Guardians of The Galaxy Vol.2: 8/10
I'm switching between 8 and 9 for this movie. It could go either way. Regardless, this is one of the best movies of the MCU. The movie looks gorgeous. My favorite shot is Ego's spaceship first entering his planet and showing the overall look of it in space. All the spaceship scenes use such an energetic way of movement to show space fights and it feels fast and exciting. All the villains work wonderfully in their roles. Ayesha and her minions are pathetic and incompetent and make for great humor. Same thing for Taserface and his goons. Ego does have a pretty conventional objective, but that's offset by the film trying to establish how much of a sociopath he has and the overall emotional effect he has on Peter. All these characters have tragic backgrounds and try to act cold and distant to hide it. Its somewhat cliché, but the acting and the dialogue between the different characters makes it work. Nebula, for instance, is described to have been a practical machine for Thanos to control as much as he wants by replacing different parts of her body. This movie can get really dark, but it uses humor that lands most of the time and I found it to be really funny. The acting was really impressive. A standout scene to me was Peter yelling at his dead for leaving his mother. You can see Ego successfully coaxing his son to accomplish his objective by putting on a façade and both of the actors do really well in the scene. The movie is nicely paced, even though I thought some of the editing was questionable. The music (both original and licensed) is well done and fits the different scenes perfectly. The movie is visually interesting and uses a lot of different angles to show different viewpoints. I liked the use of the character shadows against the colorful backgrounds. My list of complaints is really short. It primarily comes down to the final battle being incredibly CGI heavy and looking incredibly artificial. When I saw it in the theatres, it actually gave me a headache. It wasn't too bad watching it again, but it was somewhat annoying. Also, the blue material that spawns on the planet looks a bit fake. The extras that are in the scene on Earth are also stupid and just stand around to observe the goo after running from it previously. Other than that and some other nitpicks, this movie is really great.
I'm gonna rewatch Spider-Man for a third time and have my thoughts up tonight.
