I can still remember what it felt like to leave the cinema after I first saw Guardians of the Galaxy last year. I remember taking the wrong exit from the building and having to navigate my way out via the fire escape, and then I remember thinking about how strange it was that everybody in town seemed so damned smiley (after a couple of minutes, I realized I was smiling at everybody I saw). The only thing I don't remember, in fact, is my feet touching the ground.
To be fair, I'd been waiting on it for a long time. Everything augured well - the flippant trailers, the ludicrously out-of-place seventies soundtrack, the casting of talented comedy actors like Peter Serafinowicz - and I wasn't getting any of my usual pre-Marvel-event-movie alarm bells ringing. Bluntly put, I was predisposed to having fun.
The temptation at this point is to explain why Guardians of the Galaxy is such a great summer popcorn flick. It is - if you haven't seen it already then you really should - but in my view there's a few things that elevate it beyond the point of simply being a damned good time.
First and foremost amongst these is its emotional intelligence. To misquote somebody I can't be bothered looking at, comedy is tragedy plus distance. One way or other, Guardians' characters have all lived pretty horrible lives. This could have been handled in a Sandleresque sort of way, by making them fundamentally unrelatable and encouraging the audience to laugh at them - given that two of our heroes are a sentient raccoon and a walking tree, it would have been an understandable decision and to be honest, before I went in it was sort of what I was expecting. Instead of this, however, we're given some genuinely sensitive storytelling of the show-don't-tell school, whereby we're given brief insights into what they have experienced and then hit with a sight gag or a one-liner long before things have the chance to get too maudlin. This is complemented nicely by the orchestral sountrack, which carries the requisite heft for a sci-fi superhero movie. As big as it is, however, it only ever acts in service of the on-screen action rather than functioning as a cheap way to milk the tears.
None of this, however, is the most interesting thing about Guardians of the Galaxy. Heck, even Peter Serafinowicz isn't the most interesting thing about Guardians of the Galaxy, and he's normally the most interesting thing about pretty much any project he's involved with. Think about it, though: when was the last time you saw a film where the CGI characters felt like the dramatic equals of their live-action counterparts? I bet it wasn't an episode from the Star Wars series, and despite any grudging affection I might feel towards them it probably wasn't a Scooby Doo movie, either. Here, though, Rocket and Groot are just two more parts of the team - sure, they get their share of laughs, but we grieve with them, too. As voiced by Bradley Cooper, Rocket carries the film's emotional climax more or less solo, and at no point does this ever feel anything other than completely natural.
I'm not saying that this is a great movie, because it isn't - not to put too fine a point on it, great movies are seldom this ugly. Barring one or two nicely-choreographed action scenes, the cinematography here is a C+ at best. The film also suffers badly from the lack of a suitably interesting antagonist; Lee Pace's Ronan is too bland and too absent, whilst Yondu (Michael Rooker), although delightful, slots far too easily into the role of comic relief to ever present a convincing threat. As Marvel movies go, though, it's absolutely one of their best, and a small, cynical part of me suspects that this is as good as we're ever likely to get.
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