Guardians of the Galaxy
I saw some previews.
Looked.... interesting....
a Machine-gun toting raccoon....
lol
Guardians of the Galaxy, review: 'a pop-culture gem'
With this action-packed space saga, Marvel swaps gloomy superheroes for snappy, Saturday-cartoon fun. And it's an absolute blast, says Robbie Collin
Out of this world: the cast of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Photo: Marvel Films
By Robbie Collin
9:00PM BST 24 Jul 2014
Directed by James Gunn; Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Dave Bautista, Lee Pace, Karen Gillan. 12A cert, 121 mins.
The new Marvel Studios film, Guardians of the Galaxy, begins with a boy lost in the coldness of the universe. That both his feet happen to be planted on an American part of Earth in 1988 is neither here nor there: the boy’s mother is terminally ill with cancer, and he stands by her hospital bed, watching her faltering heartbeat bob on the monitor like a green comet trail.
Outside, the moon is full and low, and the grass is covered over with mist. The scene could hardly be further-flung from the digitised, hyper-polished spectacles you now expect whenever the Marvel logo pops up on a cinema screen; instead, you remember the Amblin-brand family films of that same mist-soft, moon-bright age.
Of course, the digital hyper-polish arrives soon enough: a spaceship descends and beams up the boy, Peter Quill, before whisking him off on an adventure that’s still unfolding 20-or-so years later, when the bulk of Guardians of the Galaxy takes place. But while Earth is never seen again, the importance of that quick opening sequence can hardly be overstated.
A brand new summer family blockbuster this may be, but it plays by old, half-forgotten rules; trimming out the clutter and cross-referencing for snappy, streamlined, Saturday-cartoon fun.
The film rejoins Quill as an adult, played by the increasingly busy Chris Pratt and going by the swaggering alias Star Lord, as he hunts for treasure. His discovery, in a dank ruin, of a mysterious orb sets a plot of superweapons and threatened cities in motion, even though the orb itself turns out to be little more than a galactic MacGuffin, much like the Maltese Falcon or Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant. (Quill even describes it as “an Ark-of-the-Covenant, Maltese-Falcon kinda thing,” proving both he and the film are in on the joke.)
Fate bundles Quill with four uneasy allies: Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a green-skinned warrior princess; Drax (Dave Bautista), an angry hulk with no apparent grasp of metaphor; Rocket, a sardonic raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper; and a kindly walking tree called Groot, motion-captured by the Fast & Furious star Vin Diesel with an unexpected tenderness that defuses any half-hearted jokes you might be hoping to deploy about wooden acting.
The fun of it – and Guardians of the Galaxy specialises in fun, served by the sugar-sprinkled ice-cream-scoopload – is in seeing this odd quintet bluster through space battles and alien brawls that would have defeated anyone smarter and better-equipped. Just as the team makes do with the junk they find around them, the film feels like a mound of gems culled from decades of pop-culture scavenging: essentially, the Guardians are two Han Solos, two Chewbaccas and a Princess Leia, pitched against Ming the Merciless and his cronies, in spacecraft from the video games Star Fox and Galaga.
The script, by the film’s director James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, shares the jokes democratically and tends towards the quotable: in particular, the use of “pelvic sorcery” as a euphemism for slow dancing is a line worthy of Joss Whedon, the most favoured filmmaker in Marvel’s court.
Could Gunn now find himself similarly elevated? If so, the rise would be precipitous, but not undeserved. Gunn began his filmmaking career amid the scuzz and squelch of Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma studio, and there’s an abiding sense here that, however wild and glittering the cosmic backdrops become – and at one point, what we assume to be a planet turns out to be “the severed head of a celestial god” – the film will always find a use for a good pair of prosthetic horns and a tub of sparkly face-paint.
In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy’s cheerful, hectic aesthetic is closer to one of the crackpot fantasias of Guillermo del Toro than Marvel’s own increasingly house-styled output, which reassures you, even in the wake of the Ant-Man debacle, that the studio hasn’t entirely lost the will to experiment. Who could have guessed that, after six years of hawkish franchise-building, the new instalment in cinema’s mightiest serial would be such a delirious one-off?
Guardians of the Galaxy is released in the UK on July 31
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Originally Posted by Malsua
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