‘Guardians’: Fun, Just A Few Flaws

If Farscape and Star Wars had a baby, and it grew up to be a stand-up comedian, it would be Guardians of the Galaxy.

That is high praise, by the way not a dig. Guardians takes the best crazy alien design and super advanced tech ideas of Farscape and blends them with the awesome action and incredible alien world building of the Star Wars movies, particularly the prequels (and don’t worry, there is no Jar-Jaresque character in Guardians to spoil the fun).

But that doesn’t mean the movie is without flaws and to explain some of them I will need to get into the dreaded SPOILERS. So if you don’t want some details of the movie spoiled for you (including one huge plot moment near the end), do not read past the break line. If, however you have already seen Guardians of the Galaxy, or you don’t mind having it spoiled for you, read on. Once again though — SPOILERS!

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There may not have been any way around this but if you don’t have a firm grasp of the cosmic-level players in the Marvel Universe you may wind up lost early on in Guardians. Unlike the Avengers movie, Guardians did not have the benefit of having four of its main characters introduced in their own movies, so it had to give pretty short shrift to the back stories of nearly all the characters, and that is a problem.

It is least problematic with Peter Quill, played brilliantly by Chris Pratt. As an aside, Pratt may be the first real comic action hero we’ve had since Eddie Murphy in the Beverly Hills Cop movies. He could milk his new physique and his stellar comic timing for years as a funny action star. But even Quill’s back story gets played too fast and loose. (SPOILER) We find out that Yondu picked him off earth as a child the day his mother died, but we don’t know why. Unless you think Yondu’s statement at the end about how they were supposed to deliver Quill to his father meant way back 26 years ago, in which case why did Yondu screw over one of the most powerful men in the galaxy and why hasn’t the Spartax Empire hunted Yondu down already?

The real too-short back stories come for all the other characters. It is tough to take Gamora seriously as the deadliest assassin in the galaxy if all you know about her background is her statements about Thanos and her warlike life to date. Maybe a flashback might have been in order.

Then there is Ronan. I know how dangerous and bad-ass Ronan is because I have been reading about him in comics since the 1960s. But in the movie we see him execute one person from a world he hates, and hear from all sorts of other characters that he is one of the most dangerous beings around. Unfortunately, aside from an early on meeting of hammer-like Universal Weapon with Xandarian skull, we see nothing that helps us in the audience come to the realization that he is evil.

And that is the problem with Guardians — there is too much exposition about why we should be emotionally invested in these characters and their fight but very little demonstration. Christopher Nolan set the bar pretty high for an origin story with Batman Begins, from a movie making and narrative standpoint. Sure I realize there is a big difference between telling one hero’s story and that of five, but there are lessons that can be used from one to the other. And they weren’t used in Guardians.

The biggest example of this is (SPOILER) the death of Groot. Rocket falls apart after his buddy sacrifices himself to save everyone else on the team, but we next see him carrying around the Groot sprout in a clay pot. If he knew his buddy regenerates, why did he cry so much? If he didn’t, where is the scene where Rocket finds the sprout in the ruins of the Milano — as Groot so obviously telegraphed when we see him grow a sprout from his shoulder and pick it off with unknown but clearly important intent just before the big final battle?

Because of these problems it felt quite a bit like the first Captain America movie — after the transformation of Steve Rogers, it was essentially a series of scenes strung together, as opposed to a fluid narrative. Now to be fair, in Guardians those scenes are goose bump-level exciting or wildly hilarious, or often both at the same time. But with all the hype about James Gunn directing and about Nicole Perlman being the first female writer of a Marvel Universe movie, I was hoping for a more coherent film.

For me, Captain America: The Winter Soldier set the bar for superhero film making at an extremely high level. That film holds together in the character-building slower moments and the nail-biting action sequences, and every scene feels like it had to follow the previous one. Unfortunately because Guardians of the Galaxy misses that bar by quite a bit, for me it just barely breaks into the top five in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far.

I still heartily recommend it. It is a theme park thrill ride from start to finish, with outstanding performances all around (Dave Bautista is well on his way to being the second huge wrestler that can really handle the funny, in the footsteps of Dwayne Johnson). Just go into it knowing that some things won’t make sense and you’ll have a ball.