Guardians of the Galaxy (****)

Directed by: James Gunn

Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Lee Pace, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Djimon Hounsou, John C. Reilly, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro

Seen: August 11^th 2014

**** Out of ****

The last time I enjoyed a movie for its sheer entertainment value and tongue in cheek humour as much as Guardians of the Galaxy was in 1997 with The Fifth Element, which Guardians also reminded me of rather often. Guardians is not a masterpiece of filmmaking, but I suspect I will be watching it as often in the following 17 years as I have watched The Fifth Element during the last 17 years; it’s properly entertaining and heaps of fun. I can almost go as far as to say that Guardians is possibly my favourite of all the Marvel movies up to now; it’s funny, it’s great-looking, it’s entertaining, and it introduces relatively unknown Marvel characters so well that it doesn’t take long for you to take position squarely behind them.

Guardians starts out in 1988, with a young Peter Quill in the hospital as his mother is dying. In her last moments, he refuses to take his mother’s hand, and when she dies he runs away. As he collapses on the lawn outside, he is picked up by a spaceship hovering in a sea of lights. Skip 26 years, and an older Peter Quill (Pratt) is introduced by way of the same Walkman the young Peter had with him, and he is still listening to his mother’s Awesome Mix cassette tape. He is on the planet Morag, looking for loot, specifically a mysterious orb which turns out to be hot property as Korath (Hounsou) shows up just as he is about to leave with it. Peter manages to escape with the orb, but also tries to cut out his partner in rogue-space-crime, Yondu (Rooker), who puts a bounty on Quill, also known as Star-Lord. Elsewhere, Ronan the Accuser (Pace) hears from Korath, and sends the assassin Gamora (Saldana) after the orb.

Quill tries to sell the orb on the home world of the Nova Corps, Xandar, and he gets anything but money for his troubles. Gamora comes after the orb, and two bounty hunters, a genetically engineered Racoon named Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper) and the walking tree Groot (voice of Vin Diesel) come after him for Yondu’s bounty. The Nova Corps however arrest them all and imprison them. In their short prison stay they meet Drax the Destroyer (Bautista), who also joins them in their eventual mission to stop the orb from falling into the wrong hands, those of Ronan the Accuser, and also in the process of saving Xandar and probably many other worlds.

Guardians of the Galaxy is incredibly entertaining, with fantastic visual effects, great design flair, and action and fight scenes that draws the viewer into the action. Chris Pratt is great as the eventual leader of the Guardians, reminiscent of Harrison Ford in Star Wars, and Dave Bautista delivers some great humour as the far-too-literal Drax. Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser is interesting, but in the end not all that much is done with his Ronan, who is a pretty standard super-villain who can only be defeated through a bit of a Deus ex machina. I also find it somewhat unnecessary to feature big name actors in voice rolls when there is almost no way to recognize the actual actors as their voices are modified to fit the characters, not to even mention the fact that Vin Diesel’s modified voice has a vocabulary of only four words. These are really, really small qualms however, and while Guardians of the Galaxy is not the best movie I’ll see in 2014, I doubt that anything else will be as entertaining for a few years to come. Go Guardians!