+ Best Blockbuster of the Year
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| A delicious-looking poster for James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy |
Guardians is a new Marvel comic book adaptation of one of their more wacky properties, which looks like it will turn into its own movie franchise now:
Peter 'Star-Lord' Quill thinks he's all human: He has been taken from Earth following his mother's death in his childhood and is now a bounty-hunter after a very powerful and expensive orb. He gets it, but also becomes locked up with a band of celestial misfits (see posters). They break out, loose the orb and realize that it can be used to kill billions of innocents, so they decide to get it back to prevent that from happening.
Our outlaw heroes in Guardians are good, even if they are primarily out for money and revenge. Guardians of the Galaxy is a somewhat silly, off-center universe, which is apparent right off the bat as Star-Lord, - charmingly played by Chris Pratt (Her (2013)), - starts his dangerous orb-retrieval mission by dancing around to Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede, - just one of the film's many 1970's and 80's pop-rock-hits that make it all a little groovier. - And sillier and more refreshing than most superhero movies in recent years.
But the characters in themselves are also so strange that it would have been a catastrophe for any writer-director to have taken it all too deadly serious. And James Gunn (Slither (2006)) certainly doesn't choose that road: Guardians is probably the most irreverent, self-humorous huge superhero space opera creation of this millennium.
Bradley Cooper voices the raccoon Rocket, wrestler Dave Bautista is the intellectually limited but hard-punching Drax, and Vin Diesel, - in what must be one of the easiest earned top-billings ever, - voices the giant, living tree Groot, who can only say, 'I am Groot'. They are all fun characters. Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)) is a good difficult stepfather for Quill called Yondu, and John C. Reilly (Step Brothers (2008)) is fun as 'Corpsman Dey'. Glenn Close (Dangerous Liaisons (1988)) looks crazy as a tight-haired leader of the peaceful human planet.
They have apparently built some real, huge sets in London for the shooting of Guardians, which is hard to notice in it, because it looks almost completely animated. It is not a critique per se, because it has a consistent look and impressive stuff like the various skies and fights, - which are fun, but still don't draw out and eat up all the room from story and dialog, - but the tour de force cinematic experience is hard to achieve in an environment that feels so artificial as is the case in Guardians and other similar CGI-based giants.
Where Star Wars, in comparison, is always about good vs. evil, this the first Guardians film is more about friendship and comradeship, and diversity meeting and becoming unity, and very timely at that. By its end, the film is a sure and quite uplifting winner.
Guardians is certainly also the funniest major summer blockbuster ride of 2014, and it will certainly stimulate kids and make adults giddy from its permanent wit. Where Avengers (2012) entertained but at the same time punctured my last bit of superhero enthusiasm, Guardians is a new Marvel franchise that I found myself actually looking forward to seeing return by the end of the film. It seems also a good replacement for the X-Men franchise that I at Film Excess deemed obsolete a few months ago.
Guardians has one really vulgar, adult referential joke, (which I don't think it absolutely needed), but it will shoot (bad but as you'll realize; appropriate pun again) right over the heads of the younger ones in the audience, so I'd say the film is fine for any media-trained kid who is 8 years or older.
Pratt was sure fun here, but I hope he will have another, much more serious role to play in next summer's highly anticipated Jurassic World (2015), which will have to be a lot more serious than Guardians to be any bit scary.
Related posts:
2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
Watch the trailer here
Cost: 232.3 mil. $
Box office: 773.3 mil. $
= Box office success
What do you think of Guardians of the Galaxy?
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