Things:

  1. So that’s a very well-done comedy-action movie, right. I feel like it went too hard at the jokes, but not by enough to be a major detriment. It definitely benefited from not having to tie in to the rest of the MCU at all, other than maybe in a couple of cameos/end-scenes.

  2. Man, the deep cuts in this movie are definitely in keeping with the first. Like, I actually had to look up in this article who the people with Starhawk at the end were (1975 Guardians, which explains it, as I got to the earlier version of the team in my old-comic readthrough, and the main 2008 version of the team in my regular comics reading, but have never read the 1975 ones). Like, when Ego the Living Planet and Mantis are your just normal ol’ characters, yeah.

  3. It’s pretty clear from the Thor: Ragnarok trailer that it’s acting more like a Guardians-related movie than the past Thors were, from the old-fashionedy ’80s stylings to the spacy stuff.

  4. Overall, though, I feel like this movie was substantially less interesting than Guardians 1, because that movie was doing something new in the Marvel movies, whereas this one is doing the same thing that Guardians 1 did. I know that they’re going to make sequels to movies that make a shit-ton of money, and there’s no way around that, but honestly, I want fewer of those and more new characters with new film-makers doing new things.

  5. Oh, and the Stan Lee cameo was funny, but it also has the bittersweet feeling of basically being pre-made to play as a little clip at the end of his obituary someday.