Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Enterprises, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 3) my husband Charles and I watched the new Blu-Ray disc I had just ordered of the 2014 Marvel superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy, which I wanted to see before the third and (at least according to star Chris Pratt) final Guardians of the Galaxy film comes out tomorrow. I’d originally ordered a DVD boxed set of both previous Guardians of the Galaxy movies but they had been unplayable on our equipment because of a different “region code” (something the creators of the DVD format slipped in to keep people in different countries from being able to swap or sell discs to each other), so I returned the box and ordered Blu-Rays of the two movies individually. The first Guardians of the Galaxy was co-produced by Kevin Feige and directed by James Gunn, who also co-wrote the script with Nicole Perlman – and despite flashes of interest, it was a really disappointing movie with which I literally had trouble staying awake. I was expecting a comedy-drama blending actual superhero action with a lighthearted, spoofy approach to the genre – something I’d got in spades in the last DVD Charles and I had watched, the marvelous Shazam! (2019). Instead I got a ponderous mess of barely motivated action set-pieces which were stunningly staged individually but got dull and boring as the movie went on, interspersed with bits of exposition that only served to get us from one supposed action “highlight” to the next.

The film starts with a prologue, set in 1988, in which a woman named Meredith Quill (Laura Haddock) is dying of cancer – we know that because we see her in a hospital bed and she’s bald, a frequent side effect of cancer chemotherapy – and with her last ounce of strength she’s saying goodbye to her young son Peter (Wyatt Oleff). She gives Peter a Walkman-style cassette player with a tape inside, “Awesome Mix, Volume 1,” and a gift-wrapped package she tells him he can’t open yet until … well, I would have thought he could open it once she passed, but before mom is quite dead a spaceship from elsewhere in the Milky Way lands and beams Peter aboard in a set of scenes Gunn and Perlman obviously copied from the ending of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (one of many visual quotes from other movies in this one). The film then flashes forward to the 2014 present, in which Peter Quill has grown to be Chris Pratt and is a member of “The Ravagers,” a group of thieves and smugglers led by someone or something named Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker). When we first see the Chris Pratt incarnation of his character he’s on the surface of a supposedly abandoned planet called Morag looking for “The Orb,” a mystical object of great power, which he is supposed to steal for a mysterious and anonymous collector. Only he gets embroiled in a war between the Nova Empire (good) and the Kree (evil). The Empress, Nova Prime (Glenn Close), has just negotiated a treaty between the two sides she believes will ensure intergalactic peace, but a bitter-ender named Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) intends to continue the war, sort of like the Irish Republican Army in the pre-Good Friday Agreement days.

We eventually learn that Ronan is acting at the behest of an even worse villain, Thanos (Josh Brolin), the super-bad guy from the Avengers movies (which Charles and I haven’t seen, so though the name “Thanos” has become a byword in the culture for absolute evil this was the first time either of us had ever seen him depicted in a film). Yondu puts up a bounty for Peter when Peter decides to keep the Orb for himself, and Peter finds himself chased by Gamora (Zoe Saldana, once again playing a blue-skinned character five years after Avatar). Eventually he ends up in a prison called The Kyln along with others who tried to collect the bounty on him, including a genetically re-engineered raccoon called Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and an animate tree called Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel, though this wasn’t a tough assignment because all Groot can say is, “I am Groot,” over and over as his all-purpose answer to anything) as well as a semi-normal humanoid named Drax (Dave Bautista) who’s angry at Ronan for killing his wife and family. This motley group of heroes and anti-heroes ultimately break out of prison and into a series of beautifully staged but dull action scenes that ends with the forces of evil at least temporarily defeated, the heroes ascendant, and Peter learning that he’s only half-human. His mom was the person he always thought she was but his dad was an alien from another planet, though the Gunn-Perlman script doesn’t specify just where he’s from or how he and Meredith Quill got together to produce Peter. (That suggests the plot for a much more interesting movie than this one.)

Eventually Peter opens that mysterious package his mom gave him before she croaked, and it contains another cassette – “Awesome Mix, Vol. 2” – and a note that says she’s gone to a better place, though whether she meant heaven or an alien world where her cancer could have been cured is unclear. That little cassette player has been Peter’s most prized possession throughout his galactic odyssey, though just how he powered it when its original batteries ran out is a mystery, as is how his spaceship manages to have a cassette player built into its dashboard so he can play the tape while he’s traveling through space. The film has some clever and occasionally moving scenes – my favorite was when Peter is trying to use one of the songs on his mom’s tape to seduce Gamora, though the moment he tries to kiss her she goes into self-defense mode and knocks him to the ground – but I’m not sure why Shazam! gripped me and this film didn’t. I suspect it was because Shazam!’s writers, Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke, gave real depth and dimension to the characters, whereas Gunn, Perlman and Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Bill Mantlo, who created the comics on which Guardians of the Galaxy and its two sequelae were based, didn’t bother.

For all its light-heartedness, Shazam! contains scenes of real emotion. Billy Batson’s foster parents, Pedro Peña (Jovan Armond) and Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans), have genuine character depth, and so do Billy’s foster siblings, not only Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), who becomes Billy’s guru on how to be a superhero, but Darla Dudley (Faithe Herman), Mary Bromley (Grace Fulton), and Eugene Butler (Ian Chen), all emerge as distinct personalities instead of the stock characters common in superhero fiction. Even Shazam!’s villain, Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), is a figure of real pathos, especially in his trauma over not being given the super-powers of the wizard Shazam! (Djimon Hounsou, the one actor in both films; in Guardians of the Galaxy he’s far less effectively used as a subsidiary villain, Korath) while Billy was, sort of like Salieri in Amadeus. Nothing in Guardians of the Galaxy matches the real depth and poignancy of the best scenes in Shazam! By far the most entertaining characters in Guardians of the Galaxy were the wise-cracking raccoon Rocket (whose name I suspect was inspired by the Beatles’ song “Rocky Raccoon”) and the animate tree Groot, and they were clearly animatronic CGI creations rather than real beings – though one scene in Guardians that I liked was a sapling of Groot planted in a flowerpot and doing a dance to the Jackson 5’s first record, “I Want You Back.” Had more of Guardians been done with that sort of irreverent spirit, I might have liked it better!