Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy is terribly silly – a multifarious group of sociopaths race to find a silver orb in order to prevent cosmic genocide – but it’s also hard to resist. It is a heroic interplanetary adventure mixed with an ironic B-movie space opera that is nevertheless more serious and less bizarre than you would expect from a former Troma collaborator (Gunn is the co-author of the screenplay for Tromeo and Juliet and the book All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger). ___ It’s rather unlikely that such a disparate group would come together, so we spend the whole film being persuaded that they can actually work together as a team. The development of the characters is limited to the transformation of hard-headed individualists into team players, which is skilfully incorporated into the main storyline – the plan has to be changed on the fly multiple times because the characters dumbly pursue their own objectives and complicate or delay the achievement of the main goal (Groot in prison, Drax on Knowhere). The film rather straightforwardly focuses on a group of outsiders being accepted by the system (which is dialectically represented by the peace-loving democratic planet Xandar and the Nova Corps military organisation), finding kindred spirits and becoming members of a notional new family (a large, live tree becomes its symbol in probably the most sentimental scene of the film). ___ However, it’s also essentially true that the deeper you go beneath the surface of the film, the more likely you are to be disappointed. The action scenes are spectacular, quite well arranged and sufficiently funny, but they don’t always serve the narrative. For example, the struggle after the first attempt to sell the orb didn’t have to happen at all or could have taken just a few tens of seconds and the impact on the main storyline would have been the same. Furthermore, the formula of “intergalactic terrorist wants to destroy/dominate the universe using a super-powerful artifact (which is nothing more than a MacGuffin)” is already rather worn out and the film doesn’t manage to overcome its clichéd nature quite as effectively as, for example, Iron Man 3 did.  ___ On the other hand, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a blockbuster that was such a joy to watch for its visual aspect alone – and often only for that. Whereas the plot, an Oedipal narrative in its most traditional form, is strikingly reminiscent of A New Hope (a young man growing up without his parents and whose father turns out to be a rather dark character is drawn into an adventure in which millions of lives are at stake) and cheap Star Wars imitations like Battle Beyond the Stars, The Ice Pirates and The Last Starfighter (whose posters obviously inspired the Guardians of the Galaxy poster), the visual creativity of the artists was clearly inspired by the kitschy scenography of the new Star Wars trilogy, the dark visions of H.R. Giger (a planet in a huge head) and the camp aesthetics of Flash Gordon. ___ In addition to the breathtaking visuals, which we can thoroughly enjoy thanks to the longer shots and the large number of deeply composed scenes and half-scenes (which, among other things, serve to illustrate the motif of team cohesion, or lack thereof), Guardians of the Galaxy is notable for its parallel targeting at multiple age groups. Unlike other self-conscious genre pastiches, it doesn’t offer greater pleasure only for those viewers who are familiar with the various fictional worlds (Star Trek, Godzilla, Django), but also for viewers who are familiar with various frames of reference, particularly the present day and the 1980s in this case. Quill represents this duality in the diegesis. On the one hand, he easily fits in among contemporary nerdy heroes with their own system of values that is not derived from authorities, who care more about their technological toys (Walkman, mask) than about living beings and are walking encyclopaedias of pop culture. On the other hand, Quill is also a child of the ’80s, which is evident not only in the objects on his instrument panel (an old cassette recorder, a troll doll, an ALF sticker), but also in most of the films that he quotes from (Footloose, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Howard the Duck). The music that he listens to (naturally on a Walkman from the ’80s), which his absent mother recorded for him and which repeatedly interferes with the development of the narrative, can also be understood as a reminder of the period of his childhood, i.e. the ‘80s. If the 1980s, understood as a period of return to conservative values, serve as a model for the hero’s actions and thinking, this is a variation on the formula of Back to the Future, in which the ’80s had to be “corrected” according to the model of the innocent 1950s. What is implied by all of today’s looking back to the values represented by Reagan’s America of the 1980s? I’d prefer to let others answer that, but I don’t have a very good feeling about it. 80% (01/08/2014) (less) (more)