There isn't a lot to say about this movie that isn't a spoiler, so the review will be a little vague, and there will be minor spoilers (very minor), just FYI. The movie starts out strong, showing us the team leader Peter Quill, or Starlord as he will be known later, still on Earth as a child in the late eighties. He is going through something that would devastate any young child. He takes it as badly as one would expect, runs outside, and is scooped up by a UFO. This might seem comical, but trust me, the emotional impact of Peter's experience helps bring the unusual scene down to earth so that, rather than put-offish and strange, the end result of the scene leaves you feeling for this kid. He's had to live through everything that he's lived through, and then he's kidnapped. How will he every recover? Well, he does, more or less, growing up into a cross between Indiana Jones, Captain Kirk, and Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. The next time we see him, he's screwing around on the surface of an abandoned planet, listening to an old mix tape on a Walkman, on his way to his next score. He's become something of a thief, joining the very crew of outlaws which abducted him, even though he often prefers to work toward his own ends rather than theirs. He reaches his destination, and finds the small orb which he came to retrieve, retrieves it, and is suddenly faced with a team of armed soldiers sent to the planet by the movie's villain, Ronan the Accuser, who have been sent for the same device.
This scene is perfectly paced, showing off our leading man's personality, his skills, and how he handles himself in a fight. This scene is, in fact, a perfect analogy for the rest of the film, for it's pacing, its sense of humor, its atmosphere, and for the fact that Chris Pratt's performance as Starlord does a remarkable job of elevating every scene he's in. He hits every mark perfectly, moving seamlessly between humor and drama without even a blink, selling even the most ridiculous of scenarios. From there, the plot continues as you would expect. Circumstances bring our cast of misfit characters together, they clash, and then bond and become a team. Every scene that one or more of the Guardians have together shines, even the simple ones, like one Guardian putting his hand on another's shoulder to comfort them. Rocket the Raccoon and Groot, despite being CG puppets, share a touching and believable friendship, and the chemistry between Starlord and Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana, is palpable. Only Dave Bautista's Drax was left out in the cold in terms of meaningful interactions, though he still got a few. While Starlord got the majority of the development, the rest got enough that the audience came to understand and relate to them, giving their circumstances real weight.
In fact, that's what I'd say is the thing to take away from this movie, that despite the nature of its unusual cast, it really is a movie about people. Advancing the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe leaps and bounds, true, but mostly people. The characters in this movie feel absolutely real, absolutely, for lack of a better term, human. The best proof of this is when Starlord presents the orb that he retrieved from the planet to the buyer that he and his allies have eventually decided upon. He goes to hold it out to the buyer dramatically, and drops it, reaches down quickly, and scoops it up in an attempt to save face. It is a scene that is not only funny, but helps a strange scene in a stranger environment feel more natural and relatable. Less scifi, and more normal fi. The movie progresses to a final battle which is one of the most emotional and intense, and visually exciting, ever put to film.
If I were to complain about anything in this movie, it would be Ronan. He was cool, he looked cool, and yet he was paper thin. Motivated only by generic bad guy hate and power-hunger, he was little more than a functional combination of thin motivations, one-liners, and clichés. At one point in the movie we see him trade threats with Thanos, the character who is being set up as the overreaching villain of the entire Avengers movie franchise, and in just that one scene, Thanos becomes an infinitely more interesting character. After that Ronan never really developed past a really tough wall to breach on the way to the movie's resolution. Despite this, however, this movie was great, feeling akin to the first Iron Man movie in terms of tone, and lapping it in terms of technical achievement, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. I give Guardians of the Galaxy a 9 out of 10 on its own merits, and for what it does for the franchise, and for the theatrical science fiction genre as a whole. Check it out, and come back later for another Something Awesome.
Great review.
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