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Guardians of the Galaxy: A Captivating Stepping Stone to the Marvel Universe

By Jim Rohner · August 4, 2014

Guardians of the Galaxy represents the biggest risk and most audacious attempt at world building that Marvel Studios has attempted to date. It's not just the fact that Marvel produced a multi-million dollar blockbuster based around a series of (at best) C-list superheroes; they handed the reins of said blockbuster to a writer/director (James Gunn) with almost no box office clout (though those points certainly factor into it). It's also that this film about largely unknown heroes brought to life by a largely unknown creative entity stands as the capstone of the entire Marvel cinematic opera so far, the film that more so than any of its predecessors relies on knowledge of, and insight into, said predecessors in order to bring scope and scale to the "universe" part of the Marvel cinematic universe.

It's a high risk, high reward reward situation, almost as though Kevin Feige, well aware of the mostly pathetic state of the DC cinematic universe, is giving his competitors the finger. "I've got space pirates. You've got more movies from the director of Sucker Punch coming up." It's a bold move for sure, but boy oh boy does it pay off.

Guardians of the Galaxy succeeds because it has no illusions about what it's goal. From the opening sequence in which Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) dances his way to treasure while playing "Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone on his Walkman to the final dramatic showdown in which he refers to big baddy Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) as a "turd flower," Guardians of the Galaxy stands out from the rest of the Marvel Studios films by accepting and embracing the fact that it's an absurd film about a bunch of motley miscreants who are flying through space trying to save the galaxy. That's not to say the adventures of a super powered World War II soldier who was thawed out in modern day or the shenanigans of an eccentric genius billionaire with a weaponized suit are, or at least should be grounded more in reality than the exploits of the Guardians, but the minds at Marvel know that one of the draws of their comics and subsequent films is seeing the extraordinary interwoven amongst the ordinary – it is, after all, New York City that the Avengers are defending from annihilation at the end of their titular 2012 film.

But aside from Quill's background as a human kid taken by aliens after the death of his mom, nothing about the rest of the Guardians, both their characters and their surroundings, present the audience with any sort of ordinary in which to be grounded. Not only that, on paper it's a bit of a stretch to ask anyone to pay to see a film featuring an anthropomorphic tree creature with a 3-word vocabulary (Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel) or a trigger happy raccoon with a foul mouth (Rocket, voiced by Bradley Cooper). Gunn and co. realize this and add healthy doses of humor to make you forget and eventually not care. Helping matters is the genius stroke in casting Pratt as Quill, the human entryway into our story who, despite being raised amongst the stars, remains human enough to be bold/stupid enough to attempt to seduce the self-styled most dangerous woman in the universe, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and sarcastic enough to elicit humor from his interactions with Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), a being hellbent on revenge who also happens to take everything literally.  

Conversations between the five Guardians, who largely only came together out of mutual utilization for a prison break, are often hilariously sidetracked due to non-sequiturs or social misunderstandings and even the most heated and dramatic of events are regularly interrupted by personal idiosyncrasies or absurdities – Quill, for instance, proposes a dance off as a means to decide whether Ronan gets to destroy the entire planet of Xandar. Even if you're not familiar with the characters or getting a little lost in the cosmic mythology of it all, Guardians of the Galaxy provides multiple moments of hilarity, providing big, dumb fun for anyone who's open to it.

In a way, the film almost has no choice but to be entertaining as it's charged with the task of bringing into focus the cosmic significance and implications of the small, shiny objects – revealed here to be the Infinity Gems – that were so highly coveted by Loki in The Avengers, Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger and here, Ronan and his boss, Thanos. This exposition retroactively makes one realize how far reaching the implications of both past and future conflicts in the MCU are, but also makes Guardians of the Galaxy fall victim to the same nearsightedness that plagued the Avengers tie-ins.  

While hinting towards something and/or someone bigger, Guardians sells Ronan the Accuser short as a threat, declaring him, as was done with Malekith, Ivan Vanko and Aldrich Killian before him, to be merely a blip on the radar, a sightseeing stop along the path toward a threat more worth our heroes' time. Even less credence is given to Nebula (Karen Gillen) as a threat, the daughter of Thanos/sister of Gamora whose narrative presence seems more driven by comic faithfulness than anything else. However, seeing as how tall of a task this film had acting both as a standalone establishing story and a stepping stone towards what's to come, these shortcomings can be overlooked.