Guardians of the Galaxy

Watching Guardians of the Galaxy was a bit of a weird experience for me. For the first time in over ten years, a scene made my heart leap into my throat and I found myself thinking, "Man, I want one of those!" It was an arrow that an alien whistled at to control. With a tune more than a little similar to Ave Maria, he wastes a field of enemies in seconds. It's a movie made for twelve-year-olds, and I cannot stress this enough. I'm not saying this movie is targeted at twelve-year-olds, I'm saying that it is made for twelve-year-olds. The Goonies was made for twelve-year-olds, and the reason we can enjoy it just as much as the twelve-year-olds is because there's always a part of us that's still twelve. Marvel's Cinematic Universe was built on a risk. Not many people knew who Iron Man was before Iron Man. But nobody knows Guardians of the Galaxy. This was a make or break situation for the studio. Casual movie-goers who are sitting on the fence, starting to feel alienated by all of the, well, alien stuff happening in the over-arching narrative, are going to be swayed one way or the other by this movie. Then again, was it such a risk? Marvel approached Guardians of the Galaxy the same way they approached Iron Man: Get a good director, get good writers, get good actors and watch the money come in. James Gunn has done something special here, though, something that nobody has yet done. What I'm about to say, I do not say lightly: James Gunn has made The Goonies for this generation.

All superlatives aside, James Gunn was a weird choice for me. Not that I, like you, knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were before this movie was announced. The announcement that it would be a humourous, slightly sarcastic and more importantly, fun, super hero flick was promising, but James Gunn? His two previous movies, Slither and Super, were very well made, but they, Super in particular, were cynical to the point of alienation at times. I was afraid his attitude would bleed into Guardians of the Galaxy and create a movie that thought having fun was making fun of the fun-lovers. I was wrong. The movie opens with a young Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) in a hospital, listening to a mixtape made for him by his mother, who is dying of cancer in the opposite room. She passes before he takes her hand. Later, Quill, now a galactic thief who prefers the name Star-Lord, has been arrested and sees a prison guard listening to his tape player. He confronts the guard, who's far more interested in Blue Swede's Hooked on a Feeling. Even without the opening scene as context, it's pretty clear that this item is something beyond dear to Star-Lord. In another movie, this would have been a moment of power for the protagonist. Here, the guard beats Star-Lord into the ground with an electric rod as Hooked on a Feeling bleeds into the soundtrack and we're walked through the prison in question, as inmates beat each other mercilessly, someone tearfully watches a video recording of her family on the outside and our so-called heroes continue to fail. It's the absolute perfect balance of sarcasm and sincerity.

Guardians of the Galaxy's other greatest strength is that, for a film with a gun toting raccoon, none of its characters become gimmicks. The gun-toting raccoon has some of the film's most emotionally heavy moments, in fact. What's the last super hero movie you can recall in which all five of its protagonists cry at least once? These characters are monumentally flawed. They murder without a second's hesitation. Star-Lord risks freezing to death in deep space to save the life of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), only to try and use it as a pick-up line seconds later. A scene that, traditionally, would feature the hero finding the right combination of words to stir his team to go once more unto the fray here turns into a negotiation session to try and stir his team into just "giving a shit." This is followed by the classic slow-motion hallway scene, in which the team walks to certain doom. But here, one is yawning, one's wiping his nose on his arm, the other is pulling at his crotch. It seems simple, but the key to good characters lies within their ability to be relatable. The reason most people can't get into Superman is because he's so far and away from who we are. Comics writer Grant Morrison had to give Superman mortality and a death clock before he became interesting. Even the villain of Guardians of the Galaxy, Ronan (Lee Pace), has more development than most. He stands in defiance of his superior to pursue his dreams of being a genocidal freak, and when he stands against Drax (Dave Bautista), who wants to see him dead for killing his family, he exudes menace with a personality. "I do not recall killing your family," he says as he pushes his boot into Drax's face. "And I damn well won't recall killing you." Star-Lord spends the whole film trying to get anybody to call him by the nickname his mother had for him, and when the man with the gun in front of him says, "It's Star-Lord", he beams and says, "Finally." It's not played for tears, but we feel moved anyway, because every facet of the film is tying back to characterisation. Hell, the talking tree man, Groot (Vin Diesel), who can only say, "I am Groot", ended up making me cry for the simple fact that the writers refused to not let anyone have their moment.

After the aforementioned opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy, I was a little worried I was sitting down to another super hero movie that was going to take itself too seriously. Within less than two minutes, the film's over-sized title was splashed on the screen, while down at its last tenth, Star-Lord was dancing in an empty cavern to Redbone's Come and Get Your Love, and I knew I was watching something special. Like the movies Star-Lord would have grown up watching before being abducted into space, Guardians of the Galaxy uses sad scenes not to make you feel sad, but to make you feel more for the characters. Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) sits down at the end of a battle, puts his over-sized gun on the ground beside him and starts to cry. Drax the Destroyer sits beside him and pets him, something that takes Rocket by immediate surprise. It's clearly something that he's never experienced before. God, you couldn't stop my tears. But it's an event with an affectionate smile on its face. I was happy to cry. It doesn't quite escape the one problem inherent to the Marvel movies. Though each film introduces a different world-destroying object, with the overall aim of them coming together to make the Infinity Gauntlet for The Avengers 2, in movie speak, it means that every film has a token MacGuffin. They handle it the best way possible here, though. Tying into the film's prevalent cynicism, none of the protagonists give a shit. Star-Lord literally refers to it as the Maltese Falcon, and quasi-villain Yondu (Michael Rooker) starts speaking gibberish to get another character to stop talking when he tries to dump exposition on him. I imagine it would have been tempting to play it safe with Guardians of the Galaxy, to merely pepper the self-referential humour into it the same way Thor: The Dark World did. Instead, they latched onto it with full conviction, delivering a movie with five violent, cynical, morally-questionable jerks that it then asks us to fall in love with. But we do, because as Star-Lord says, "I may be an a-hole, but I'm not 100% a dick." It's also, verbose character analyses aside, a ridiculously entertaining good time at the movies. Marvel have been putting out quality films one after another, but they've finally made one that's going to be memorable. My inner twelve-year-old could not be happier. Go see it. See it twice.