“Guardians” is hilarious as a lighthearted comedy, but weak as a full-fledged space epic.
Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) was kidnapped from Earth by space pirates as a boy. Now he is a galactic adventurer and extractor of unique artifacts. During his latest mission, Peter finds a mysterious sphere, which is also being hunted by interstellar criminal groups. When Quill is imprisoned for his “exploits,” he conspires with several inmates to escape together and sell the artifact for a staggering sum. But as soon as the conspirators – Peter, the cyborg assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the dim-witted warrior Drax (Dave Bautista), the humanoid tree Groot, and the intelligent raccoon Rocket – learn what secret the sphere holds, they realize that fate has given them, the criminals, a chance to save the Galaxy from the obsessed fanatic Ronan (Lee Pace).
Disney bought “Star Wars,” but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to tell any other space stories. On the contrary, Disney has high hopes for the “galactic” offshoot of the Marvel universe, and they have invested a considerable sum in the filming and promotion of “Guardians of the Galaxy” – an adaptation of the comic book of the same name, which has been published since 2008 and is not directly related to previous Marvel superhero films. However, George Lucas can rest easy – the “Guardians” are far from his first trilogy.
Why “Guardians of the Galaxy” Works as a Comedy
Why? Because “Guardians” is not so much a “space opera” as a fantastic comedy with a terrific soloist in the form of Rocket. The film’s advertising campaign has always put the raccoon in the foreground, and it did not deceive – Rocket is truly excellent. An exceptionally realistically animated animal, who is simultaneously an indomitable warrior, an inventive mechanic, and an 80th-level troll in the spirit of Dr. House – the pantheon of fantastic film characters has just been replenished with a contender for the top of the charts! Rocket is so good that the film is worth seeing just to laugh at him and with him.
In the comics, Peter Quill enters deep space not as a boy, but as an adult and experienced Earth astronaut. Also, in the original, his mother dies not from cancer, but at the hands of an alien.
The Other Guardians
The same cannot be said of the other Guardians, however. Peter Quill is much better than one might have expected when it was announced that the hero of the sitcom “Parks and Recreation” would play a character “like Han Solo,” but, with all due respect, Pratt is not Harrison Ford, and he does not look entirely convincing when he is not joking and clowning around, but shooting enemies. In turn, the hulking Drax poses an uncomfortable question to viewers: “Is it okay to laugh at a hero who is either autistic or mentally retarded?” and the silent Groot serves as a “deus ex machina” and by the end of the film demonstrates so many different tree-like superpowers that it becomes annoying and tiring. Finally, Gamora suffers from a severe “tough chick syndrome, who appears in the film only because there should be a tough chick in such a movie.”
Only her evil adoptive sister Nebula, who suffers from “tough chick syndrome, who appears in the film only because someone has to fight the positive tough chick in the climax,” is more boring than Gamora. Poor Karen Gillan! As lively and bright as she is in the series “Doctor Who,” she is just as dead and pale (in every sense of the word) in “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
Before getting the role of the villain Ronan, Lee Pace auditioned for the role of the hero Peter Quill.
The Villains
The villains of the picture are only slightly better. Ronan looks stern and wields a huge hammer, but he is tedious, monotonous, and devoid of the intellectual flair that distinguishes true supervillains. Plus, as with Gillan, the makeup artists hid Lee Pace’s expressive face under a thick layer of makeup, and the actor plays only half of his potential. Compare Ronan with Pace’s Thranduil from “The Hobbit,” and you will immediately feel the difference.
In turn, the pirate Yondu (Michael Rooker from “The Walking Dead”) somehow too quickly switches to the side of good and rushes to risk his life for the planet of his enemies. In addition, he has the coolest and most unusual weapon in the film, which clearly should not have been wasted on a minor character, but given to one of the main characters wielding trivial blasters and blades. And so Yondu has almost the only memorable battle scene in the entire picture. Although there is action in “Guardians” literally at every step.
Script Issues
In general, there are so many script flaws in the film that you don’t have time to notice them. This is not a problem for the ironic comedy, which the picture, as already mentioned, mainly is. But “Guardians” wants to be not only a chain of jokes, but also a pompous superhero epic – and slides to the side of the road every time it turns on “serious” speed. How do you like, for example, the fact that the entire space army of the planet Xandar barely holds back Ronan’s ship, a fanatic from the Kree people? After all, it follows from the film that the combined forces of the Xandarians and the Kree are approximately equal (otherwise the war between them would not have lasted hundreds of years without a clear victory for one of the sides), and this means that a single enemy battleship should be one bite for the Xandar army. About like one Nazi tank regiment for the entire Soviet army. And why do the Xandarians attack Ronan only when his vessel enters their atmosphere? They are too advanced a people not to have a long-range warning system.
And so on, and so forth. The film is not well thought out enough to impress hardcore fans of space fiction, who have eaten a dog in discussing much more subtle blunders than “none of the police officers after the arrest of the heroes bothered to search their belongings and ask what kind of strange sphere they had with them.” But the characters are not detained for five minutes, but arrested, convicted, and transferred to a prison on another planet! And during all this time, only Peter’s cassette player brought from Earth with “super sound of the 1970s” attracts attention. Unthinkable!
The Soundtrack
And by the way, about “super sound.” This is another problem of the film, this time significant only for Russia and other countries that were not in the American cultural orbit in the early 1980s. It’s great that old music sounds in the picture, and it’s good that there are jokes in “Guardians” built, for example, around the plot of “Footloose.” But who among us is in love with those melodies and who in Russia knows by heart the movie that glorified Kevin Bacon? Hardly many. And space fiction, it seems to us, should unite viewers from different countries, and not divide them into “involved” and “uninvolved.” Especially in the XXI century, when the international audience is more important than ever for Hollywood.