Posted in: Movies | Tagged: bradley cooper, chris pratt, entertainment, film, guardians of the galaxy, james gunn, marvel, superheroes, vin diesel, zoe saldana

First Non-Spoiler Review Of Guardians Of The Galaxy: The Avengers Done Right

By Nas Hoosen

When most people point to their favorite Marvel Studios picture, it's usually to Joss Whedon's Avengers. After all, that was the one that delivered on the promise of that first post-credits tease at the end of Iron Man, which offered superhero comics fans their first taste of the one thing we love so much about comics that hadn't yet been effectively translated to cinema: the universe. Sure, Samuel L Jackson's mother***er-less lines in that teaser may not have quite rolled off the tongue naturally, but they worked to sell the concept to us before we'd even seen it executed.

The Avenger Initiative

Whedon's execution of that promise didn't quite come together easily either, not until that climactic battle against the Chitauri, and that one amazing tracking shot through Manhattan, moving from hero to hero, and finally sticking the landing on everything the notion of a cross-film universe had to offer us. And if there was a tease in Avengers, it was Tony Stark's glimpse of the vast universe that existed beyond Earth that created the next sense of anticipation in much the same way that Jackson's awkward delivery of the equally awkward line "you've become part of a bigger universe" was.

Two years later, Guardians of the Galaxy finally gets to deliver on that brief glimpse through the black hole, and boy does it deliver.

We're introduced to Peter Quill in a scene that feels like a deliberate callback to the opening of the first Iron Man. Other Marvel movies have opened with a similarly brief in media res intro before cutting to their title, but Guardians is the first one since Iron Man that has a found a way to do it with such personality.

Iron Man intro

Maybe that's the best word to describe director James Gunn's work on this film. Whereas many Marvel movies have borrowed their visual language from other films (that first Captain America movie is often straight Indiana Jones in cosplay), Guardians has an identity all its own. From the first shot to the soundtrack to the characters, everything has the playful irreverence that only the Troma-schooled writer of two Scooby Doo movies could bring to the proceedings.

Iron Man's opening is also memorable because it presents us with the thesis that will form the backbone of Tony Stark's arc across three movies (albeit with some stumbling in Act 2). We're introduced to a smug, self-involved Stark, eating up fan adoration and fame before he's almost killed by a weapon of his own design – the beat where the camera pulls in on the Stark Industries logo and Tony leaps away is pure karmic dark comedy. From that point on, Stark has to learn humility, responsibility and to value something other than himself, and it's those lessons that inform the final scene of Iron Man 3 where he destroys his prize possessions as a symbol of the man he's become.

Guardians presents us with a similar character in the adult Peter Quill, an overconfident and unrepentant space cowboy in the mould of Han Solo, but Gunn cleverly begins his arc with the death of Quill's mother, a moment of loneliness and hopelessness that informs his personality as much as the movie's consistently upbeat pop soundtrack buoys you through its various action and comedic beats, including the best damn title screen I think I've ever seen in a science fiction film.

It's that clever mix of humor and hopelessness that drives the whole film, and everyone comes off the better for it.

I won't go into too much detail about how the cast comes together but it involves the orb we've seen in the various trailers, which is also the object that links us back to the overall sense that this is all still happening in the Marvel (Cinematic) Universe we're all familiar with. Gunn wrangles strong performances out of every cast member, including Bradley Cooper's turn as voice actor for Rocket Raccoon. While Cooper seemed like an odd choice at the outset, he's probably one of the best things about the film, generating as much pathos as he does humor from a character that just shouldn't work onscreen. Needless to say, Rocket (along with Vin Diesel's Groot) is going to walk away from the movie with many more fans than he even has at the moment.

Gunn's take on Drax seems built around a gag designed specifically to take advantage of Dave  Bautista's limited acting skills while still playing off the character's history in comics, and Zoe Saldana delivers another confident performance as Gamora, who thankfully survives the action movie tendency toward rendering women as ass-kickers whose primary role is still making out with the leading man.

Speaking of, it's Chris Pratt who really shines in this film from pretty much the first moment we see him on screen. I don't know how it happened, but Andy from Parks & Recreation has managed to reinvent himself as a unique sort of leading man in the superhero movie world. It's also nice to see Marvel take another gamble on a less familiar or fashionable face, as they have in almost all their previous movies. They may have had incredibly disappointing run-ins with filmmakers in the past, but their track record is still filled with smaller name or cult directors, giving them a chance to distinguish themselves on very high profile projects.

And James Gunn is the real deal, bringing a mix of colorful B-grade sci-fi influences and the sort of character-driven scripting that very few blockbusters these days can provide.

This is also why Guardians of the Galaxy is far and away a stronger film than Avengers. Joss Whedon's strength lies in his writing of involving conversation, but that often comes at the expense of the action. That's why the Avengers spend a lot of their movie on a big plastic set waiting for the bad guys to attack them. Gunn's Guardians shamelessly rockets up the action with every spare moment, never letting things settle for long, but that action is always driven by character. There's a point halfway through the movie where Drax does something that basically causes an insane action sequence to come out of nowhere, but his actions are motivated by his personal history and everything we've learned about him so far, so it works.

And as impressive as that last big shot of the Avengers piling on the aliens was back in 2012, Gunn's climactic battle in Guardians somehow manages to consistently up the ante on explosions while still making everything that happens about who these characters are and what they've learned about themselves over the course of the movie. It's an incredible balancing act and one that Gunn has a firmer grip on than any Marvel Studios director before him, providing viewers with what is probably the first definitive, climactic third act in a Marvel movie. There are lessons to be learned here that I hope the studio carries into Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and beyond.

Oh and, although Marvel have trained everyone to diligently sit through the credits now, us reviewers weren't rewarded with the final post-credits teaser scene, which means I'll be back in the cinema on August 1^st. Thanks, Kevin Feige.

Nas Hoosen is the co-founder of Another-Day, South Africa's Least Favorite Website About All Its Favorite Things. Sometimes he still has 'Nam style flashbacks to his time spent working the counter at the local comic shop.

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