucharest to save Bucky, but whatever. Compare and contrast with Tony, by the way, who first tried to destroy the Time stone, then chose to sacrifice himself to save someone he didn’t even like? Yeah, that’s more like it. #TeamStark

5) Every single woman is defined by her relationship to a man

With the caveat that no emotion, connection or motivation is throroughly explored in IW because it’s an action-packed movie during which people never speak an honest word to each other (relying instead on posturing, movie quotes and sarcastic remarks), here is basically what happens: men have things, and women have men. Tony’s journey is mostly about saving Peter and also sacrificing himself for the world. Steve is all about his friends and various heroics. Dr Strange is a sort of ascetic monk playing the long game. Thanos wants to save the universe or something. And Vision is on a quest towards humanity? Maybe? But the women - Gamora is important because she’s Thanos’ daughter. Scarlet Witch is important because she loves Vision. Natasha (I think she’s in the movie? I don’t actually remember if we hear her speak) is on Cap’s side because Cap. Pepper only appears to remind us of what Tony has to lose. Exceptions to this rule include Shuri, whom IW didn’t quite manage to destroy; Loki, who was always female- and queer-coded, so I’m not surprised he ends up dying for the handsome and suitably Aryan hero; and arguably Starlord, who mostly fights for Gamora (what is a virtue in a woman, however, is a weakness in a man, because Starlord ends up fucking up the plan because of his love for her). And I know they probably tried to compensate for the complete lack of women in the movie by highlighting how powerful Scarlet Witch is and focusing so much on Gamora, but I’m an annoying person, so that didn’t work for me. Because, again, Scarlet Witch is a 2D character plucked directly from a Victorian dictionary’s definition of ‘woman’ (while the menfolk around her worry about the possible demise of the Entire Earth, there she is, channelling all her energy in being a good and loyal companion to her robot husband) and Gamora has no more control over her life in this movie than she had as a child? Her main narrative purpose in IW is to make us feel bad for her boyfriend and father, who’re both driven to kill her (for very different reasons) and suffer for her death (and don’t get me started on Thanos suddenly loving someone and what a stroke of luck, the one person in the universe he gives a damn about just happens to be standing next to him on top of a cliff when he needs to kill her). Seriously, why is it that female characters’ concerns still begin and end with romantic love? This trope that romance is the most important thing for every single woman needed to die, like, yesterday.

6) None of that actually means anything

Look, I’m a sucker of time-travel of any description, but I also think time-travel must be done honestly or not at all. Movies like Back to the Future or Arrival both use time bending to great effect, because the stakes are real and painful and there are all sort of complex decisions facing our heroes. But IW doesn’t care about any of that. The existence of the Time stone is not about ethical dilemmas or even turning up the drama to eleven - the one purpose of that thing is to make us hope that our personal fave is not dead after all, so we’ll keep watching this stupid franchise until the end of times. That finale could have been innovative and heartwrenching, and instead we already know it wasn’t. Samuel L. Jackson is apparently confirmed in Captain Marvel, which will be released next year, and we also know they’re working on Spider-Man 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Black Panther 2 and Doctor Strange 2. Capitalism has very nearly killed the possibility of creating a well-written and gutting story, because the rule is, If it makes money, it goes the fuck on. Hence TV shows which no longer make any kind of sense but we all keep watching out of nostalgia, affection for the characters or dissatisfaction with our own lives, and also franchises which stretch the plot to new and boring limits (for instance, it beggars belief that Tony and Steve didn’t even meet in IW, and their fight never came up at all: I guess we’ll have to wait for IW 2, or Avengers 37: The One with The Talk). And here, again, studios are so greedy that they willingly disregard the fact audiences will reward ‘complete’ stories: for instance, Logan was critically acclaimed and made tons of money, but the risk of ‘permanently’ killing off a beloved character is still considered too high. And playing it safe actually works: IW costed $320 million, which is about 5% of the studio’s budget, and that investment has already been repaid in full (the movie made double that in the first two weeks).  

(Meanwhile, 21st Century Fox gained more than one billion dollars from Trump’s TAX REFORM THAT WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN - probably a disappointing amount of money for owner Richard Murdoch, who has a net worth of 15 billion and is known to use some of that hard-earned cash to support laudable & important causes such as the privatization of public education, but hey, we all need to make do and move on, right? Right.)

So this is mostly it. To be fair, IW was mildly entertaining, and I thought they sort of did a good job in juggling twenty leads - we got no character development at all and no meaningful dialogue, but we saw everybody at least once and their lines were funny? Some moments were genuinely good despite a couple of bizarre plot points (I’m still unclear on why Strange didn’t create a circle of fire around Thanos’ arm, and very tired of the overused ‘Yeah, let’s save the most powerful weapons for last’ trope), so I wouldn’t say this was the worst movie ever made, but as I said, I’m done. I’ve given more than enough money to this franchise, so when IW 2 comes out, I think I’ll be a boring adult and watch it on TV as I’m doing my ironing or something. Good times.

[game-refraction]

Game Review: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series - Episode 1 (Xbox One)

Telltale Games had a lot to live up to after releasing the absolutely stellar ‘Tales from the Borderlands’. I’m not a huge fan of its Walking Dead series or its Game of Thrones one-off, and its latest Batman game I still have yet to push past its first episode, but Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us were just so damn good and became my Telltale Games benchmark. It was during a voice actor strike that we first learned of Telltale adapting Guardians of the Galaxy to their adventure game model and one that at times can be a great experience, even if the cracks in the engine are really starting to show.

“Tangled up in Blue” is the first of five episodes that will be released periodically throughout the year to be purchased separately or as part of a $26.99 season pass. It’s also expected that there will be a physical edition released some point later on that collects the episodes in one easy to download package, even if the season pass purchase is a simple click itself.

This version of the Guardian’s team is a small twist on what Director James Gunn and writer Nicole Perlman brought to us in the 2014 movie than what we currently see in the latest comics, even if the comic book publisher is slowly converting these characters to something closer to their celluloid counterparts. Peter Quill still rocks the cassette player, even if it’s an awful purple color here instead of the orange we saw in the movie. Gamora reflects much on her sister Nebula as well as her father, the Mad Titan; Thanos. Drax still takes everything spoken to him quite literal and Rocket is still always complaining and translating for Groot.

Episode 1 takes us to a few places and puts the team in a variety of situations, even if there isn’t much going on here. There is a rather fun ‘boss battle’ in the early chapters with someone I hope to still see in later episodes, despite the resolution of not only this battle but with how the story ends at the conclusion of this episode. The game does shake up a few of the standard Telltale mechanics and allows Peter to converse with his team via a comm device for a few interesting bits of dialogue, as well as using Peter’s thrusters on his boots to explore the surroundings to give us some more classic point and click moments. I did find the game to be far too easy with no puzzle elements really to be found to offer much challenge or creativity.

I found that after the initial few chapters that the game slows down a bit too much and not a whole lot happens. During these moments, you can interact with the team, explore some very small areas aboard the Milano, and a dialogue only chapter in a space bar where you’ll need to take sides on a few arguments between team members. At times the game can feel like it is trying to mimic certain moments from the movie instead of going further with these characters in situations created solely for the game.

As is the case with all the Telltale adventure games, you will make choices that can, and will, have consequences to your actions, or what you say, or sometimes what you don’t say, to characters within the story. “Rocket will remember that” or, “Drax noticed what you did” will flash up on the screen after making certain choices indicating that what you said or did will have some effect later on. While most of these consequences are not felt in this episode, there are moments in the game where the story does take a change depending on who you sided with during a fight or what was spoken earlier on.

As I mentioned in my Tales from the Borderlands review, the engine used for Telltales’s games is really starting to show its age. There are some nice visual spots in the game like details here and there, but for the most part, there isn’t anything here that is drastically impressive. Characters and environments can be rather basic, have poor textures or suffer from some very robotic animations. When you are given the freedom to walk around, Starlord’s walking animations are painful to watch. The game also suffers from some awkward pauses when it transitions from scene to scene or when you move to another room on the Milano. For a game as visually basic as it is, load times can be oddly long and break the pace of a scene.

As was the case with the movies, and its upcoming sequel, Telltale has packed in a few licensed songs that feel very comfortable here and work well. The cast of the game is pretty decent and can often look to emulate what Marvel Studios has done with the movies. Scott Porter is rather good as Peter Quill and I’m glad he doesn’t really look to fully mimic what Chris Pratt did with the role and attempts to have fun with the character and give him a voice that works well with the Telltale model. Brandon Paul Eells, Emily O’Brien, and Adam Harrington all work well as Drax, Gamora, and Groot, but don’t offer much in the way of standing out. Lastly, we have Nolan North as Rocket. While this isn’t the first time that North has voiced the explosive little rascal, he has tweaked the voice a bit to sound more like that of Bradley Cooper and this small change really helps it prevent itself from sounding more like a parody of the character. The rest of the cast is good, so far, and the main villain of the game has me intrigued, to say the least. 

Episode 1 is an ok but often uneven start to this five-part series which thankfully is more fun that it’s not. I didn’t find the writing to be as witty and as fun as Tales from the Borderlands and felt the game played it very safe and uneventful for its debut episode. Visually I would have liked to see Telltale update their engine and put far more polish on a game that should be running far more smoother than what we get here. I am very interested to see where the next four episodes take us as the villain looks to impress and the story is just interesting enough to wet my appetite for more shenanigans in a galaxy that needs a few more guardians, and dance off’s, which I am sure will happen eventually, because reasons.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series was purchased and reviewed on Xbox One. All Screenshots were taken via the screenshot system and shared via the Windows 10 Xbox One App.

Still not sure? Take a look at the Episode 1 trailer!

Game Review: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series – Episode 1 (Xbox One) was originally published on Game-Refraction