Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): A Raccoon, a Tree and a Cassette Tape

My Guardians of the Galaxy review starts with a confession: I walked in expecting a gamble and came out grinning. A film about a talking raccoon, a walking tree, a green assassin, a wrestler who takes every metaphor literally and a guy who’s only half a space pirate sounds like the sort of thing that falls over in the first twenty minutes. It doesn’t. It’s loud and colourful and a bit daft, and it knows exactly how daft it is, which is most of why it works. I laughed out loud more than once, and I wasn’t expecting to.

It’s also a very different kind of Marvel film from the ones before it. The Avengers had five films of setup behind it and a name on every poster. This one asks you to care about a crew nobody outside the comics had heard of, in a part of the universe we’ve never seen, and it gets there by making them enjoyable company rather than by explaining who they are. The jokes come fast, the action’s easy to follow, and the whole thing moves along like it has somewhere better to be. If you’ve been tired of superhero films that take themselves very seriously, this is the antidote. It isn’t perfect, and I’ll get to the bits that don’t land, but I spent most of the running time with a stupid smile on my face.

What I liked most going in was how little it felt like homework. A summer of big sequels has trained me to expect a film that needs a recap before I sit down, and this one needs nothing. You can walk in cold, know who everybody is by the end of the first scene, and follow every bit of it. That’s a harder trick than it sounds, and the film does it without once stopping to lecture you about how the universe works.

A boy, a Walkman and a stolen Orb

The film opens on Earth in 1988, with a young Peter Quill outside a hospital room where his mother has just died, and then a spaceship takes him. Twenty-odd years later he’s a scavenger working for a gang of blue-skinned Ravagers, calling himself Star-Lord, dancing across a collapsing alien ruin with a cassette Walkman on his head while he steals a metal Orb. That opening dance does a lot of work. Within five minutes you know he’s a cocky chancer, you know the music matters to him, and you know the film isn’t going to be shy about either. Chris Pratt plays him with a loose, easy charm that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. He’s a lot like Han Solo, a smuggler with a mouth on him and a ship held together by luck, and the swagger isn’t far from the one in The Empire Strikes Back.

Everybody wants the Orb, which turns out to hold something with enough power to flatten a planet. Ronan, a fanatic with a very large hammer, wants it to wipe out the people of Xandar. A green-skinned assassin called Gamora is sent after it and then decides she’d rather sell it herself. A bounty-hunting raccoon and his tree-shaped partner are after Quill because there’s money on his head. They all end up in the same prison, which is where it gets fun.

Five bad influences on each other

The prison section is where the gang forms, and it’s the best stretch of the film for me. Nobody trusts anybody. Gamora wants out and wants the Orb, Drax wants Ronan dead for killing his family, and Rocket has a plan for escaping that involves a lot of things no sane person would try. Dave Bautista plays Drax as a man who takes everything literally, so metaphors go straight over his head and he looks furious about it. I didn’t expect the wrestler to be one of the funniest people on screen, and he is.

Zoe Saldana’s Gamora is the straight woman to all of this, the only one who’s really sensible, and she gets enough of her own story to be more than the sensible one. Then there’s the pair I’d happily watch a whole film of. Rocket and Groot are the heart of it, with Bradley Cooper’s raccoon being spiky and sarcastic and quietly miserable, and Vin Diesel’s tree saying three words over and over in a way that somehow covers every emotion going. The film wisely never lets either of them get too cute. Rocket’s mean, Groot’s loyal, and when they’re together on screen I stopped looking at the plot.

Michael Rooker’s Yondu is the other one worth a mention, a blue-skinned Ravager leader with a fin on his head and a whistling arrow that does terrible things. He’s the closest thing Quill has to a father, and he’s also the man Quill’s been stealing from, so every scene between them has a nice bit of tension and humour running through it. It gives the opening a texture that a lot of space films don’t bother with, a sense that these people have been rubbing along together for years and are sick of each other.

Put the five of them in a row and it’s the funniest image in the film, because they look like a group that should never have been in the same room. Their rapport develops in small pieces, an argument here, a bad plan there, and by the time they’re loyal to each other it feels earned instead of announced. They’re not heroes at the start, and the film doesn’t pretend they are. They’re a crowd of people who’ve been let down by everyone else, and I liked that they find each other almost by accident.

The villain problem

Here’s where I have to be honest about what doesn’t land. The mission is a familiar one: bad guy wants the thing, good guys stop him. Ronan is a big, serious, pale-faced menace with a grudge against Xandar, and he’s about as memorable as a villain can be without being actively bad. I’d forgotten most of his speeches by the time I was back in the car. The plot is thin, and a lot of it exists to get the characters from one fun scene to the next.

What saves it is that the film never asks you to take the plot very seriously. Compare it with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which plays its time-travel stakes dead straight, and you can see how differently the two summer films want you to feel. This one wants you to have a good time, and the story’s thinness is part of the deal. There’s a stop at a place called Knowhere, a mining outpost built inside a giant severed head, where a collector explains what the Orb really is, and it’s the strangest and best-looking corner of the film. The visuals throughout are bright and busy and a long way from the grey, gloomy palette a lot of big films go for.

The Nova Corps, Xandar’s police force, get a decent amount to do as well, with a pile of ships and a crowd of officers who have to deal with a gang of escaped prisoners and a fanatic at the same time. They’re fine, and Glenn Close and John C. Reilly give them a bit of dignity, but they’re the least interesting part of the galaxy the film builds, and I’d have traded some of their scenes for more time with the main five.

The mixtape and the finish

Then there’s the music. Quill’s old cassette is a mix of seventies hits, and the film uses them like a second script. “Hooked on a Feeling” and “Come and Get Your Love” are playing before you’ve worked out what the story is, and “Spirit in the Sky” shows up when it should. It gives the whole film a warm, slightly cheesy character that suits it perfectly. The songs were already ones I knew, and I came out wanting to dig them all out again. It’s the most charming use of a soundtrack I’ve seen in a blockbuster in a long time.

The finish does what a finish like this should, with a big space battle over Xandar and a final bit of daftness that I won’t spoil. There’s one moment involving Groot that got to me more than it had any right to, a very small, very quiet beat in the middle of all the noise, and it’s the point where the film stops being a joke and shows you it actually cares about these people. Rocket’s reaction to it is what sells it. I’d happily see the five of them again, and I think this is the kind of Marvel film that rewards a second viewing.

There’s also something quietly lovely about where the cassette comes from. It’s a present from his mother, the last thing she gave him before he was taken, and he’s carried it through twenty-odd years of being a thief. That’s why the music isn’t just a gimmick. It’s the one piece of home he’s got left, and when the film lets that show, even for a few seconds, it’s more affecting than most of the speeches in bigger films.

Which of the five would you happily spend another two hours with, and did the music win you over the way it did me? Tell me in the comments.