Ever wanted to attend a therapy session that ran for two hours and seventeen minutes with a pseudo Buddhist agenda? Well, now you can. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 doesn’t even bother to thinly veil their metaphors, they outright have the hero forced to destroy Ego with the help of feelings in order to save the universe.
Our hero doesn’t know who his father is, having been born to a single mother and then snatched off the planet to become a galaxy defender. But it turns out he can hold infinity crystals without dying (GG1) which leads his father to finally find him after thirty or so years. His father explains to him that he is a celestial (ie, God) who created another celestial (Andy from Parks and Rec) in order to not be alone. His father also tells him that his name is Ego. Of course.
So our hero is now literally Jesus, with Ego as god.
Of course, the god father turns out to be evil, and Andy’s true family come to his aid, along with a cute girl with antennae on her head who is capable of putting ego to sleep with feelings. I guess subtlety isn’t something you find in modern movie making. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 makes The Matrix’s tale of the god king Neo look like a delicately woven parable.
When ego is finally destroyed, every other evil person in the story turns out to just want to be loved. Because there’s no such thing as evil aside from ego. Apparently.
If you like shitty ‘I did two papers in psychology’ babble sledgehammered into your brain in place of actual plot, I can recommend Guardians of the Galaxy 2, 10/10.