Granted, I came in with high expectations fueled by Rotten Tomatoes ratings and a love for the source material. This neighborhood of comicland is one I'm intimately familiar with. I've read almost everything there is to read from "cosmic" Marvel, and I've been waiting for it to make its big-screen debut for years. The 2008 comic run of Guardians is one of my favorites--phenomenally drawn, and written with a fantastic understanding of what makes the characters compelling. James Gunn, the director of the film adaptation, has taken a lot of liberties, but his movie has the same two basic virtues--characters and visuals.
The movie's about a group of prisoners fighting to get their paws on a piece of expensive contraband, and accidentally becoming the only ones capable of saving a planet under attack. Peter Quill, a Han Solo wannabe who was abducted from Earth as a child is played brilliantly by rising star Chris Pratt, who manages to capture Quill's stunted maturity without ever losing his charm. He becomes the de facto leader of these galactic misfits, and the force that eventually forges them into a dysfunctional, amoral, but bonded family.
It's nice to see a Marvel movie that isn't really about superheroes. Yes, some of them are super-powered, and yes, they have moments of heroism, but the story feels like a nice change of pace from the Avengers-fueled films that Marvel has exclusively produced up till now. The Guardians are, as one space-cop puts it, a bunch of a-holes. They don't like each other (at first), they don't like most of the galaxy, and they don't really like doing what's right. They're reluctant without ever feeling passive, and this fresh dynamic is the most liberating thing about Guardians.
Aside from Pratt (who is the best thing about this movie), Dave Bautista's Drax shines brightest. The character is perfectly written in a heightened, pseudo-Elizabethan speech that offers amusing juxtaposition with Drax's feeble intelligence. It helps that he's played by a professional wrestler, but don't think that means that Bautista's performance isn't charismatic, intimate, and really smart. He made the movie for me.
Zoe Saldana is sadly stiff as Gamora, a deadly assassin who begins the movie with the intent of betraying her villainous adoptive father. She has some great lines, but what bothered me about Gamora was the same thing that bothered me about Thanos** and the other high-status aliens in the movie--they sound really pedestrian. It might be the fact that they're played by American actors without any sort of heightened accent, or it might be that I'm too picky about dialect stuff (being an actor). It's a small thing, but when you're playing a Shakespearean villain (and standing next to classically trained Lee Pace), you need to heighten it. Do Standard American, not General American. Sound like Orson Welles, not your college roommate. My perception was that several characters in the movie had a hard time selling their galactically high status because of the way they spoke. Maybe this is just me, though.
If I had one significant complaint about Guardians of the Galaxy, it's that the script and visuals, otherwise fantastic for a summer action flick, were really overactive. Gunn feels the need to explain way more than he has to with regard to character and setting exposition. While most of this exposition takes the form of loglines spouted out during mostly-interesting scenes, they build up to the point where you start to lose stuff. The Star Wars movies prove that you don't need to explain weird things in a pulpy space opera. You can just show them and let the quirkiness speak for itself. I think if you cut half the exposition, Guardians would make just as much sense, and you'd actually be able to take more of it in on a first viewing. More than that, it would be easier to realize how ingenious the central characters and their emotional arcs are.
The same goes for the movie's visuals. Their design is flawless. Gunn and production designer Charles Wood have brought the color back to space for the first time since Farscape. Their sets are a canvas of the bizarre and vibrant. They also admirably employed practical effects in places where Jackson or Lucas would have used CGI. That fact alone gets Guardians in my good books. But make no mistake, there's a butt-ton of CGI, including three entirely animated characters. This only bothered me when the scales tipped so that my eye was drawn to the computer effects more than the practical ones. The result is large stretches of action scenes so busy my eye couldn't decide where to go, which had the unfortunate effect of drawing my mind away from how truly beautiful the movie is.
Still, it's hard to complain about a summer blockbuster being a summer blockbuster (unless you pretentiously know the comic characters inside and out), so I can't help but recommend Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a great sci-fi movie, and full of unexpected delight. Go see it, because I made a bet that it would make $110,200,522.70 at the opening weekend box office.
*We forget that Iron Man wasn't well known outside of the comics before his movie. Now he's become an A-lister, but it wasn't always that way.
**Thanos I found to be extremely disappointing. In a movie with plenty of blue/green/purple/red pseudo-humans in practical prosthetics, you'd think they wouldn't need for Thanos to be entirely CGI. Did they learn nothing from The Hobbit? It's really hard to care about a CGI villain.
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