Guardians of the Galaxy (2014, Dir. James Gunn):
We know the template: likeable heroes and hiss-able villains, everything we hold dear in peril, destructive forces housed in day-glo energy balls, snarky dialogue, a climax drenched in orgiastic special effects, a dollop of sincerity, fun for the whole family, on to sequels and TV tie-ins. Marvel Studios has become the most reliable of blockbuster factories using this formula, because it recognizes the two most important rules: establish a baseline of professionalism, and provide something for everyone. With movies and TV series lined up well into the next decade like cars on a production schedule, Marvel is the culmination of film as state-of-the-art-assembly-line product, where surprises are few but folks go home happy.
Or at least that was the case until recently. As if sensing that audiences would soon grow tired of the same-old same-old, and recognizing that “something for everyone” had included everything except a true taste of subversion, Marvel has made offbeat choices of directors for its latest wave of comics-inspired mega-movies. Thus we have Lethal Weapon’s Shane Black helming Iron Man 3, the Russo brothers from Community directing Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and now James Gunn, the man responsible for Tromeo and Juliet and Slither, unleashed on Guardians of the Galaxy. Make no mistake, these films are still producer-driven, with each director’s personal quirks ultimately subsumed under the slick Marvel imprint, but you don’t find too many comic book movies that risk audience alienation by having the main villain turn out to be a pathetic stooge (the Mandarin in Iron Man 3), or by fashioning a paranoid conspiracy thriller that’s more about the Patriot Act than it is about blowing up bad guys real good (Captain America: The Winter Soldier).
Which brings us to what might be the quirkiest Marvel movie yet, Guardians of the Galaxy. Say what you will about Gunn’s credentials or suitability for the gig, but one thing he definitely is not is slick. For evidence, just watch Super (2011), which purports to be a superhero comedy, but is actually a schizoid retelling of Taxi Driver, replete with hitherto unseen and unforgettable sights, like Ellen Page raping Rainn Wilson while dressed as a super-sidekick, or puke in a toilet forming the angelic face of Liv Tyler. Seesawing violently between slapstick, satire, and sincerity, Super is no masterpiece, and is about as artless as it gets, but one can’t deny there’s a unique sensibility at work; as it turns out, it’s a sensibility well-fitted to Guardians of the Galaxy, the shaggy ill-bred mutt of the Marvel universe.
A synopsis of the goings-on (more hooey about energy balls and saving billions from destruction) doesn’t do the film justice, and isn’t really the point. Just know that Guardians is about the juxtaposition of classic ’70s tunes with space dogfights; that the best-developed characters among its mismatched heroes are a talking tree and a genetically modified raccoon who’s about as cuddly as the master-blaster gun he totes around; that all the colors of the rainbow are represented in the skin tones of every alien character; that every moment where things threaten to get serious veers wildly into another that takes the piss out of the whole enterprise, and vice versa; and that a mix tape will bind the galaxy together. Or as our wiseass human protagonist Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) sums up, “Something good, something bad… a bit of both.” You know you’ve passed through the looking glass when Quill argues with CGI creation Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) over whether Rocket just made a fake laugh or not, and all the time you’re aware that everything about Rocket is technically fake, and somehow it doesn’t matter.
In Guardians, context and subtext are conflated: both Gunn and Quill are children of the ’80s, and that fact permeates Quill’s puffed-up image of himself as a Han Solo/Captain Kirk renegade as well as the film’s Technicolor palette, its general air of goofiness, and the hodgepodge of cultural references, which run the gamut from Michael Jackson to Kevin Bacon, and all six degrees between. The jaded among us might claim that all these hip signifiers and the constant shifts between sincerity and irony are a bit too calculated, a bit too cool for school, but as Gunn cribs from every cultural touchstone from Star Wars to The Ice Pirates,you get the sense that he isn’t striking poses so much as turning loose all the influences in his Gen-X brain. While someone like J.J. Abrams dresses up his tributes to ’80s cinema with “mystery box” plots that ultimately go nowhere, Gunn is content to go old-fashioned on the story and just let ’er rip everywhere else. This is the kind of movie where the most triumphant moment is punctuated by the line “They got my dick message!”
Peter Quill: On my planet, we have a legend about people like you. It’s called Footloose. And in it, a great hero, named Kevin Bacon, teaches an entire city full of people with sticks up their butts that, dancing, well, is the greatest thing there is.
Gamora: Who put the sticks up their butts?
Gunn’s scattershot tone is the key to Guardians’ effectiveness; after a bunch of superhero movies inflated with self-importance or buffed to a bland sheen, it’s a relief to experience something a bit more messy. It helps that his actors buy into the overall vibe: Pratt is too good-natured and knowing to totally convince as a reckless womanizing mercenary, which turns out to be part of the joke. Meanwhile, Cooper and the CGI experts wring an impressive range of emotions out of the irascible Rocket Raccoon, and wrestler Dave Bautista shows surprising comic chops as Drax, the literal-minded muscle with the advanced vocabulary. Speaking of vocabulary, the strangest (and most strangely affecting) of all the characters is Vin Diesel’s gargantuan, childlike Groot — who would have thunk that a tree that can only speak three words (“I Am Groot”) would turn out to be the heart and soul of a movie? Adding welcome color is Gunn favorite Michael Rooker as Quill’s redneck (and blue-faced) boss, and Benicio Del Toro as an effete collector — and it’s saying something when a typically mannered Del Toro performance fits right in with the rest of the ensemble. The weak link turns out to be Zoe Saldana’s assassin extraordinaire Gamora, who is too wan to be the badass she’s painted out to be, and the less said about underdeveloped baddies Ronan (Lee Pace) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) the better; with apologies to Loki fans, if there’s one nut Marvel hasn’t cracked, it’s how to create a memorably juicy villain.
Fortunately, Guardians doesn’t skimp on the gee-whiz — as you would expect from a Marvel production, the art direction is top-notch, and it’s fun to zip around this new universe, even though there’s nothing you haven’t seen before (except for that colony inside the giant floating alien head, but sadly the camera lingers on it only briefly). By the time the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” belts forth on the soundtrack, and Quill and his new buddies ready for a final assault on Ronan and his goons, resistance to Guardians’ charms seems futile… and then the film nearly undermines itself with a cacophonous, F/X-drenched finale. After successfully playing against cliché for the majority of its running time, it’s a downer to see Marvel surrendering to formula in the closing minutes, but with Gunn already signed on for a Guardians sequel, one can at least hope for another model off the assembly line that pops with as much bubblegum entertainment as this movie does.
