Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn, Nicole Perlman
Running Time: 122 minutes
Rotten Tomatoes: 90% at 127 reviews and counting
Staaring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Batista, Karen Gillan, Lee Pace, Benicio Del Toro, Bradley Cooper, vin Diesel
Guardians of the Galaxy (hereafter GoTG) is the 10th movie from Marvel Studios all of which have taken place in the same cinematic universe, though this is the first movie in which we barely see Earth. This movie follows up on events which took place in The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, with the evil warlord Thanos tasking his servant Ronan the Accuser (of the Kree species) with acquiring an infinity stone, the purple-coloured one, to go along with the red-coloured mist we saw in Thor: The Dark World and the blue Tesseract we saw in Captain America: The First Avenger and in The Avengers (that makes 3 of the 6 stones, for those keeping track).
The purple infinity stone operates as a McGuffin to guide the plot. The team of heroes of Peter Quill (human), Gamorah (alien who looks almost human), Groot (the tree), Rocket (the racoon), and Drax (Batista) are brought together by various bounties seeking to acquire the stone, though Quill found it first which is what sets the plot in motion. Ronan the accuser, who is alien-loooking with blue skin, upon acquiring the infinity stone about halfway through the movie, renounces the authority of Thanos and sets out to the planet Xandar, populated by people physically indistinguishable from humans, who are the good guys.
What GoTG converges to is a very generic adventure story bursting at the seams with pop-culture references, though it accomplishes that task reasonably well.It's a fun dumb moment, like Pacific Rim, though I have a hard time loving these when there isn't much originality. Karen Gillan's evil and alien-looking character Nebula is in the movie only as a foil to Zoe Saldana's good and human-looking Gamorah, she has no other purpose. Groot and Rocket are there to provide jokes, though a few of those are very funny. Gamorah is the evil woman turned good who is defined by her martial arts skills and her victimhood as a child. Peter Quill is the white male lead who brings everyone together under his charismatic leadership, saves the day, gets the girl at the end, and whose life story is motivated by the loss of a parent when he was small. We've seen most of this before.
Among what we've seen before are the Star Wars references. There are a lot in this movie:
- The tree Groot is nominally incomprehensible, though Rocket understands him well and figures out exactly what he wants to say, which is played like how Han Solo understand Chewbacca ;
- When Thanos appears on a screen to Ronan, it is an identical scene to how the Emperor first appeared to Vader in The Empire Strikes Back ;
- At least two asteroid belts, presented in the same manner as seen in The Empire Strikes Back, which is the movie that popularised that style of asteroid belts in fiction ;
- When Quill almost shoots Ronan in an attempt to kill him near the end, they play a musical theme that sounds like the one when Luke was trying to fire the torpedo down the Death Star in A New Hope ;
- When Rocket Racoon subsequently shows up and shoots with his ship to save the day, it's identical to how Han Solo showed up with the Millennium Falcon to shoot Darth Vader's Tie Fighter at the end of A New Hope ;
All of these references end up being distracting, because it hits at me, "James Gunn loves Star Wars", I get it, I'm not sure that's a good idea. A few references would be enough. There are also references to other movies.
Aside from that, the movie is hurt by being too loud, trying to force emotions with theme music as an alternative to good writing, too many CGI action scenes, weak villains, and a loud climax that is hard to follow and full of cross-cuts between the actions of the different characters. To continue on the Star Wars analogy preferred by GoTG director James Gunn, Red Letter Media once pointed out that A New Hope had 1 climax sequence, The Empire Strikes Back had 2, The Return of the Jedi had 3, and The Phantom Menace has 4. Within the climax of GoTG, we have the actions of Peter and company chasing Ronan, Gamorah fighting Nebula, the fighters navigating an air battle, the ground command of Xandar, that of Rocket Racoon, and that of the bounty hunters, so it's a climax sequence divided into ***SIX*** parallel narrative subcomponents, that's pretty bad.
There were several pluses. As said before, a lot of funny jokes. The bonding between the characters is mostly earned. The colour scheme for the movie is consistent so it doesn't hurt the eyes in spite of being CGI. There's a more competent expansion of the mythology than we saw in Thor: The Dark World. Hearing a lot of those old songs was great ... "Cherry Bomb" from The Runaways in a superhero movie? Wow, that was great.
GoTG effectively incorporates story beats we've seen before, but doesnt create many new ones other than the fun time in the collector's lab. GoTG has both dull and fun moments. The jokes are plentiful, funnier than those in Thor: The Dark World but not as funny as those in The Winter Soldier or The Avengers. It's worth seeing once, if you're not otherwise busy. The CGI is good for what it is.
Overall, GoTG is competent, but not inspired.
Grade: B
t: Pratt is just likable to me. Was worried going in that I would not be able to forget "Bradley Cooper"...but it never entered my mind...thumbs up to him.
Awesome!
wtf? hey im an 80's kid so i remember this weird Big Bird distant relative (no i dont know the real backstory and frankly i dont care for it much). but yeah that kinda fell flat. sure its nice to see The Collector having a drink amidst the ruins of his once glorious treasury, indicating we could see him again in future Marvel movies, and even adding Cosmo the Dog was a nice touch (even if general public doesnt know his significance) but then they had to tack on Howard the Duck at the end that just killed the moment. and i am suddenly reminded why i despised his movie.
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