Guardians Of The Galaxy

A colorful and funny space adventure, GotG delivers an inventive and slightly oddball take on very familiar plot and characters.

The plot and characters could not be more familiar: five outlaws are bound together by circumstance to save the world by retrieving a powerful object from an evil overlord. The five Guardians are (from left):

• A smooth-talking Butch Cassidy leader type
• A gentle giant
• An amoral thief
• A man avenging the murder of his wife and child (think Inigo Montoya or Mason Storm)
• A heartless assassin

[UPDATE: I've been thinking about GotG for a few days, and I suddenly realized that the Rocket & Groot pair are just like Han Solo & Chewbacca- the fast-talking amoral thief and the gentle giant whom only Rocket (Solo) understands. Except, here's the wild part- Rocket & Groot do it better! Groot is a more interesting and better partner than Chewbacca. Chewbacca is less expressive and contributes less to their adventures! Am I crazy or does Groot make Chewbacca really look like a "walking carpet"? PS: Please save the "Rocket & Groot in the comics predate Star Wars" emails- it doesn't matter which duo was invented first, it's just two variations on the same partnership. We could compare them both to Inigo Montoya & Fezzik from The Princess Bride if we wanted to...]

These five bouncing off each other creates lots of fun sparks. The dialog is sharp, five completely different body types leads to dynamic and inventive fight scenes, and their five different motivations are all illustrated and leveraged for interesting plot twists.
The production design also made the movie worth watching. Normally I prefer "hard science fiction" where the filmmakers attempt to be faithful to the way the universe really works. But GotG is more of a "soft sci fi" movie in the vein of the Star Wars prequels, where characters are blue, green, and magenta skinned, where the humanoids are weird looking for its own sake. The second act takes place at a mining colony inside the massive head of some space giant that died centuries ago, now the skull is floating in space, completely encrusted inside and out with an lawless scavenging mining encampment, kind of like Deadwood but with more alien goo. All this color is wonderful, but I was especially reminded of Star Wars (in a bad way) on the aseptic capital home world, that's all white and futuristic plainness and fountains and skyways for no reason. For a movie that's otherwise so inventive, this one planet was too underdesigned.

Fun Moments: Earthling Peter Quill uses the 'finger across the neck' motion as the symbol for 'kill', but the alien he's talking to doesn't know what that means "Why would I put my finger on his neck?"
The soundtrack is great - not my favorite 1970s music, but still, the silly glam and bubblegum pop is emblematic of the whole movie's lack of pretense in the sci-fi genre. Besides, who doesn't want to see spaceships flying set to the Runaways "Cherry Bomb"?
Theater Notes: My audience was completely dialed in- all the best punchlines were followed by that brand of laughter that drowns out the next few lines of dialog. The crowd included a cadre of comic book fans who were especially tuned into the parts that connected to the comic book the most closely.
(Arlington Capitol Theater, Screen 1, with Shiner Bock on draft!)