As I write this I'm listening to Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix, Vol. 1, so you can already tell what this is going to be about. And on top of the kick-ass soundtrack there's a good movie with some great effects and a surprising depth to the colourful character roster.
GotG is about Chris Pratt's goofy-yet-heroic protagonist, quick-talking thief and self-styled "Star-lord", Peter Quill. He's essentially a Han Solo-style ruffian without Luke Skywalker as a moral compass to guide him. He goes where the money is, but from the opening he's set up as the kind of person who's quick to stick up for the little guy. From the beginning in the '80s we zoom forward 26 years (coincidentally, to 2014) where he's gone from the scrawny little kid who fights with all the other kids to the anti-hero tomb-robber, making enemies left and right. Anyway, he steals a mysterious orb from a dead planet and narrowly escapes the clutches of the Kree soldiers, there to grab the orb for themselves on the orders of Ronan the Accuser. And I'm sure to Marvel buffs, these names mean something. To myself, they're essentially a villain of the week which help establish Quill and his team as the heroes they become.
So the team: Gamora, a green-skinned assassin with a grudge against her employer played by Zoe Saldana, who's quickly becoming something of a designated sci-fi action girl; Rocket, a raccoon-thing voiced by Bradley Cooper with a penchant for pranks and quick-thinking; Groot, a tree which has only learned to say its own name (in a booming Vin Diesel voice), but is powerfully strong, and hugely defensive of its friends; and Drax the Destroyer, David Bautista's heavy-set, constantly-angry meat shield with an eye for vengeance against Ronan the Accuser. Together with Quill, they make up the Guardians for no reason other than they were there at the time, and they each had a stake in the 4 billion units the myterious stolen orb is apparently worth.
The villains are a huge contrast to the heroes; Ronan is not built up so much, we only know him as the antagonist, and his enforcer Nebula - daughter of Thanos - is pretty much there to serve as a foil to Gamora, which gives Karen Gillan a bit of a short shrift.
Thematically, GotG focuses on friendship and family, with the character arcs revolving around their becoming friends in the face of overwhelming odds, and on family and the loss of it. Looking back, it feels a little heavy-handed sometimes - particularly in the opening, which feels kinda weak in comparison to the rest of the movie - but there are times when it's perfectly placed to bring a tear to your eye, particularly as the characters work to overcome their differences between fighting and flirting and become a strong team.
As a story, it's not so complex on the surface: Ronan wants the orb, as do Quill's former partners whom he left in the lurch, and they all come together against the Guardians in their bid to get it. The story is pretty typically split, which leaves the darker second act feeling a little contrived, but it's buoyed by a script full of crude humour and recurring gags, which Chris Pratt wields magnificently, and the final battle is so epic in scope it defies belief. But the real strength of GotG is in its characters. Everyone has a different story, and Marvel tells them all magnificently through the script. Little bits of dialogue here and there give us insights into their histories, but very little is explicitly stated. It treats the audience like intelligent people, letting you close to the characters in between their dirty jokes and the swearing, much of the time censored by some background noise or another.
I think that's what really warms me to this movie. It's all so rough and ready, everything is a reflection of the characters from the beat-up spaceships to the grimy prison colony. But even on the scrupulously clean planet Xandar they seem to fit in perfectly (also, props to Stan Lee for the most interesting cameo so far!), not so clean-cut as the citizens but not the lawbreakers they really are. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this already, but what I will say is this: it's easy to see parallels between this and Firefly, in particular their Big Damn movie, Serenity. It has the epic scope of Serenity's story and the variety of characters like Whedon's ensemble cast, and there's only one other battle I can think of which compares to the climactic battle on Xander, and that's the Alliance versus the Reavers towards the end of Serenity. But the expanded-universe feel of it, that there's more to it than we see, and the variety of alien life and worlds give it an epicness, an almost Star Wars feel of grandeur that Serenity didn't have. It's got the closeness of Serenity in the characters, but the scope and scale remind me of the awesome-scale worldbuilding of the Star Wars EU. Universe-wise this is almost entirely separate to the Avengers storyline, the only threads tying it together a couple of previous credits scenes featuring Thanos and the Collector. But this helps it stay apart and prove itself as a decent sci-fi movie first and foremost, and that it does with aplomb. It focuses on the characters and their struggles in between the swooping, diving space battles and the enormously-varied planetside battles, which gives it a unique feel of being friendly despite its epic scale.
And I think that's the best thing, soundtrack aside. That it mixes the small stories and the huge so well, that's what makes it a great movie.
Adieu!
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