Guardians Of The Galaxy

Synopsis: Peter Quill aka Star Lord (Chris Pratt) is a thief who steals something everyone wants, a gem of incredible power that can destroy planets. Now everyone wants a piece of him.

I love space opera, the sub-genre of science fiction that this firmly belongs in. I don’t completely love this film though. But I’ll start with what I love and go from there. At last, at long last, someone had the good sense to hire Chris Foss as their ship designer and actually follow through on using his designs. It means that this looks like all those cheap SF paperbacks that sported weird and wonderful spaceships on their covers. There were moments in the film that made me giddy with how much it resembled the visions of space I had as a kid reading those books, my imagination guided by Foss’s artwork. I didn’t even know who he was at the time, but I certainly do now.

There’s great concepts played with throughout the film, a mining colony inside the head of a dead giant creature, a prison where the escape plan involves the abuse of physics and attack droids, and generally just lots of really inventive approaches to the fairly traditional plot problems of a heist/betrayal/redemption story. There’s also the lovely comic tone to the whole thing. Director James Gunn keeps the whole thing tonally light, even as the plot steers into the “we have to save the universe” pedestrianism that I wish it had avoided.

And that takes me to the things I didn’t love so much. For something that is clearly having a lot of fun thinking up weird and wonderful approaches to its fairly simple plot, I could have done with lower-key heroics. The characters are all low-rent crooks or high-class assassins, so it doesn’t entirely fit. But then again, it’s a Marvel movie, and comic books need their outsized heroics. It’s not like the plot isn’t fun, it just gets really stupid and dull when the “we gotta save the world” bits kick in. And the resolution of the plotline is lifted straight from Captain America, which was unsatisfying then and is just as irritating now. The editing is also problematic, with the occasional jarring cut.

In the final analysis though, Guardians Of The Galaxy is still a great popcorn science fiction film. The look of it is amazing, the main characters are interesting, if not always well fleshed out, and the action is delivered with a glee you feel coming off the screen. It ain’t perfect, but it is a heap of fun. And comic book geeks should stick around for the scene at the end of the credits. If Marvel follows through on it, they’re either brave or insane.

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