JFK

JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) 

 

"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

At the time of this film's release, Stone's movie-collage of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories was more than controversial, it was inflammatory. Experts in "the field" criticized it for playing fast and loose with facts and some went so far as to call it dangerous in its implications. There was so much flummery going on, some of which contradicted other speculations of the film, that it was considered a new form of propaganda, where new possibilities popped up before previous assertions were followed up on, that one was simply overwhelmed with the slew of speculations so that, finally, nothing was ever concluded. There were no answers, merely a mountain of questions, all of them vague and unsubstantiated. Stone was merely throwing stuff up at the screen and seeing if anything stuck.

Stone answered these charges by saying that he was making a new kind of film, and that he was trying to build a new narrative for the Kennedy assassination, not provide a definitive answer, but to ask questions, merely. The evidence of film bears it out—at least at first glance—as it's so filled with theories and goes down so many rabbit-holes, unchecked and unverified (Stone has stated he was using the films Rashomon and Z as his models). But, one only has to see how Stone starts the movie to know where he thinks the center of the conspiracy lies. After that quote by author and spiritualist Ella Wheeler Wilcox, he introduces Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower's final address as President, in which he warns of "the military-industrial complex". Like so many openings of so many movies, it is the director's thesis statement, providing that one bit of detail before launching into a history of Kennedy's recent history (narrated by Martin Sheen, who has played both John and Robert Kennedy in the past).

"I'm ashamed to be an American today."

The film proper begins the day of Kennedy's assassination as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner, who had, in 1998's Bull Durham, delivered a speech in which his character states "I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.") sees the assassination coverage on television initially in his office, then watches mournfully from a nearby bar where the local booze-hounds are free to weep in their beers or grunt their approval of the President's death. At the same point he cuts away to an argument between two men in the bar, New Orleans private detective Guy Bannister (Edward Asner) and an operative Jack Wheeler (Jack Lemmon),* which leads to a fight in Bannister's office when Martin brings up past suspicious activity. Meanwhile, Garrison starts looking into local links to the assassination and brings in pilot David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), who might have had links with Oswald. And despite Ferrie being sketchy and giving conflicting stories, they let him go.

"It's all broken down, spread around, you read it and the point gets lost."

It is only after the Warren Commission Report on the assassination is released that Garrison picks up the threads of the case again. A chance airplane encounter with a Senator (Walter Matthau), whose skepticism —"That dog don't hunt!"—about the report sparks Garrison to again call in Ferrie, but also Martin, who had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in Bannister's office and follow up leads not explored after the initial inquiry was dropped. One name keeps popping up—"Clay Bertrand" but nobody knows who that is. Turns out that "Bertrand" is an alias of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), well known in New Orleans business circles as a wealthy benefactor and who had connections with Ferrie and thus Oswald. Garrison and his team have Shaw picked up for arrest despite their inquiries producing only denials.

 

"Oh, you are so naive"

 

One aspect of the film that is both a high achievement and problematic is the way that it mixes archive footage with deftly re-created new footage in such a way that it is nearly impossible to determine one from the other. Stone and his cinematographer, the wizardly Robert Richardson, mix and match formats, color and black-and-white, 35mm and 16mm, and all sorts of film stocks to create and re-create source footage and the results are nearly indistinguishable, especially the way they are cross-cut between each other. It lends the air of verisimilitude—and certainly adds a dynamic tension between the transitions—but one is never sure if one should believe what one is seeing. Is that press footage from the day of the shooting or is Stone just fabricating something he wants you to see?

It's troubling. There's a fine line between making it look right and obfuscation and given that film, by its very nature, is manipulative—even with documentaries—the level of distrust this attention to detail evokes is extremely high. What are we to believe? The answer is whatever the director wants you to believe. And given Richardson's deserving Oscar-winning work on this film to match the look, the grain and the confusion of archive footage, some of which might even be familiar, distinguishing the true from forgery is almost impossible. And audiences become susceptible.

One should always be aware that it's a fictional film of real-life events. And rather than speaking truth, it can only come up with conjecture.

 

"And the truth is on your side, bubba."

 

Stone makes his own case on what happened in a middle sequence where Garrison goes to Washington D.C. to meet an informant, a former military official who only identifies himself as "X" (Donald Sutherland, who's brilliant in a role of pure exposition). That Garrison would fly to D.C. to meet an anonymous source strains credulity (he surely must know his name before agreeing to meet, but then, the reality is Garrison never met this character, communicating with him in un-cinematic exchanges of letters).

It is 'X''s contention that Kennedy was making feasibility studies for withdrawing troops from Vietnam—"X" was doing the inquiries—and that this rattled the cages of the Pentagon and the CIA. "X" is unexpectedly assigned to...Antarctica...and only learns of the assassination the next day when he reads a New Zealand newspaper that has a full run-down on Oswald as the assassin when he hadn't even been charged yet. To "X" this smacks of "black ops" work (which he also used to do). Oh, and did I mention that "X" was also part of Kennedy's security detail? "X" seems to have got around.

Anyway, by the end of his exposition, "X" has a conspiracy that could involve the Pentagon, "the military-industrial complex", FBI, CIA, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, the Secret Service and Lyndon B. Johnson—he was in the fired-upon motorcade, after all—and all of them had grudges against Kennedy, but mostly, they didn't want to cease operations in Vietnam which was making a lot of people a lot of money. This is the same Vietnam War that Oliver Stone fought in from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry, which was a traumatic experience for him, and that he has made the subject of three of his films.

"X" refuses to come forward with this information and flat-out refuses to be a witness for Garrison's prosecution, but "X" tells him that his best chance is that he's the only guy conducting a trial involving the Kennedy assassination. "Your only chance," he says "is to come up with a case. Something. Anything. Make arrests. Stir the shit-storm. Hope to start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government will crack." And, with those words of encouragement, he walks away, leaving Garrison hanging. Stone cuts to the Eternal Flame at Kennedy's grave. When Stone gets in trouble, he goes for sentimentality.

The film's last hour is that most deadly of momentum killers, a trial, with Exhibit A being a long speech by one character...in this case Garrison.* That speech wouldn't stand in a court of law and it isn't made clear if it's a closing argument (that barely mentions the defendant Clay Shaw) or a part of Garrison's evidentiary overview (it starts with objections from the defense and then they are never heard from again), but Stone is dramatically stretching truth...and credulity...to make his point. And it goes on forever, like the stultifying final speech in court in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It's only Stone's direction, Richardson's chameleon cinematography and Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia's quick-silver editing that keeps it interesting as film. And almost impossible to make counter-arguments against the assertions, they come so fast and furiously.

Stone's film ends with "what's past is prologue." Okay, so let's look at the past. All previous American political assassinations, successful or otherwise, before and after Kennedy's own, have been due to "lone gun-men" (or women). The most suspicious shooting is that of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And most damning of all, recent events have seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents questioning or ignoring, even humiliating their own intelligence or military agencies...but manage to remain very much alive. Kennedy was less of a threat...he merely wanted to wind down a war...as has been done recently...and Stone would have you think he was killed for it.

Yet, History doesn't bear that out. In fact, though they may rebel (or at least write a book), they don't assassinate. "That dog don't hunt."

Remember, "what's past is prologue."

But, the film did have an impact. 99% of the documents that were sealed after the assassination have been brought to light, particularly to the issues raised in the movie (The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed in 1992, the year after the movie's release). Although the stated goal of the act was to release all documents by October 2017, some still have not been released. Trump went back on a promise to release them pushing it back to when he was out of office, then Biden delayed them (COVID...for some reason) then released some in 2022 and 2023.** We're at 99% except for those that would cause "identifiable harm... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure."

Same old excuse. "It'll keep us from doing our jobs" they say, even if those jobs have dramatically changed in 60 years. But, if JFK is worth anything, it is for its shaming of our government agencies' lack of transparency to commit them to act in that 1992 law. Six decades is two generations of secrets. Too many people and too many prominent people have expressed their doubts to not have as many answers as possible to wash away as many questions as possible.

Not that that will make a difference. We've reached the Age of Un-reason where nobody believes their own eyes anymore. If everything was released, unredacted and transparent, it is doubtful that the truth would be accepted...especially by those who make their livings as professional doubters and skeptics.

The true conspiracy has always been theirs. As in the mantra of All the President's Men, one merely has to "follow the money."

"It's up to you."

 

* The film is awash with cameo's and "guest-stars" in what Stone intended to be like the roster of The Longest Day, but it feels more like the many odd cameos in The Greatest Story Ever Told, that seem ill-though-out and are actually distracting and pull you right out of the movie. John Candy? 

** This is just part of Garrison's summation from the film:

The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague's cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet Theory." This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you'd have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.

*** Whether Trump will release any more documents in his next term one can only speculate. I don't believe a word the man says so even if he says he will, I'd be looking at updates on the website: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk

Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Costner's Folly, Chapter 2 ("Nobody Knows Anything")

or

Going For the Fences
 

You've got to hand it to Kevin Costner. He takes chances. He's parlayed his television success on "Yellowstone" to make a movie he's been dreaming of for a couple of decades, in times both fallow and flush, cast it with a steady stream of great character actors who've never passed onto the A-list, split it into two chapters (although hopefully there will be more) and released the first one—in which various story-lines do not intersect—as a 3-hour set-up...the sum of which would spell box-office poison to a movie-going audience that wants its product pre-digested and easily grasped like fast-food.

 

And who can blame him? He's done it before. When he was making it, Dances with Wolves was being derided as "Costner's Folly" for making a Western when they weren't fashionable, for it's extensive location shooting, for the supposed grandiosity of writing, directing, producing and starring in it, for it's planned use of sub-titles, and for its cost overruns. 

 

But, as William Goldman wrote, nobody in Hollywood knows anything. Dances with Wolves became a box-office smash, its elegaic, and unconventionally seditious, story becoming a hit with audiences and garnering the Best Picture Oscar, beating out Goodfellas (which some may argue was a mistake, but, to my mind, really wasn't).

So, here's "Coster's Folly" Chapter Two, the ungainly titled Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, with a story by Mark Kasdan (who co-wrote Silverado, a favorite of mine), Costner and Jon Baird, photographed by J. Michael Muro, who shot Costner's lovely Open Range.

 

And it's great. Simply great.

For a 3-hour movie, it sails right by, packed to the sprockets with detail, period and story-wise, never seeming to waste a frame in telling three...four? five?...stories about a plot of land in the San Pedro Valley in the American west that may—or may not —be available for homesteading, and the people who are attracted to the promise of it (whether it is true or not) and the people already living there who take it for what it is. 

 

There are the first white settlers, there to survey and parcel, but as they're alone in the wilderness and, unbeknownst to them, surveying Apache hunting grounds, they soon fall victim to a war party. Their graves are the first semi-permanent structures of Horizon. They won't be the last.

But, the pattern will remain the same. By 1863, there is a well-established colony on the site, across the river from those three original graves. They, too, are attacked by Apache, leaving a limited number of survivors: some, like Frances Kittridge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) will take shelter at nearby Fort Gallant; others, like the boy who rode to the fort to get help, Russell (Etienne Kellici) form a hunting party to track down the Apache who burned down the encampment.

That attack has caused a dispute between the leader of the war party, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) and the leader Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz), resulting in the younger man splitting from the tribe, taking one of Tuayeseh's sons with him. 

In Montana, James Sykes (Charles Halford) is shot by Lucy (Jena Malone), who takes her son David and flees for the Wyoming territory. Sykes' sons Junior (Jon Beavers) and Caleb (Jamie Campbell Bower) are sent to find her and the child. They catch up with her where she now goes by the name Ellen, married to hopeful lands-trader Walter Childs and living with a local prostitute Marybelle (Abbey Lee). When the Sykes boys show up, there is a confrontation between the vicious Caleb and saddle-tramp Hayes Ellison (Costner), a potential customer of Marybelle's. She and Hayes and the child escape town to avoid repercussions of the murder.

Also heading for Horizon is a wagon train, moving along the Santa Fe Trail, under the auspices of Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who is having trouble keeping the eclectic group of settlers (including a naive British couple and the family of Frances Kittridge's late husband) of the mind that, although they may be headed for a paradise, they're not there yet, and water and team-spirit are in short supply in a desert.

In the mix are interesting characters, like the leaders of the Army detachment at Ft. Gallant, who are straight out of John Ford's Cavalry films: Lt. Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington, the most effective performance I've seen of his), who's a pragmatic soldier and would just as soon have settlers somewhere else and the "indigenous" (as he calls them) left to their land to keep the peace, a sentiment acknowledged but considered historically unrealistic by Gallant's leader, Col. Albert Houghton (Danny Huston) and his sergeant major, Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker, in a slightly less garrulous version of the parts Victor McLaglan played in Ford films). One likes these people and you get the feeling everybody's doing the best they can under the conditions and the inevitability of time.

That's a novel's worth of people and a lot of stories and one suspects everybody's going to converge in Horizon (the town itself will probably end up being the focus of the series), their characters already established and with ensuing complications in the offing—Costner has previews of the next chapter at the end of this one and my appetite for it is whetted.

Despite the obvious nods towards Ford, Horizon: an American Saga, so far, feels more in the vein of the sprawling How the West was Won, but, in character, more like "Lonesome Dove", where individuals weave in and out of the fabric of the narrative, and sometimes—as in life—are never to be seen again in an indifferent Universe, lost in the stream of History. Costner may love his Westerns, but he acknowledges there's less romanticism to it when the survival rate hovers around 50%.

It was in Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a reporter states "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Ford's career peeled back veneers of western legend varnish in his films and in his later work stripped off more layers of his own earlier myth-making. Costner goes even farther, taking into account the grubbier myths of Leone and Peckinpah (and Eastwood) with his hard-scrabble porous towns in need of light and cleaning and extermination. He goes a step further by putting back all the practicalities of the settler experience that Ford cut out—the burying of the dead, the scarcity of water, the bugs and critters, the difficulty of killing a man with ball-shot, the necessity of self-sustainment by farming, the ritual of hard work, more important community matters than tea-dances and ceremonies.

If there's anything more to wish for, for me, it would be that there's more of it (despite others quibbling about length). A couple transition sequences seem to have been excised just to speed things along that might not have added much but may have smoothed a passage of time.

It's still early days, but one gets the sense that Costner will be making a point that the beauty of the West that we admire may not be just a matter of the dirt and stone carved by time and tide but also foundationed by the bones of those who walked before us. 

The Suicide Squad

Task Force "Ecch!"

or

"Here's Hoping I See You in 3 Hours"

 

David Ayer's Suicide Squad was a sad affair. The trailers looked great, and the fan response was so positive to them that the Warner Brothers team took the movie away from Ayer and tapped the trailer team to re-cut it. There may have been two cuts and some "genius" mixed and matched, but the sum total was not as lively as it should have been, and a lot less anarchic as it was called out to be. It was glum with the sole high point being the introduction to Margot Robbie's version of Harley Quinn.

 

So, now, here's the 2.0 version, with a "The" adjective inserted to tell them apart (the next "Batman" film is "The" Batman), and the Warner Bro's do what they usually do when they think one of their tent-poles is in trouble—hire a director with ties to Marvel to re-do it (because that's worked so well in the past!). In this case, it's Troma director James Gunn, who directed the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films for Marvel, and got fired by Disney for some "bad tweets" he'd made in the past. While Disney got their mouse-knickers in a bunch, Warner grabbed him for the next "Suicide Squad" before Disney/Marvel turned tail and asked him to come back.

It was Warner's gain. Gunn's "take" on "Task Force X" "works".

There isn't a lot of set-up. We're are introduced to the super-villain Savant (Gunn crony Michael Rooker), sent to Belle Reve prison for blackmail. He has been made a deal by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, national treasure and who is put to good use here) to become part of "Task Force X"—The Suicide Squad. An explosive charge is put in his neck (amusingly, played by the comics' creator James Ostrander) and is told that if he deviates from his mission that the device will be detonated, killing him instantly, but if the mission is accomplished and he survives, ten years will be taken off his sentence.

 

He is put on a plane to the South American Island of Corto Maltese, which has just had it's American-friendly government toppled by a new regime of cut-throats. The team consists of Savant, Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman from the original film), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, ditto), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, ditto-ditto) as well as new members Blackguard (Peter Davidson), Javelin (Flula Borg), an alien warlord called Mongal (Mayling Ng), TDK ("don't ask" and played by Nathan Fillion) and Weasel (Sean Gunn). Things do not go well once they make land-fall as their landing has been leaked to military on the island. As some of the posters say "Don't get too attached." More on this section later.

That assault was just a diversion; another team, comprising of Bloodsport (Idris Elba—he's great in this!), Peacemaker (Jon Cena), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), King Shark (Steve Agee and voiced by Sylvester Stallone), and The Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchion) land elsewhere and have a considerably easier time of it. How these guys got mixed up in this is done with a flashback as their mission is to infiltrate the capital and destroy all vestiges of what is called "Operation: Starfish," a super-secret project that has been under wraps for years and is in danger of being misused by the current junta. Oh, and their mission gets revised to also rescue Flag and Harley, who have gone missing.

Sounds simple enough, but there's still quite a few characters to juggle, and unlike Ayer, who gave back-stories to Quinn and Deadshot—and that's about it—Gunn manages to weave back-story in without having to build a whole new sequence around it, interrupting the story-flow. Oh, he jumps around in time a bit, but in the service of planning a surprise with a well-timed "gotcha" at moments of extreme duress for the team. "How will they get out of this one?" Well, just wait, we've got some 'splainin' to do.

Now, those who've seen the Marvel "Guardians" movies will be surprised at the difference between a "PG-13" James Gunn movie and a Hard-"R" James Gunn movie. Those who remember his unrated comics spoof, Super, will be more prepared. In the battle sequences, faces get blown off, people are ripped to shreds, blood spurts copiously, bodies set aflame, and limbs come off—intentionally and unintentionally—in a way that feels more like a visit to a triage unit than it does a comic-book fight. At one point (when Harley Quinn is single-handedly making an escape from the island El Presidente's stronghold) the blood-splatter is replaced by flower-petals and chirping birds, which can be explained away that she's crazy, but more probably it's to avoid an "X"-rating. 

And it's persistent. Parents should be warned: "It's a super-hero movie" is not an excuse and taking your kids to this is like taking them to Taxi Driver.

That being said, the movie also goes out of its way to be goofy. Gunn has picked comic-book characters whose power ratings are very low in the D&D deck—"Polka-Dot Man?" "The Disconnected Kid?" "Ratcatcher 2?" "Weasel?"—but very high in the disposability category. That also includes two characters we meet later: "The Thinker" (played by an emaciated—but no less sharp—Peter Capaldi), and the movie's "Big Bad," one of the original villains of DC's "silver age"—appearing in the first appearance of The Justice League—"Starro, the Conqueror."

Yes, folks, he's a giant starfish. But, an intergalactic giant starfish. (Okay, that's still not impressive...) An intergalactic giant star-fish, who can squirt little starfish that will latch onto your face and take over your mind (except in the movie, they kill people dead and re-animate them as zombies). Well, yeah, it's still silly as all Hell, but...ya know...canon, copyrighted, merchandisable DC property...all of that.

A starfish throws a shark into a building. Yeah, tell me you've seen that before...

 
Okay, it's still silly as all Hell—especially when Gunn has stuck a google-eye rolling around in the middle of it—but, for me, it's a little bit of the charm. I liked the Pacific Rim movies, even though my rational brain told me that giant killer robots are a really ungainly system of defense (like the AT-AT's in the "Star Wars" movies, "just go for the legs and let gravity sort it out"), but it's still something of a hoot to see. And look, you can go as grim and gritty as you want to in the quest to make your movie "bad-ass," but in the end it's still a comic book movie. Real junta's flood countries with cocaine or hack computer clouds, they don't launch giant starfish (although I bet they would if they could).

What I'm saying is the goofiness off-sets the carnage, crossing that bridge between tension and comedy, which, although I say it's a bridge it is actually more of a tightrope. The greater the tension, the greater the release, whether it be shock or laughter. Gunn has always had that sensibility, but the allowance to go "R" just gives him permission to push the boundaries, not unlike the original Deadpool (but without the fourth-wall breaking "meta" quality that quickly wears out its welcome). It's fast, it's funny, and it's more than competent. Recently, I've been decrying the loose/lame action scenes these movies have been sporting, but Gunn lets you know where people are, how they got there, and what the big picture perspective of those sequences are. With so many characters that takes some doing.

Casting helps that process a lot. Fortunately, the film is chock-full of good actors who can do the drama and the comedy. Davis, Robbie and, surprisingly, Kinnaman pull this off amazingly well. But, Idris Elba comes off with one of the best star-turns he's ever done, Cena shows a flair for straight-faced comedy, Melchior becomes the heart and soul of the movie, and Dastmalchion takes a lame part and turns it to an advantage. You care if these guys make it through the movie, and, as it lives up to the title and original concept, that is never a sure-thing.

 

It's a savage/silly romp, not afraid of making fun of and celebrating the silliness of the four-color world.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

Super-Saturation
or
A Small "s" Sequel

The first Guardians of the Galaxy movie looked like such a lame concept in the trailers (and post-credits set-up of some Marvel film or other—I've lost track*) that it was a pleasant surprise for it to be not only fresh and funny, but an oddly genre-disdainful addition to the Marvel Universe, a story of space-orphans who form a Dirty Half-Dozen and quite against their intentions become a family, a dysfunctional family, to be sure, but a family nonetheless. Indeed, more power to them as they discover they're better as a group than as individuals, no matter how good they think they are, individually.

Given the success of the first film, there had to be the inevitable sequel, called (unimaginatively) Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2.  Same cast with a few additions, same writer-director (James Gunn, whose Super was a damning condemnation of heroic vigilantism, comic culture and the ones who are both perpetrators and victims of it) and one would hope, given his past, that any continuation would have the same affectionately anarchic spirit and mess with the formula.

Alas, it doesn't. Alack, someone must have made him read the memo's from Marvel Studios (the animated corporate logo of which is becoming increasingly long and self-important) of the audience metrics from the last one because it starts out catering to the masses with its opening sequence.** 

The self-styled Guardians are on a job protecting a group called "The Sovereigns" (as in the coinage, I'd guess, because they are gilded from head to foot like some Goldfinger fetish-fantasy) whose "something-or-other" batteries are being threatened by a "who-the-hell-cares" squid-ish attacker from outer space that's going to drain them or eat them or replace them with cheap convenience-store-branded batteries and that just ain't right. It feels like a disposable "Men in Black" sequence where they just needed a strong open and this is as good as any to show that the group is still together and functioning as a viable team.

Now, as everyone synchronizes watches and gets ready for the attack, Rocket the Raccoon (he has a lot of good disparaging nicknames in the movie) is busy...setting up a sound system? What the...? It's because one of the delights of the first film was its use of old obscure pop as a soundtrack and the sound system is to play a track...possibly as mood music for the team, distraction for the opponent, or for soundtrack sales for Marvel Studios (my guess would be the latter). Whatever. The Main Titles run along while the Guardians are battling a big-mouthed squid, while in the foreground Baby Groot is boogieing to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" to the delight of the audience, while the carnage goes on around him.

Cute. But derivative, one might even say pandering. And a bit of a time-waster, even if the Titles are unwinding in the background. It's a call-back to the previous film's mid-credit sequence where "potted" Groot is grooving to the Jackson's "I Want You Back"—and freezes whenever Drax (David Bautista) notices him. This sort of "memory lane" of audience highlights is lazy writing and dilutes the good will of the original as well as its uniqueness. I keep wondering if someday a movie sequel will ever be a direct copy of its predecessor and I realize that it's been done—Back to the Future II, for most of its length follows a parallel path to its Part 1. It's a weakness of series films that they hearken back to their origins, and there's nothing anyone can say except "I've got a bad feeling about this." It is lazy writing, but at the behest of producers who know it's less risky to do more of the same than tinker with what made the coffers fill the last time.

This is concerning for someone who enjoyed the original Guardians' insouciance in messing with the uber-tone of most movies based on comics, trying desperately to be taken seriously that they take on the mantle of big-m "Myth." It's indicative of less risk-taking (which made its predecessor so enjoyable). A Guardians of the Galaxy entry that took itself seriously would be as dull as Thor...or Iron Man III. Enough on that, there's a whole rest of the movie that improves things.

Ayesha...or "Her"...or "Kismet"...anyway, she's different from the Marvel comics version...i
f she weren't she'd be the Sylvester Stallone character's mother. A-Yeesh.

But, the sequence does get the movie started and introduces us to the Sovereigns, whose Queen Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki...in an Oscar-worthy performance because, frankly, she LOOKS like an Oscar) pays the Guardians their reward, the sister of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Nebula (Karen Gillan), the bitter daughter of Thanos (it would be Josh Brolin if he appeared) who disappeared after commandeering a ravager ship in the last movie. Fortunately, it starts to lighten up once the G.o.t.G's move away from Main Title Land. With Nebula in tow, they have to leave in a hurry when it's discovered that Rocket has stolen some of the batteries they've been paid to protect. The Sovereigns send out an impressive number of drone-ships to stop them, but a couple of light-jumps and the battered ship, which is dragging a tethered Drax held by a straining Gamora with her hair on fire (now that's a bit more like it!), crash-lands on a far-away rock.

"Some day, son, this can be all yours..."

They've been followed. The folks in the craft are Ego (Kurt Russell) and his protege Mantis (Pom Klementieff), who make the astounding revelation that Ego is the actual biological father of Peter Quill (Chris Pratt)—his real one, not his human step-father. Quill, Drax and Gamora go to Ego's planet (well...yeah, no, I'm not going to say it...spoiler) while Rocket and Groot keep an eye on Nebula while repairing their ship. The Sovereigns aren't done yet. After Yondu (Michael Rooker) has a falling out with another Ravager, Stakar Ogord (Sylvester Stallone...mm-hmm...we're starting to recycle past super-hero stars***) over child-trafficking (he's the one who plucked Peter Quill from Earth, after all, but...keeps him...because he had tiny, stealing hands), he's approached by the Sovereigns to track down the Guardians wherever in the Universe they might be.

Ego's planet...or maybe...his ego's bigger than you think.

So, there's a lot of conflict and cross-conflict: the Guardians against the Sovereigns AND the Ravagers; factions of the Ravagers against other factions of the Ravagers; Nebula against Gamora; Quill against his team-mates who are suspicious about Ego; Quill with his own suspicions about Ego (despite his finding out the answer to one of his Big Questions). With conflicts come alliances and sometimes in the most unexpected places. Old grudges dissipate with new understandings and different perspectives and the Guardians evolve into a new team, a combination of old and new members.

"We are a pair, aren't we?"

But, the biggest conflict isn't Ravager or Sovereign vs Guardian, it's Nature vs Nurture. It seems odd but wholly appropriate that by the end of Guardians, Vol. 2, there is a perverse contradiction of "there's no place like home." DNA is less important than the strings that tie us together; sure, you may find your biological father or mother, but sometimes, in their absence, you may outgrow them or even replace them with what you need. It is not as complex as Oedipus, especially in the comic-book world filled with orphans who find themselves empowered without biology having anything to do with it. Our courts (in the real, non-fictional world) favor DNA over everything when they have to solemnize the future of a child. Guardians 2 comes down hard on the side of step-parents, mentors, and...well, guardians, who will take in a waif when there's a case of need, even if the arguments against are as a big as a planet.

....ow

It's different and that's good. For all the call-backs and deja-vu moments, it doesn't run in place until it comes up with a good idea for a third movie (which a lot of sequels do). It takes a major hanging plot-point, resolves it, and moves on. That actually builds more good will in a franchise than all the repetitions of key moments can buy.

The Ego begins inflating across the Galaxy (when its Guardians are distracted)

* Thor: The Dark World, as it turns out. I actually did some research.

** And, as if to belie that opening asterisked statement,  I am wrong in this point—there IS a prelude of sorts, set in "EARTH. MISSOURI. 1980" with a CGI'd Kurt Russell (this "de-aging" stuff DOES NOT work on conventionally handsome or beautiful actors, but seemed to work well on the recreation of the skull-like countenance of Peter Cushing in Rogue One.)

*** Next example: Michael Keaton plays The Vulture in Spider-man: Homecoming.