My Favourite Movies: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

When I first saw the trailer for GotG I thought to myself that Marvel had finally run out of ideas – then came Ant Man! But I kid… kind of. I did sort of watch it open mouthed and said that this is either going to be truly awful or a screaming laugh a minute. Well, it wasn’t awful.

The story starts with a young Peter Quill in hospital refusing to be involved in his mother’s dying moments. Running away from the hospital in despair he’s picked up by an alien spacecraft and abducted. Cut to 20+ years later when Quill, now known (at least to some people) as Starlord is a passably capable thief caught in the act of stealing something really, really important. The rest of the film (or at least most of it) is basically a chase film for what I originally thought to be a ‘McGuffin’ but turned out to be an actually Very Important Object (VIO). Typically of McGuffins and VIO’s this object is found, fought over, lost, recovered, lost, traded, stolen back and so on just to keep things interesting. Through this process we get to know all of the major players Quinn/Starlord played brilliantly by Chris Pratt, the assassin Gamora played excellently by Zoe Saldana complete with green skin (a very odd but good look for her), Drax played (or barely acted) by Dave Bautista, and the two CGI characters Rocket voiced by Bradley Cooper and Groot voiced (if you can call it that) by Vin Diesel. There’s also sometimes a rather frightening ‘comedy’ role Yondu (Quill’s abductor) played by Michael Rooker. Through a series of adventures the self-styled Guardians bond, save each other’s lives and basically become who they publically profess to be – almost despite themselves and to the surprise of those around them.

So, despite the rather generic plot why did this film make my Favourite movies list? Essentially for one thing – it was really, really, and I can’t emphasise this too much, really funny. If you are in anyway a fan of the SF space-opera genre or just SF generally you with most definitely laugh your socks off during this movie as it sends up just about every plot device in the genre time and time again – and in a way that just makes you (or at least me) smile and nod in appreciation at a job brilliantly done. But humour isn’t the only thing going on here. There’s some serious bits too. There’s real danger, some pretty good fight scenes, death (mostly off screen this is a 12 certificate after all!), hinted at sex, loss and longing for those long gone and of course a kicking soundtrack from the 1970’s (how that cassette tape survived for so long is well beyond me!!). Oh, I almost forgot…. The great surprise of the movie for me was who played Nebula – a kick ass (mostly) blue cyborg. It was Karen Gillan from Dr Who. I was stunned (I kid you not) at just how wonderful she was in it.

I do hope that they make the much talked about sequel. I’d like them to get the band back together to discover the mystery of Quill’s dad and why he’d paid a bunch of ravagers to abduct him from Earth (and then not follow it up be coming to get him) but – hopefully – that’s for another time.