So… how ’bout them Guardians of the Galaxy?

Okay, so I totally meant to do a reviewy-type post for Days of Future Past, but never got around to it because… uh… AMNESIA DUST!

Okay, so I, like many people, saw Guardians of the Galaxy.  Also like many people, I had thoughts about it.  Also also like many people, I enjoyed it.  And now the thoughts:

• Before I go into anything else about the film, I feel the need to give props to Nicole Perlman’s screenplay, because far too few people are.  Probably because everyone thinks that directors are the only creative forces that matter in film-making.  Which is a shame, because while James Gunn’s directing was excellent for this movie, the dialogue and characterization was what made it.
• Important aside: the marketing surrounding this movie was quite ingenious.  The fact that the marketing hyped up the fact that about ninety-something percent of the audience had no idea who or what any of these characters were is simply extraordinary in this age of nostalgia-mining.  While GotG is an adapted concept, as far as most of the audience is concerned the Marvel brand was the only thing connecting the film to anything familiar.  I’m hoping that the marketing strategists who worked on GotG will get to work on publicity for more original projects in the future, because I think they’ll be able to work wonders.
• I think it bears mentioning that prior to today, I have never seen such enthusiasm among the children in the audience for any movie that was not explicitly kid-centric.  GotG aimed for a wide age range, and if the delighted crowd I saw today is any indication (including the long lines to get in), then I think it certainly succeeded in that regard.
• The cosmic side of Marvel is one of the densest settings in comics (in my opinion), and I was concerned that this film was going to bog itself down with exposition– or worse, try to tip-toe the audience its world at the expense of the story.  Thankfully, GotG took the approach used in the original Star Wars: dropping you straight into the setting and letting the plot and characters speak for themselves (okay, we had a few minutes at the beginning on Earth, but then we jumped forward about twenty-odd years for the rest, so it hardly counts).  I vastly prefer this sort of storytelling, and it worked very well here; by not trying to explain too many things and avoiding relying on ‘normal’ people to gasp in amazement at all the weirdness (a phenomenon I’ve taken to calling ‘Companion Syndrome,’ after this trope’s tedious overuse in Doctor Who since the 2005 revival), the setting felt more authentic and believable.  I found that the strange space opera world of GotG felt, if anything, more real than the more grounded Marvel films, since we didn’t have a constant ‘normal life’ to compare it to.
• The characters, as mentioned above, were what really made this movie.  But rather than talk about the individual characters, I’m more interested in their dynamics.  First of all, even though the film used Peter Quill as its primary viewpoint character, he was not the overall hero of the story.  This was very much a buddy hero flick, and even though Peter took on the leadership role by the end, the entire team had mutually-critical roles in the plot, development, and interpersonal relationships.  We’ve seen several ‘bunch of misfits form a team’ movies over the years, but this was one of the few that actually made them feel like they had grown into a family by the time the credits rolled.
• I really like how the Gamora-Peter relationship turned out, primarily because it really didn’t force itself as a romantic one.  In fact, while the two characters became very close by the end, I didn’t get an explicitly romantic vibe from them.  Well, there was a lot of potentially-sexual tension that simmered throughout the second act, but it didn’t really go anywhere; during the finale, the semi-romantic interactions were subsumed by their status as comrades-in-arms.  I hate the fact that we still live in a world where it’s still noteworthy that a movie doesn’t push the female lead as a love interest, but I hope that this film’s success draws more attention to the fact that we don’t need ‘obligatory romances’ to keep things interesting.
• Also on the subject of Gamora, I was intrigued by her rivalry with Nebula.  They left a ton of unanswered questions about the two of them, but I felt that felt that Zoe Saldana and Karen Gillan were able to use those ambiguities to bring a greater sense of gravitas to their characters’ interactions.  While this movie was about establishing how the Guardians themselves became a family, I hope that we’ll see more with these two in the future.  I do think that they could have done more with both of them, but in general I would say that Gamora had as much or more development as the other heroes, while Nebula actually had more than the other villains.  So it’s a good start.
• I want to gush for hours about Rocket and Groot, but I’ll restrain myself.  Aside from the two of them being extremely funny, I have to say that the two of them were some of the most engaging CGI characters I’ve yet seen in a movie.  Both the physical actors on set and the voice actors really brought these guys to life.  I’d like to give mad props to Vin Diesel’s performance as Groot in particular.  There’s a lot more to voice acting than just reading the lines, and Diesel had literally three words to go with for the entire film.  Yet each iteration of ‘I am Groot’ was delivered with a surprising spectrum of emotion and tone.
• From a purely storytelling perspective, GotG‘s biggest strength was that it treated itself like a standalone film.  While there were dozens of Marvel Easter eggs throughout, nothing in this movie required a prior understanding of previous films in the Marvel canon (Thanos’ appearance was the closest thing to this, but even then his presence has only been indirect so far and I’m pretty sure that this is the first time he’s even been named onscreen).  Even with the obvious sequel hooks at the end, GotG‘s narrative was almost entirely self-contained.  Again, it could be best compared to the original Star Wars in this regard (which, as I’m sure you recall, had a fully encapsulated story even while making it clear that Darth Vader and the Empire were still a threat in the future).
• The biggest complaint I’ve heard about GotG was that it was ‘predictable’ and had ‘too many clichés,’ but I’ve always felt that such a claim is more of a description than a criticism; all fiction (and art in general) is inherently derivative of past works, so this is like going to the beach and being unhappy about the existence of water and sand.  But I digress.  In any case, this film enthusiastically embraced every trope it could get its grubby little paws on, making fun of most of them on the way (nearly every cliché, from the ‘let’s put our differences aside and save the day speech’ to the ‘slow-motion hallway walk,’ was accompanied by a self-aware joke or two).  Indeed, this self-parody was so pervasive that when the film actually played tropes completely straight, they felt as fresh as they did before constant imitation diluted their original impact.  In short, every aspect of the production– from Perlman’s script and Dunn’s direction to the actors and SFX– was positively drenched in playful self-awareness.  It’s easy to dismiss works that embrace conventions rather than actively defy them (especially if one, like the majority of critics and literary analysts, is trained in the theory of art and not the actual mechanics behind its construction), but these stories are the ones that are most interesting and useful to me as a storyteller myself (and incidentally are often the ones that have the longest-lasting cultural impacts; there’s a reason why Shakespeare is still considered relevant four hundred years later, after all).
• Overall, Guardians of the Galaxy was just a lot of fun.  It didn’t try too hard, it didn’t take itself very seriously, it didn’t make excuses, it didn’t get up on a soapbox about anything, and it definitely didn’t pretend to be anything that it wasn’t.  In this regard, GotG was one of the most refreshingly honest movies in recent memory.  Blockbusters tread an uneasy path: most of them are very openly escapist*, but often try to establish more critical ‘street cred’ with varying degrees of success (though usually to their detriment).  Indie and ‘art’ films are rarely any better, since they more often than not disappear up their own backsides trying to make ‘A Statement.’  GotG decided it was going to have nothing to do with any of that buffoonery: it wanted to be a fun movie and it decided to be smart about it.  It celebrates its own silliness in ways that few films are willing to do, but by doing so, it comes across as a much more mature work than most of its contemporaries (including, I might add by way of pettiness, the ‘highbrow’ Oscar-bait crowd).  Guardians of the Galaxy was not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen– and it probably wasn’t even the best Marvel film so far (I usually have to give these movies a few months before I can rank them)–, but it was a ridiculously fun breath of fresh air that the po-faced popular culture of the last decade desperately needed.  Time will tell how well it stands up to the test of time, but I think that history’s judgment will be very kind to this movie, even after audiences tire of the Marvel Studios project.

* I’m not using ‘escapist’ as a pejorative, mind you.  Escapism, to a large extent, is one of the driving factors behind the drive to create art in the first place.  Escapism is no more inherently positive or negative than our species’ universal need for self-actualization.