I want to hear your complaints. I have them on a base structural level, but like you I forgave them all due to the emotional "wow" factor.
The structural level... It's way overcrowded. So much so that I couldn't focus on the bad guy at all. I feel like the takeaway was that Thanos is the real bad guy and we'll get to him in the sequels, so Ronin hardly matters except for some immediate threat that they have to deal with. This disassociation with the characterization was especially noticeable when Drax makes the (joke?) that it's really Thanos he wants to kill anyway. Really? After all of that? (His general response to Ronin's demise is blase anyway...which is weird. Rocket has more anger and emotion during the showdown than the man who's dedicated his life to that showdown.)
We have such big supporting personalities -- from Peter S's Kitchen Gun to the underused and totally two-dimensional Nova Prime, that I found myself not caring if the Nova planet was destroyed or not...and wasn't 100% clear why any of our people cared, except that Ronin was an asshole. The cheesy attempts to make us care -- wide eyed babies in mother's arms caught in the middle of yet another planetary-level catastrophe -- was eye-rolling.
Oh, and, yes -- ultimate catastrophe! Now the formula for every single Marvel movie. Just once, I want to see the Great Apocalypse get nuked in orbit, Fifth Element-style. It was made worse here not only because I didn't care, but because these were all unexplored characters. New York? Okay. Thor's planet? Okay, because Hopkins and Elba give us uber-gravitas. The Nova planet? Our brief glimpses of Glenn Close being, for the large part, ineffectual, and the stuffy colonialists working for her, almost make you wonder if Ronin is right.
Then we get the complicated relationships that may have been a thrill for people who read the comics... Their backstories almost felt like catching-you-up-with-the-comics, and seemed clunky. Zoe Saldana and her evil robot sister were the worst part there. All too convenient. I guess the core is that they both hate Thanos and want revenge for we're not sure what... We get Saldana's background, and the robot says "look what he did to me," but it all seems a bit wonky since, no matter what Ronin does, they know that Thanos has at least one other infinity stone himself, right? And The Collector knows. And everyone who saw Thor 2 knows. So what we get, repeated a few times over at a few different levels, is a "curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!" Oh, and Ronin's betrayal of Thanos is...met with stony silence and then a cut connection? No retaliation or reaction? Why was Thanos in this? Just to give the bad guy who already had clear motivation some motivation?
I also think we trust Saldana too quickly... She goes from impossible threat to maybe fuckworthy to worth the absolute sacrifice in, what, 48 hours? Sacrificing yourself for her was this weird too-early-in-the-script redemption moment for two characters who either didn't really need it or didn't make sense having it at that time. The big problem there is that we *do* get that moment, during the showdown, which means the power of that scene (Saldana/memory of mom) is just slightly empty.
In fact, due to the overcrowding, the only successful character arc was Groot --simply because he stayed true to who he was throughout.
Michael Rooker's team suffered terribly from the overcrowding and became nothing more than mere convenience. They're all over the map, aren't they? It almost feels like I could mentally hear the director screaming, "CUE ROOKER!" every time.
Then we get the Collector, who also feels shoe-horned in there. He's like Mr. Universe in Serenity, isn't he? This all powerful yet weirdly vulnerable guy, who has some backstory that we don't know, and whose assistant chooses this moment to fuck everything up because he's a bad boss. Also a moment of convenient-ultimate-superweapon-fickleness, eh? Grabbing it in the Collector's lab results in "we're gonna need a shitload of new screen doors" but grabbing it from Ronin results in "apocalypse #79" but using it to embed in your sledgehammer results in "makes robot girl horny." I guess it all depends on who grabs it, eh? From little slave to big bad guy to Someone More Than Human and his buddies.
But, then, this is the thing that simply has to touch the ground to destroy the entire planet, and they literally spend the whole movie tossing it around like a baseball. The only person who ever seems worried about the larger threat of the stone is Glenn Close, briefly, and the only one who has the reaction normal people would have when confronted with the stone is Rocket when they retrieve it from the blast at the Collector's lab. Everyone else's motivation really is "Ronin's an asshole."
I think they could have done with the knock-off Chronicles of Riddick theme and kept it small. Rooker in the not-quite-so-terrible bounty hunter role getting in more trouble than not, the bad guy who's actually a small fry in the final reveal... Get us engaged with the survival of our team, and not the survival of ten billion people. The plan was for a sequel -- the whole movie is setting it up from very early on -- so why not give us a slow reveal of all this other stuff? It's the same as the too-many-villains syndrome.
I miss Star Wars, I guess. Yes, okay, we have the planet destroying threat. Everyone's gotten that part down perfectly in modern sci-fi... But they're forgetting the two hours spent on the deeply personal journey of a small handful of characters (speaking of perfectly executed final showdown redemption moments!) that was required before they could save the universe.
