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| Sorry, the other maid service was booked solid... |
Guardians of the Galaxy is the tale of a ravenous, despotic power forced to overcome a stubborn, slippery foe and achieve the unachievable.
Yes,
let's talk about the Disney Corporation for a moment, and the odds
stacked against it with the release of this thoroughly fun flick.
Okay,
the House that Mickey Built seems at times like the Third Reich of
American Media, having gobbled up ABC, ESPN and LucasFilm Ltd. to
namedrop some of their juiciest booty. But while 'Castle',
'SportsCenter' and a little start-up called Star Wars will
no doubt bear fruit for years to come, Disney's chief child soldier
is and will remain Marvel Worldwide Inc. and its vast lexicon of
eminently popular, eminently bankable
characters in this, the golden age of super hero cinema.
But
space is cold, hostile and cruel, and the milieu in which space
movies have been
forced to compete for the box office is hardly better. Survival, much
less profitability, is a dubious prospect if it isn't from a
grandfathered franchise with serious name recognition. Serenity
and Avatar come
to mind as the last truly noble efforts to entice John and Jane
Public to a film set among the stars that didn't have Wars
or Trek
in the title. Serenity,
despite a built-in cult following, petered out. Avatar...did
a little better.
Point
is, Guardians of the Galaxy faced
an uphill battle against a generally uninformed public that is
historically apathetic when offered a sci-fi joint filled with
unfamiliar faces and a bevy of technobabble. No lightsabers? No
funny droids to dither and chirp? No Leonard Nemoy to smear gravitas
on the lens and explain the plot with a clarion baritone? Not
interested. Could even the Olympian might of the Marvel Machine
overcome such an implacable nemesis? After all, Robert Downey Jr.'s
coifed gourd poking out from the gleaming Iron Man armor is one
thing. But a movie poster with exactly zero recognizable
faces and no capes, no masks, no Hulk SMASH! and not so much as a
glimpse of Scarlet Johannssen's...um...eyes? Another thing entirely.
Or
so it seemed. As I write this, Guardians of the Galaxy
appears to have conquered the
foe. A $37.8 million dollar opening day began a weekend run that
capped at $94 million by Sunday afternoon.
That's better than Captain America: The Winter Soldier and
Thor: The Dark World.
Yes, Disney has beaten the odds yet again.
And
I'm not going to begrudge them for a moment. Not this time. Because
Guardians is more than
just a crowd-pleaser; it's a damned entertaining, old school
adventure that keeps you riveted and
giggling, often at the same time. It is also a dyed-in-the-wool
comic book movie, a whip-smart adaptation of a more obscure (but no
less beloved) Marvel property, steadfast to its source material,
totally reverent in its irreverence.
Meet
Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), ordinary Earth boy abducted by space
pirates (you know: pirates, but in space) practically from the foot
of his mother's death bed to parts unknown for reasons unknown. A
couple decades later he's a cocky, pistol-toting outlaw/thief/puckish
rogue known by the oft-mocked moniker 'Starlord'. Quill makes his
living desecrating alien tombs for unscrupulous treasure brokers,
which he does with gusto and class and an arsenal of groovy dance
moves. Though he's spent most of his life in deep space, the awesome
might of 80's America clearly lives on in his punchy, pop
culture-suffused slang and his use of a Walkman for his musical
accompaniment. Quill's latest score, a chrome-ish sphere called
simply 'the Orb', is coveted by the tyrannical Kree Empire (looking a
tad too much like the s & m antagonists from The
Chronicles of Riddick) and its
mysterious benefactor, the mad despot Thanos. Why? What for? Does
it matter? It's a thin excuse for ceaseless action and mayhem on a
biblical scale, and that's the only kind of excuse you need. At some
point we'll get to the pesky reasons
for everything, but until then it's just a matter of hanging on for
the ride.
And
what a ride. Starlord quickly runs afoul not only of the
blue-skinned Kree but also the green-skinned killer hottie Gamora
(Zoe Saldana) and a pair of wonky bounty hunters: Rocket, a
short-tempered cad who also happens to be a genetically reconstituted
raccoon, and Groot, an eight-foot tall humanoid tree - imagine Swamp
Thing's good-natured younger brother. The former is an acid-tongued
motormouth, the latter a monosyllabic simpleton (and it will take a
better man than I to manage all the Vin Diesel jokes here) who can
only say 'I am Groot', albeit with a multitude of subtle inflections
that convey volumes of meaning. The early scramble and subsequent
melee to secure the Orb results in all four heroes-to-be captured and
jailed, thereby ensuring ample opportunity for them to bond, come to
terms with stuff, and collaborate on a harebrained jailbreak that
cements their loyalty to one another. Gosh, what are the chances?
The
quest for fortune and glory takes a turn for the heavy when it is
revealed that the Orb is a containment device housing one of the
Infinity Gems, a revelation guaranteed to elicit an “Awww, yeah!”
from anyone who read Marvel comics in the 90's (these hypothetical
readers of the yore would happily tell you the Infinity Gem is
actually one of a set of six which collectively imbue the user with
powers at a level only God himself is supposed to have...but I'm
getting ahead of myself). A minor demonstration of the little purple
stone's titanic energies is plenty for Quill and his new friends to
get serious and take the fight straight to the Kree, in particular
the psychotic Ronan the Accuser, a standard S/F douche tired of taking
orders from the aloof Thanos. Throw in loads of teeth-jarring
action, some serious sibling
rivalry, and a fifth hero in the form of Drax the Destroyer, a
vengeful tank of a man too stubborn to lose, let simmer for two hours
and you've got Guardians of the Galaxy.
What
impressed me most about the film was its ceaseless momentum, a sort
of focused hyperactivity that kept the plot plunging ahead and to
Hell with whoever got lost along the way. This was accomplished
thanks to a huge amount of narrative negative space: virtually all
backstory is implied, assumed, or just outright ignored in favor of
sheer kinetic thrust. Exposition is rare
in this flick, and when it does become absolutely necessary it is
fileted like fine oro tuna, leaving only the choicest bits for
consumption; everything else is discarded as extraneous. Quill's
twenty lost years and his transformation into Starlord are never once
explained; it is merely presented to you as fact that he not only
survived his ordeal but came away pretty badass for the experience.
Similarly it is taken as a given that the Marvel Universe, previously
grounded mostly on a real-ish Earth, is indeed rife with alien
beings, cosmic entities, a corps of cosmic lawmen, and entire
civilizations of humans not actually from our galactic cul-de-sac.
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| It's a bee, right?! Oh, God, I hate bees! Get it! Get it! |
A
bloated script, a boorish cast or a compulsive insistence to explain
everything would likely result in disaster with such an approach.
But director James Gunn, whose previous credits include the
horror-parody Slither
and who shares credit for the abomination that was Movie
43, hurls Guardians
like a guided missile towards
the end credits and trusts the audience will simply be buoyed along
in the updraft. He was right: generally you're having so much fun
you never notice the (rare) misstep, which for me manifested
primarily in Saldana's beige-plain delivery and general wooden-ness.
It is not omnipresent – she gets some base hits here and there –
but it is more noticeable when contrasted with an otherwise seamless
cast. Offsetting it is that fact that the camera seems to adore Ms.
Saldana and her glorious cheekbones, which motion-captured her way to
our hearts in Avatar
when her skin was blue instead of green (mind = blown). Color seems
to be one of Gunn's strong suits; he even manages to make space
itself look interesting, splashing the starry backgrounds with
radiant nebulae and exotic cosmic décor that looks not unlike
backlit sewage drifting through Waterford crystal.
Two
other things help immensely: despite the frantic pace, Guardians
of the Galaxy never fails to be
funny and many times it also manages to be sweet. The low moments,
those very brief pauses in the action, are reserved not for cosmic
history lessons but for endearing character moments that humanize the
otherwise invincible heroes and make each one of them feel less like
archetypes (bruiser, assassin, thief) and more like people, good
dudes you'd delight to swap stories with over warm beers at two in
the morning. Groot gets the best of these moments, but a surprising
runner-up is Dave Bautista's Drax, who manages pained contrition and
a handful of wicked, low-key zingers with equal skill. And speaking
of which...
Yeah,
Guardians is freakin'
funny. Granted, there's a bit of a shotgun approach to the humor, a
sense at times that they were throwing every potential gag at the
wall and seeing what would stick, but the yucks are pretty much all
decanted from the same bottle: wry, sardonic, subversive and
shit-eating. Rocket gets the best of this – in particular a time
bomb-style gag involving a prosthetic leg that had my theater in
stitches – and the delivery of Bradley Cooper as Rocket's voice is
a welcome asset. On the whole I'm not a fan of Mr. Cooper – even
in starring roles he always seems like he'd rather be somewhere else
– but here he does much more than just phone in a quick buck from
the sound studio, infusing the little rodent with equal parts Bill
Murray and Andrew Dice Clay.
So
it looks as though Marvel has unveiled the other end of it's Grand
Unification Plan, having firmly established the Avengers and expanded
comic universe Earth-side and now starting at the other end with
Guardians and working
toward the middle. The idea, presumably, is for the heroes of the
last decade's worth of films to stretch out into space and confront
the 'cosmic' threats that have so long been a part of Marvel's
biggest arcs. We've already got a brief scene featuring Thanos (a
comfortable Josh Brolin, effectively sporting stubble on his purple
chin) and will no doubt be seeing more of the Infinity Stones, too.
Until
then Marvel and proud papa Disney can once again sit pretty.
Those
jerks.
