Guardians of the Galaxy

Charming and spectacular, Guardians of the Galaxy is wonderfully entertaining from beginning to end.  This film is by far the best of Marvel franchise pictures combining vivid and likeable heroes with special effects action sequences that are almost gratuitously beautiful.  The influence of Pixar films is evident in this movie:  the boldly drawn and pungently characterized protagonists are like the talking toys or cars or fish in those computer-animated pictures.  The heroes are bundles of fascinating characteristics brightly outlined, endearing, and almost instantly appealing -- this is film making as handmaiden to advertising and, to some eyes, there may be something sinister about cartoon-like characters so effectively presented as to launch entire commercial empires -- I assume that will be the financial effect of this film.  But there is serious art and high endeavor in making a movie that combines elements of childish comedy, sophisticated adult banter, and jaw-dropping special effects action.  If this film is accepted for what it is, the picture is well-nigh flawless, an entertainment designed to amuse every sort of spectator, diversion for brows of all dimensions.  In this respect, Guardians of the Galaxy reminds me of old Disney animated features (and the film is produced under Disney's auspices):  the picture is designed to keep five-year olds amazed and engrossed while periodically offering morsels of more complex, even profound, substance to the adults superintending their children in the theater.  The film's plot is rudimentary and primitive but effective.  At one point, the earthling hero, Peter Quill, says:  "It's got that kind of ark of the covenant, Maltese falcon kind of vibe about it."  An orb contains matter from before the universe erupted in the Big Bang.  This matter is powerful beyond all imagining and confers vast destructive energies upon the possessor of the metal sphere encasing these shards of primordial plasma.  Of course, an evil lord, something like the bad guy in the Star Wars films sends his hideous minions out into the universe to search for this sphere.  A group of outlaws called Ravagers is also on the hunt for the sphere.  One of them is Peter Quill, a human boy who was snatched from the bedside of his dying mother in 1988 and recruited into the ranks of the scruffy extraterrestrial renegades -- their leader uses a guided and lethal arrow to slaughter his enemies and speaks with southern accent; he's like a blue and green-faced reptilian version of Jesse James or Clyde Barrow.  A genetically modified raccoon and his side-kick, a massive tree-shaped creature called Groot, are bounty hunters.  They target Quill for a bounty on his head and end up being entangled in the mad pursuit, an extended chase across the universe, with the sphere as its objective. After some wonderful Mad-magazine style adventures designed to push the protagonists into collision and, then, alliance with one another, the five protagonists league together to save the universe by capturing the movie's MacGuffin, the sphere from the evil chainmail-clad villain, a bad guy named Ronan.  The Guardians are the sardonic talking raccoon, Groot, the tree-man, a woman warrior with cadaverously high cheekbones and brow and blue skin, a huge brute covered in iridescent red and gold tattoos, and Peter Quill.  These characters are sufficiently unpredictable to be interesting, but also provided with strong, heroic attributes.  The film celebrates friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice and its sentimental scenes are genuinely moving.  The plot, although very simple, makes sense and small details are coherently developed:  the death of the hero's mother by cancer, a jarring note at the outset of the film, involves events and motifs that return in satisfying manner at the movie's climax.  (Indeed, the movie is almost too obsessively coherent in some of its details:  as a huge falcon-shaped metal space-ship crashes down on a city, we see a woman with bright red skin holding a baby with similar complexion both of them cowering as the vast vessel explodes -- it's a startling and memorable image.  In the last two minutes of the movie, woman and baby are revealed to be John C. Reilly's family who have been saved by the film's heroes.  This film makes sense of a five second image embedded in a titanic special effects sequence.  Very few action films of this sort have this kind of crazy, and unnecessary narrative integrity.)  The action sequences are clearly choreographed and filmed lucidly -- they actually make sense even when filled with hundreds of complicated moving parts.  Unlike most films of this sort, the climactic battle scenes are shot in bright daylight not the typical special effects murk afflicting many similarly designed pictures -- everything is clearly visible down to the tiniest detail and the screen is packed with information, gags, and interesting things to see.  Indeed, the movie is exhausting because it is so generously imaginative, so densely crammed with curious and wonderful things to delight the eye.  For reasons too complex to explain in this note, the movie is largely scored to old pop songs and R & B standards and this gives the picture a cheerful tone, a sort of bounce and insouciance that is undercuts the solemnity of all the exploding planets and armies of villainous space-troopers blasted into pieces in the film's light-show battle-scenes.  The movie doesn't take itself seriously and some scenes that would droop and bore spectators in most pictures of this genre -- for instance, a lengthy council scene in which the five characters debate their prospects for retrieving the MacGuffin from the bad guys -- are witty, delightful and laugh-out-loud funny in this film.  The movie is filled with gorgeous colors, weird landscapes, and strange creatures -- all of this is derived from the Star Wars films but this picture, in my view, is much better, much funnier, more inventive, better shot and staged, and, ultimately, much more exciting.  In the opening scene, the hero dances through caverns filled with monsters, shucks and jives avoiding huge luminous geysers, and periodically picks up little lizard-like monsters, miniature T-rex creatures, that he holds in front of his mouth like a microphone, lip-synching to one of the soundtracks golden oldies -- it's a wonderful image, light on its feet, scary and spectacular at the same time, and, curiously, joyful and light-hearted.  At one point, the hero is told by the beautiful woman warrior that his space-ship is filthy.  We know that he's seduced all manner of ET girls in this vessel.  He says:  "I should show her the place in black-light.  It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting."  This film is excellent on all levels and I recommend it highly.