Thursday, March 28, 2024

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Review // Guardians of the Galaxy

First Published:

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While comic book fans and Marvel devotees will be going to see Guardians of the Galaxy this weekend with a nervous excitement, hoping that the film lives up to their enormous expectations and fits nicely into the lead up to Avengers: Age of Ultron, I watched it hoping it would live up to it’s trailer. Seriously, that trailer was rad.

And it does! The film is an energetic, engrossing and surprisingly funny space adventure featuring some well developed characters and great effects. In a year so laden with interesting, yet serious, sci-fi (Edge of Tomorrow, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla) Guardians is a refreshingly light affair that nevertheless manages to be thrilling, heartwarming and spit-out-your-Frutopia funny. Yeah, I got Fruitopia.

Chris Pratt stars as Peter Quill, but he would prefer it if you called him Star Lord. Quill has all the swagger and bravado of Han Solo, with just a streak of self-deprecation. It’s a very strong performance from the Parks and Rec star who flexes his comedic muscles, but also his body muscles. Quill is a Ravager, which in Guardians language means space pirate, but he has higher ideas about himself than that. Scooped up by an alien spacecraft as a kid, he holds on to only a few remnants of his home world; one of which is a classic rock mixtape made for him by his late mother. There is an air of loneliness about this hero, but he does his best to fill the void seducing alien women and stealing important artifacts.

The film’s opening action piece sees Quill set down on an abandoned planet and break into an ancient temple. He’s there, ala Indiana Jones, to steal a metal orb. This is an important orb guys, and apparently everyone got the memo on its whereabouts at about the same time, as a group of Kree warriors quickly appear on the surface too. Led by Korath (Djimon Hounsou) these fellas are working for Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) who is searching for the orb on the orders of his wrinkle-chinned superior Emperor Palpatine, err, Thanos (Josh Brolin). Quill fights them off and – thinking that was a lot of unexpected work – decides to keep the orb himself instead of returning it to his Ravager captain/adoptive father figure Yondu (Michael Rooker). Everybody’s got a boss in this universe.

Ronan is a mean looking dude with a large hammer, and if it wasn’t clear from his name, he’s the bad guy. He’s got a raging inferiority complex that manifests itself in genocidal plans for the planet Xandar, home to Nova Corps, the intergalactic police force led by Nova Prime (Glenn Close). The key to these plans is the orb and Ronan sends out his mercenary Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to retrieve it. His other mercenary, the robotic Nebula (Karen Gillan) wants to go, but Ronan is basically like “Gamora’s cooler I’m sending her”. Needless to say Nebula is pissed.

Anyway, as Quill attempts to hawk the orb on Xandar, Gamora shows up and uses her amazing mercenary skills on him (she grabs the orb from his hand and runs). Seeking a bounty on Quill’s head, the anthropomorphic raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and his ent-like partner Groot (Vin Diesel) soon get into the fray as well. It’s all very amusing and the four of them wind up in jail. It’s here that they meet Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), who at first has murderous thoughts towards Gamora but soon comes around and joins the team, seeing in the mercenary a chance to reap his long-planned revenge on Ronan. The Guardians have assembled!

What [Gunn] seems to understand is the reason some movies stick in our pop-culture memories for a long time, and others faded away into the aether. The main thing is giving his heroes real motivation.

What follows is a space opera that moves ahead quickly and assuredly while keeping its tongue firmly in-cheek. One of my big beefs with super-hero films is when they slow down and you start getting moody speeches from people in silly costumes. That’s when the absurdity starts to show, and director James Gunn seems to realize this, moving things forward with a rapid pace and throwing alien eye-candy at the audience with every stop of Quill’s ship.

It’s also really funny. Gunn and co-writer Nicole Perlman clearly love their characters and happily utilize their self-serious personalities for laughs. Drax is a near-sociopath who takes everything literally and the writers delight in the gag of having him constantly misunderstand his sarcastic companions. Groot may only be able to say the sentence “I am Groot”, but he winds up stealing the show. And Bradley Cooper has a great time as the foul-mouthed Rocket who spends his spare minutes making bombs out of whatever’s handy.

Gunn’s willingness to be self-referential and occasionally take the piss out of the genre feels fresh, but he’s not reinventing the wheel here. The film’s influences are pretty easy to spot on-screen. What he seems to understand is the reason some movies stick in our pop-culture memories for a long time, and others faded away into the aether. The main thing is giving his heroes real motivation. There’s a reason Han Solo is everyone’s favourite character in Star Wars, and it’s because he has to be converted to the side of good. For the entire first movie he’s acting on selfish desires (money), and so are the Guardians.

The one complaint I have is that the villain isn’t sympathetic enough. Ronan is a really scary looking character, but he’s pretty one-dimensional and doesn’t get a lot of screen time. It’s always “I’m going to be the most powerful being in the universe”. That’s a lofty goal and good for you, but I’ve got no connection to that. At no point have I thought about being the most powerful being in the universe. But I know the grandiosity of the thing is why most people like comics, so I won’t push the point. Avengers fans will be happy to know that Thanos looks cool.

Guardians of the Galaxy wraps up with an epic space battle that will have you wondering about the last time you saw an epic space battle on the big screen. It’s great, and Gunn does the smart action-director thing by splitting it into multiple small battles so that your brain doesn’t go into autopilot. In fact it’s impressive that your brain doesn’t go into autopilot at all during this film. There’s enough intelligent stuff going on that it probably makes the film seem deeper than it is. This is, after all, just another necessary stepping-stone towards the long awaited Avengers: Age of Ultron. Because of that, Gunn could have made a far less interesting film and gotten away with it. Instead, he put together a great summer blockbuster that will appeal to comic-bookers and non-comic-bookers alike. To that I say, “I am Groot”.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.

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