Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy is an unpretentious action film that chooses to put its focus on the interaction between its characters. With its eccentric cast of heroes, the movie delivers a simple and well-known story that is nevertheless skillfully developed by director and co-writer James Gunn.

The plot of Guardians of the Galaxy is somewhat cliché. The villain wants to destroy an entire planet using an artifact of immeasurable power and the group of heroes, united by the whims of fate, tries to prevent that.

The movie opens brilliantly with a small scene that, within just a couple of minutes, already reveals several of the elements that will form the narrative. The viewers are introduced to a kid sitting alone on a hospital bench, immersed in thoughts while listening to music. After visiting his mother, who dies of cancer, he runs out of the hospital crying. However, as soon as he leaves the building, he is abducted by a fleet of alien ships.

Dark humor and irony are recurring elements in Guardians of the Galaxy. The following scene, for example, continues to subvert expectations. It follows a mysterious man walking through the ruins of what appears to be an ancient civilization, wearing a threatening mask and using a special piece of equipment that allows him to see the holograms of the people who lived there, until he finally finds the temple that holds the object he came for. As soon as he enters the room, he removes the mask, puts on headphones, and starts dancing while overcoming the obstacles of the place in a relaxed way.

A gigantic sign announcing the name of the movie, then, suddenly comes up just as the camera spans away, leaving the character tiny in the lower-left corner of the screen – performing a visual rhyme with the previous scene in which he was abducted. The effect of these two shots is clear: to make fun of the vulnerability aspect of the heroes, sometimes playing with the tragedies they experience, sometimes with the dangers they must face.

The group, headed by Peter Quill (Chris Patt), is also composed of the green-skinned alien Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the muscular Drax (Dave Bautista), and the talking raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and his partner Groot (Vin Diesel), a humanoid tree. The protagonist is a bon vivant, who seems to care little about danger, although he never fails to notice the weight of the situations he finds himself in – and this is where viewers can sense the point of balance that makes the character work: he doesn’t act playfully because he discredits the imminent threat; he does it despite understanding it very well.

Gamora is, in turn, a character more somber and intense than Quill, despite being the weak link of the group. Zoe Saldana seems indecisive if she intends to work with the violent aspect of the character or with the one that generates her good intentions, exaggerating on both sides and sounding only contradictory. In addition, she is defined by the anger that she feels at the villains, which brings her thematically close to Drax, without the unique quirk of Dave Bautista’s character: Drax’s hatred led him to megalomania, which, together with his inability to understand metaphors, generates recurring jokes (“Why would I put my finger on his neck?”). Now, Rocket and Groot, two exotic bounty hunters, take on the role of Han Solo and Chewbacca in Star Wars, the first entertaining the viewers with his sharp dialogues – which are always in contrast to the fact that they are pronounced by a raccoon – and the second amusing by the fact that his coarse figure does not match his gentle personality, besides repeating a single phrase (“I am Groot“) regardless of context.

Guardians of the Galaxy’s characters turning out to be clichés is actually fundamental to the construction of the unpretentious tone of the story, which doesn’t mean they are not used or developed well, with key scenes revealing little nuances in their personalities. Scenes like when Rocket appears without clothes and the protagonist watches, with a sad expression, the chips implemented on his back, or the one in Quill’s reasons for making so much fuss about being be called “Star-lord” are finally revealed all make the viewer forget the jokes for a moment and see the characters as tragic individuals.

Since the dynamics between the characters is the thematic center of the story, the narrative tries to justify their union by putting strong similarities in their painful pasts. If they meet each other because fate so wanted, they stay together because they understand each other’s pain. Writers James Gunn and Nicole Perlman go further, intensifying this idea by making it a narrative arc: if, at first, it’s their quarrels that stand out (Rocket getting angry because he believes he’s underestimated for being a raccoon, for example), later it’s the small moments of sacrifice that gain focus, to finally culminate on the climax when they literally share each other’s pain.

The quality of the narrative is also visible in the number of elements that appear useless until it’s revealed their connection with the story, such as the rescue of an apparently random family actually having dramatic weight for one of the secondary characters. Even the jokes serve a dramatic purpose: when Groot’s repeated line is finally subverted, for example, the scene ends up revealing a lot about the character and adding power to the movie’s core theme of friendship.

James Gunn shows a remarkable ability to fill the movie with jokes without making them tiresome, by adopting a different visual strategy for each one. At one moment, for example, he shows some characters talking about a plan to escape from prison, all the while, in the background, another character shows up doing exactly what they were just deciding to be a bad idea. At another moment, he keeps a character out of frame until his presence is important for comical effect. In the prologue, he makes the protagonist smaller twice to mock his situation and, near the climax, puts Gamora yawning in the middle of an epic shot in slow motion to subvert expectations.

It’s also worth noting the thematic similarity between the various jokes in the movie, which is often the opposition between an act of violence and a childish gesture or dialogue, such as Groot’s broad smile after decimating a group of enemy soldiers, Rocket’s reasons for wanting a mechanical leg, and the lament of a prisoner after being robbed by Drax (“That was my favorite knife“).

Also noticeable is the care behind the film’s visuals, which abuses of bright, bold colors to create a completely alien universe that is very different from other Marvel movies, without abandoning a very efficient internal logic. One can notice, for example, the color consistency of all those who threaten the protagonist, going from the main villain to Quill’s boss, and even the first prisoner who wants to attack him and the prison guard who actually does it: they’re all blue. This also makes Gamora stand out immediately when she appears alongside the blue villains for being, well, green – which, of course, is also one of the main colors associated with betrayal.

If Guardians of the Galaxy falters in any aspect it is in the development of the movie’s main villain, the alien Ronan (Lee Pace), who is considerably one-dimensional. He is initially presented as a fanatical fundamentalist leader, but the concept is never developed and his reasons for destroying an entire planet never surpass the basics of “They killed my father.” Serving as a comparison, the 2009 Star Trek reboot is a movie similar in tone that creates a villain whose motivations for destroying a planet are fully understood by the audience, which helps to make him a more complex character.

Finally, the film also slips up in the excessive focus on the weapon wielded by Peter Quill’s boss, the alien Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker). Whenever the guy appears, the camera sticks to the object, indicating that it will assume some important role in the story. At the climax,  the weapon is indeed used to kill a huge group of enemies, but in a separate, isolated scene that doesn’t affect the main characters and the story in any way. 

Guardians of the Galaxy is one the best Marvel movies to date and, despite some minor problems, manages to develop very well several of its characters, conflicts, and even jokes.

December 04, 2018.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 11, 2015.