6.5 / 10
Official trailer
Come and Get Your Love
I’ve watched Guardians of the Galaxy once. It’s an okay movie, and once was enough.
The film opens in 1988, on Earth, with a little boy sitting in a hospital corridor while his mother dies of cancer. He runs outside, grieving, and a spaceship beams him up. Twenty-six years later, he’s Peter Quill, a space scavenger who calls himself Star-Lord, and he’s dancing through an alien ruin to Redbone’s Come and Get Your Love on an old Walkman, kicking space rats out of his way.
That opening tells you what James Gunn is going for: a sad backstory followed immediately by goofy, irreverent fun. That combination carried the Guardians films for a decade, and here it feels fresh. Quill dancing through the ruins of Morag is the most purely enjoyable stretch of the movie, and the film spends a lot of its running time trying to get back to that high.
The Walkman plays a mixtape his mother made him, Awesome Mix Vol. 1, full of seventies pop hits. The mixtape gives the film its personality. The soundtrack became a bestseller, and it’s still the best thing about the movie.
For Writers
Quill’s mother dies in the first scene, and then he’s dancing through an alien ruin. Grief and goofiness sit side by side, and the combination defines the film’s tone.
Opening with a moment of real loss before shifting to comedy can give a light story emotional depth. The reader carries that early sadness through the fun, and it gives the character’s jokes and bravado a hidden layer.
It’s the same trick Gunn would use with Rocket in the third film, and it works here more cleanly because it’s used only once, at the start. The mixtape becomes the link: every song is a reminder of the mother he lost, and every time he presses play, the audience remembers too.
The Gang
Chris Pratt plays Quill, and he’s likeable, goofy and cocky, a shaggy leading man in the Han Solo mold. Zoe Saldaña plays Gamora, an assassin who wants to betray her adoptive father, Thanos. Dave Bautista plays Drax, a hulking warrior who takes everything literally and doesn’t understand metaphors, and he’s the funniest thing in the film. Pratt is fun company, but I’d trade half his quips for one more scene of Drax misreading a figure of speech.
Bradley Cooper voices Rocket, a genetically engineered raccoon with a chip on his shoulder and a love of big guns, and Vin Diesel voices Groot, a tree whose entire vocabulary is I’m Groot. The pair are the film’s secret weapon, and Groot, in particular, became a pop-culture icon.
The five of them meet in a prison, squabble, betray each other and slowly become a family. That arc, misfits learning to trust each other, drives the film, and it works more often than not. The cast’s chemistry sells it, even when the script leans on shortcuts to get them from enemies to friends.
The Orb
The plot revolves around the Orb, a small glowing ball Quill steals at the start. Everybody wants it: a fanatical Kree warrior named Ronan, who plans to use it to destroy the planet Xandar; a creepy collector; various bounty hunters; and Thanos, lurking in the background. It turns out to contain an Infinity Stone, one of six cosmic gems the Marvel films would spend the next five years chasing.
This is the film’s biggest weakness. The Orb is a MacGuffin, and the plot is a chase after a glowing object, the same structure as half the Marvel films of this era. Strip away the jokes and the music, and what’s left is another story about a powerful rock and a villain who wants to blow something up.
For Writers
The plot is a chase after a glowing object, the Orb, that everybody wants. The Orb is a MacGuffin, and the story feels generic because of it.
A MacGuffin can drive a plot, but it can’t carry one. If the object everybody’s chasing has no personal meaning for the characters, the chase feels mechanical, and the reader stops caring who gets it.
The fix is to tie the object to a character’s wound or desire.
The Orb means nothing to anybody in the gang. If it had meant something to Quill, or Gamora, the chase would have had stakes beyond saving a planet the audience never gets to know. Personal stakes beat cosmic ones almost every time.
Yondu
Michael Rooker plays Yondu, the blue-skinned space pirate who abducted Quill as a boy and raised him as one of his crew, and he steals every scene he’s in. He’s rough, greedy and dangerous, whistling to control a deadly flying arrow, and he keeps threatening to eat Quill while obviously caring about him.
Rooker gives the film a grizzled, funny menace that the main villains lack. The relationship between Yondu and Quill, a surrogate father and son who can’t admit they love each other, is only sketched here, but it’s the seed of the best thing in the sequel.
James Gunn’s Gamble
Marvel’s choice of James Gunn looked like a risk. He’d come up through Troma, the schlocky independent studio, and made cult films like Slither and Super, full of gore and dark jokes. Handing him a hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar space opera about characters most people had never heard of seemed crazy.
It paid off. Gunn’s weird sense of humor, his love of misfits and his ear for music gave the film a personality the Marvel machine tended to sand away. When the film works, it’s because Gunn’s voice comes through. When it doesn’t, the studio formula has taken over.
For Writers
The film undercuts nearly every serious moment with a joke. It’s funny, and it drains the tension.
Humour and stakes pull against each other. A well-timed joke can relieve tension and make characters likeable, but constant jokes tell the reader nothing is really at risk.
Decide which scenes in your story must be taken seriously, and protect them from comic relief. Let the reader feel the weight before you let them laugh. A joke after a real moment of loss can be a relief. A joke instead of the loss is a dodge, and readers notice. Guardians does both, and the difference between them is the difference between its best scenes and its weakest. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on humor in writing.
Ronan
Lee Pace plays Ronan the Accuser, and he bored me stiff. He glowers, shouts about ancient grudges, wears a lot of dark makeup and never becomes a real character. He wants to destroy Xandar because of an old war, and that’s about all you learn. An empty villain like this is a big part of why I can’t rate the film as high as its reputation sits.
Karen Gillan’s Nebula, Gamora’s resentful sister, is more interesting.
She’s bitter, damaged and jealous, a woman Thanos rebuilt piece by piece with machine parts every time she lost to Gamora, and she’d get much better material in later films. Josh Brolin turns up briefly as Thanos, sitting on a floating throne, looking bored. The villains drag down every scene they’re in.
The Jokes
Gunn’s great skill is comedy, and the film is very funny. Drax’s inability to understand figures of speech, Rocket’s contempt for everybody, Quill’s pop-culture references that nobody in space understands, and a running gag about Quill’s jacket all land. The dance-off at the climax, where Quill distracts Ronan by challenging him to a dance, is absurd and delightful.
The humor also has a cost. The film undercuts almost every serious moment with a gag, and after a while, nothing feels like it matters. When the stakes are a planet full of people, and everybody’s cracking jokes, it’s hard to feel the danger.
For Writers
The film undercuts nearly every serious moment with a joke. It’s funny, and it drains the tension.
Humor and stakes pull against each other. A well-timed joke can relieve tension and make characters likeable, but constant jokes tell the reader nothing is really at risk.
Decide which scenes in your story must be taken seriously, and protect them from comic relief.
Let the reader feel the weight before you let them laugh. A joke after a real moment of loss can be a relief. A joke instead of the loss is a dodge, and readers notice. Guardians does both, and the difference between them is the difference between its best scenes and its weakest. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on humor in writing.
Groot
The film’s most affecting moment belongs to Groot. As the team’s crippled ship falls toward the planet, Groot wraps them all in his branches to protect them, sacrificing himself, and says, for the only time, we’re Groot. The moment is lovely and simple, and Diesel manages to give three words real feeling. That’s harder than it sounds.
Immediately, the film softens it by showing a baby Groot sprouting from a twig and dancing in a pot. It’s cute and it sold a lot of toys, and it’s a mistake, because it takes the sting out of the best moment in the picture. I’d have ended on the sacrifice and let it hurt.
Knowhere and the Sky Fight
Visually, the film is great, full of colorful planets, strange aliens and vivid spaceships, a welcome change from the grey, gritty look of many superhero films at the time. Knowhere, a mining colony built inside the severed head of a giant celestial being, is a terrific piece of design.
Benicio del Toro turns up there as the Collector, a strange, fussy hoarder of rare creatures and objects, in a museum stuffed with alien curiosities, including a few sly in-jokes for comic fans. The scene sticks, and del Toro plays it with a weird, whispery relish, even though the character exists to explain what the Orb contains.
The final battle, though, is a standard Marvel sky fight, with spaceships crashing into cities and a lot of computer-generated debris. It’s loud and forgettable, and it looks more like every other Marvel movie than anything else in the film.
The Hype
Guardians of the Galaxy was a surprise smash, turning a group of obscure comic-book characters into household names, and critics loved it. It’s often ranked among the best Marvel films. I think that’s overrated. It’s a fun, likeable adventure with a great soundtrack and a charming cast, built on a thin plot, a weak villain and a lot of jokes papering over the cracks.
It’s also where the Marvel habit of undercutting every emotional beat with a quip really took hold, and later films borrowed that habit far less skilfully. Gunn at least makes it work most of the time.
Six and a Half
It’s fun, and you’ll enjoy it. The music, the cast chemistry, Drax’s literal-mindedness, Rocket and Groot, and the opening scene with Quill’s mother all work. The plot, the villain, the MacGuffin and the finale don’t.
The sequel, Vol. 2, went deeper into the characters and the family theme, and Vol. 3 went darker still. This first one is the lightest and breeziest of the three.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Its appeal rests on character and tone, a band of misfits with great banter and a great soundtrack, and gets away with a generic plot and a weak villain because the characters are so much fun.
Strong characters can carry a thin plot for a while, but the story is always stronger when the plot tests them in ways that matter.
If your characters are your strength, make sure your plot is built to challenge exactly who they are.
A Great Mixtape, a Thin Movie
I give Guardians of the Galaxy a 6.5. I had fun with it, I laughed at Drax and Rocket, and the soundtrack is terrific, but the villain is forgettable, the plot is a chase after a glowing rock, and the finale could be dropped into any other Marvel movie without anyone noticing. It’s a good time with a thin movie underneath, and its reputation gives it more credit than I can.
