Oh wow. Loved Guardians of the Galaxy. Just loved it. It was just gorgeous to look at, full of bright pinks, vivid yellows and electric blues. It wore its kitschy, space opera dressing like a star. The movie follows Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who is desperately disappointed that nobody ever takes him up on his alter ago, Star-Lord. He’s an earthling that is kidnapped by aliens as a kid in 1988 when his mother dies. The soundtrack for the movie is the list of 70s hits she’s compiled to remember her by. He plays these constantly on the Sony Walkman he wore when he was kidnapped.
After stealing a mysterious orb and becoming the target of both his own gang and a genocidal war criminal called Ronan the Accuser (played with fanatical aplomb by Lee Pace) intent on recovering the orb, he falls in with a talking raccoon (Bradley Cooper, whose voice I didn’t recognise as himself at all), a green-skinned daughter of Thanos (Zoe Saldana), a mobile tree called Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel, and who is the best thing in the entire movie, despite stiff competition) and an angry revenge-driven hulk of a prisoner named Drax (Dave Bautista, who is this kind of man-mountain) who cannot understand any form of metaphor or simile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B16Bo47KS2g
Together they try to recover the orb, and the Infinity Stone it contains, before Ronan can use it to destroy the cheerful utopian Xandarian empire, led by Glenn Close in a fabulous white wig.
It was just the most fun. It was funny, bright, breezy, appropriately scary in places, and sometimes unexpectedly moving. If I were to try and stick a tone on it, I would say it was much more like The Fifth Element than The Avengers. It has the same broad but offbeat humour and a sumptuous palate of design and colour. It clearly owes hugely to the flashy SF movies of the 80s with their galleries of rogues, schemers, and idealists engaging in spaceship dogfights.
If I was forced to come up with a criticism, it might be that sometimes the emotional parts were a little schmaltzy, but since they would then be consistently undercut with humour it’s not really worth whining about.
Amazing how quickly you got used to the idea of a psychotic talking raccoon, though. I was over it within ten minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDFom5Typ0s
Favourite moment, hands down, is when Groot, with his vast, innocent liquid eyes and unforeseen gentleness, takes out a corridor of approaching bad guys by impaling half along his arm and then using then to beat the others to death with. When he’s done, he turns around and offers this wonderfully happy, beaming smile. It was just genius.
And they’re making a sequel, apparently. 🙂
P.S. Saw it again on Wednesday night at 9:30, and the cinema was rammed. Think this is going to be a big, big hit.
