11 Days of Marvel: Guardians of the Galaxy

Sorry for the delay, but now, Day 10 of 11 Days of Marvel is here! In this project, Bill and Erin go through every sin­gle extant film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and write their reac­tions to them! The project start­ed here, with Iron Man, or you can click here to see all the arti­cles in the project so far. Today is about:

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Bill’s Response: Too Apathetic to Write a Witty Title

I have tried so hard to like this movie, you guys. I tried to be excit­ed for it when I saw the wild­ly under­whelm­ing trail­ers that every­one else was ecsta­t­ic about. I tried to like it while I was watch­ing it in the the­aters. I tried to like it when I watched it again sev­er­al months later, in light of everyone’s rave reviews. And I tried to like it the other night when we watched it for this project. But I don’t like this movie, friends. It is a silly movie. It is Boring, Hackneyed, and Not Funny.

I can­not bring myself to care about most of these char­ac­ters, but I also don’t hate them enough to say much of any­thing witty about them. Chris Pratt does the best he can with a dumb script, but his Peter Quill/Star-Lord is such a gener­ic Heroic Manchild that there’s absolute­ly no grip to him what­so­ev­er. He slides off of my con­scious­ness like water off of a duck’s back. His love for the pop music of the ‘70s and ‘80s feels like a cheap attempt for the movie to score some Tarantinite cred. His casu­al wom­an­iz­ing and gen­er­al gross­ness (“If I had a black­light in here, it’d look like a Jackson Pollock paint­ing”) fail to land. The inten­tion is pre­sum­ably to make it clear that he’s Not A Traditional Hero, but there are so few Traditional Heroes in con­tem­po­rary media that it’s utter­ly unre­mark­able. It feels a bit like tak­ing the piss out of a trope from Jacobean drama: out of date and irrel­e­vant. He’s not as charm­ing as Tony Stark, nor as com­plete­ly out-of-control as Sterling Archer, and so I just don’t care at all.

Ronan the Accuser is the second-worst vil­lain in the fran­chise. Lee Pace plays him with a bizarre pouty petu­lance that is utter­ly at odds with the writ­ers’ attempts at grandiose dia­logue. He comes off more as a tod­dler throw­ing a tem­per tantrum than as a men­ac­ing vil­lain. His intro­duc­tion is a decent scene, but the rest of the movie fails to deliv­er on his speech. Also, he wants to blow up the world, which as I’ve said before, is the Most Boring Thing, and I never want to see it again. He wants to chew scenery with the big boys, but whether because of bad direc­tion, crum­my act­ing, or a lousy script, he feels like a B‑movie vil­lain wear­ing a silly hat.

Gamora is incred­i­bly dis­ap­point­ing. I want to like this osten­si­bly badass space assas­sin, yet she spends the whole movie being res­cued or upstaged by the rest of the crew. Her dia­logue is laugh­able (she lit­er­al­ly says some­thing like “stop it you fool, you’ll be the death of us all” at one point, apro­pos of noth­ing). Gamora’s voice breaks con­stant­ly, as though she’s always just on the edge of tears, and her utter­ly gener­ic trag­ic back­sto­ry is almost as bor­ing as the com­plete­ly pre­dictable roman­tic ten­sion between her and Quill. I don’t care about this chick or her prob­lems.

Yeah, Groot and Rocket and Drax have some pret­ty decent moments, but the movie rests on the shoul­ders of its two leads and the vil­lain, and those shoul­ders are not up to the task. So the plot and char­ac­ters don’t make any sense, which might be okay if it was visu­al­ly nifty or well-choreographed, but the movie’s action scenes are entire­ly for­get­table. The final con­fronta­tion between Gamora and Nebula should have been one of the coolest scenes in the movie, but I defy you to remem­ber what hap­pens in it. Unlike The Avengers’ won­der­ful end fight, where the team final­ly coheres and works togeth­er to defeat a face­less alien army, the Guardians just keep doing the same stuff they have been doing all movie, inter­spersed with yet more forced, unfun­ny quips.

You know what this movie feels like? It feels like a trun­cat­ed D&D cam­paign. Five char­ac­ters is about right for the aver­age D&D group, and the movie’s “look how funny and goofy we are” approach squares pret­ty neat­ly with many of the D&D games I’ve played in or run. But even most of my favorite D&D games wouldn’t trans­late very well to the big screen with­out tons of edit­ing. The sort of wacky, impro­vised antics and off-the-cuff ban­ter that char­ac­ter­izes many D&D ses­sions doesn’t have to hold togeth­er in ret­ro­spect. It just has to be fun at the time and pro­pel the char­ac­ters for­ward. Drax’s deci­sion to call Ronan feels like exact­ly the sort of thing a mis­chie­vous play­er does to speed up a drag­ging ses­sion. I can pret­ty eas­i­ly see the DM paus­ing for a moment and real­iz­ing her entire cam­paign out­line has just been derailed.

But lis­ten­ing to other peo­ple tell sto­ries about their D&D ses­sions is often one of the Least Interesting Things a per­son can do: events and plot twists which felt alive and orig­i­nal in the heat of the moment become pre­dictable and unim­pres­sive in the uncar­ing light of the next day.

So, I give up. I don’t like this movie, and I’m going to quit try­ing to.

Favorite Moment: “We’re just like Kevin Bacon” is a pret­ty solid brick joke. I like the idea of Knowhere, the float­ing, dis­em­bod­ied head of an Ancient God, which feels very Astral Sea to me. But Rocket weep­ing over Groot is prob­a­bly the only moment of gen­uine emo­tion in the entire movie, and is thus eas­i­ly my favorite moment while also stick­ing out like a sore thumb.

Least Favorite Moment: I don’t care enough about this movie to hate any indi­vid­ual moment of it with par­tic­u­lar ire. Drax ran­dom­ly call­ing Gamora a “whore” comes to mind, though.

Character I Would Rather Watch In A Feature Film: John C. Reilly’s space-cop, just try­ing to make ends meet and get home at the end of the day to see his hot alien wife and adorable alien daugh­ter. He just wants to be a pleas­ant, local cop, but goofy would-be swash­buck­lers keep drop­ping out of the sky and mess­ing up his day.

Bill’s Ranking:

1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

2. Captain America: The First Avenger

3. The Avengers

4. Iron Man

5. Iron Man 3

6. Thor

7. The Incredible Hulk

8. Guardians of the Galaxy

9. Iron Man 2

10. Thor: The Dark World

Erin’s Response: Evil, Generic Space Assassin

Hello, every­one! We are BACK and bet­ter than ever! Sorry for the delay in writ­ing – we had many super fun (and very tir­ing) activ­i­ties in the past few weeks which delayed the writ­ing of these. Luckily, the spell last­ed long enough for us to see Ant-Man, which I think we can all agree is a for­tu­itous event.

Without delay, I still don’t under­stand why Guardians of the Galaxy received so much praise. I didn’t under­stand it the first time I watched it, and I don’t real­ly under­stand it now. Gamora is so bor­ing (we never see her con­flict­ed – why has it taken her until now to break free from her father? Why don’t they play with the ambi­gu­i­ty of her posi­tion, I don’t know, AT ALL?), Chris Pratt is cute but bor­ing (strong guy con­fronting his feel­ings – yawn), and as far as I can tell the vil­lain is made out of evil apple­sauce and jiggery-pokery (a lit­tle Supreme Court humor for you there).

I think I know why this movie struck more of a chord with peo­ple – after Captain America and Thor, it is fun to see good-ish guys who are inter­est­ed in sav­ing the galaxy as well as turn­ing a prof­it. After exces­sive do-gooders and moral­ly unam­bigu­ous plots, it is inter­est­ing to have heroes who don’t real­ly want the LAWFUL GOOD title. The prob­lem, of course, is that by plac­ing them oppo­site an unabashed­ly homi­ci­dal mani­ac none of their CHAOTIC NEUTRAL ten­den­cies have the slight­est chance of pre­vail­ing.

In line with this prob­lem, why does every story need to have as its main pro­tag­o­nist a white, human man? The fun part about Guardians is that this story real­ly could have been about devel­op­ing any of them. Gamora is (in my mind) the obvi­ous choice for an alter­na­tive pro­tag­o­nist (after all, her life changes far more rad­i­cal­ly than Star-Lord’s). Furthermore, by focus­ing on her we could have actu­al­ly devel­oped the alien races, and by exten­sion done a bit of world build­ing with the galaxy. Who were her peo­ple? Why did her “father” take her? What does “being turned into a weapon” mean? (Why is this phrased used twice, with exact­ly the same ver­biage?) What are the cus­toms of her new peo­ple? Why has there been an eons long war between the Kree and Xandar? For a movie that actu­al­ly pass­es the BechdelTest (two named female char­ac­ters have a dis­cus­sion about some­thing other than a man), Gamora as a char­ac­ter is bare­ly a piece of card­board. By focus­ing on the Terran (male, white) Star-Lord, the galaxy remains com­plete­ly unknown. This was a squan­dered oppor­tu­ni­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the goings-on of the galaxy are start­ing to make a much big­ger impact on the rest of the fran­chise.

Favorite Moment: When the Nova star fight­ers (delib­er­ate­ly left ambigu­ous because we don’t real­ly learn any­thing about these peo­ple) form the badass light-net that fends off the huge space­ship bent on total anni­hi­la­tion of life on the plan­et while our heroes spend time look­ing at fire­flies and talk­ing about how Gamora is a wh—. Just kid­ding, maybe this is my favorite moment inex­tri­ca­bly linked to inex­cus­able sex­ism. Particularly because this sex­ism is com­ing from the world’s most lit­er­al man. There is no rea­son for it, unless she was actu­al­ly a pros­ti­tute.

Least Favorite Moment: The whole “pelvic sor­cery” moment between Gamora and Star-Lord. I enjoyed the ref­er­ence to Footloose as much as any­one (and the later brick joke it inspires – “We’re just like Kevin Bacon?” was quite funny and unex­pect­ed!), but this scene is dumb. Gamora is BAD ASS and Star-Lord is way out­classed. Instead of mak­ing it about how she has never lis­tened to music or danced (which could have devel­oped her char­ac­ter in an inter­est­ing way) Star-Lord’s sad attempts at seduc­tion almost work. Boring, trite, and hol­low. Particularly because these two might just end up as friends– just kid­ding, she is his alien sex-kitten and we all know it.

Favorite Soundtrack thus Far: As far as I can tell, the whole point of this movie is to use a fun ’70s/’80s sound­track. It does help you get your groove on.

Erin’s Rankings:

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

2. Iron Man

3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

4. The Avengers

5. Iron Man 3

6. Thor

7. Guardians of the Galaxy

8. The Incredible Hulk

9. Iron Man 2

10. Thor: The Dark World

And Now, A Conversation

Bill: Do you think we don’t like this movie because we HATE FUN?

Erin: No– I just think we have dif­fer­ent under­stand­ings of the word “Fun.” See, I think fun means “enjoy­able,” which appar­ent­ly the writ­ers of this movie don’t. I actu­al­ly still don’t under­stand why every­one liked this movie. On the sec­ond view­ing it was even worse because I knew all of the jokes and Groot was­n’t doing it for me.

Bill: Yeah, I feel you. Groot is funny, but he can’t carry the whole movie. It just feels very forced. The movie feels like it’s try­ing very hard to be wacky and irrev­er­ent, like a Hot Topic T‑shirt or a teenag­er who is super proud of being “ran­dom.” (Is that still a thing? It was a thing teens did when we were in col­lege. Maybe that’s an old ref­er­ence.)

Erin: It is old. They now all try to be “salty.” I think.

Bill: Lord.

Erin: Parts of this movie are okay. I do like the sound­track, and I think that hav­ing a whole group of anti­heroes makes the MCU a bit more inter­est­ing and diverse. But I can’t help but feel that every­one is wast­ed on this script.

Bill: Agreed. I think that a Guardians of the Galaxy movie made a lot of sense for the fran­chise as a whole — group of anti­heroes to con­trast with the Avengers, wacky space adven­ture, etc. But it’s just not a very good script. And so most of the peo­ple are just super bor­ing videogame char­ac­ter clich­es. And the vil­lain is so dumb, you guys.

Erin: SO DUMB.

Bill: arg i want to destroy every­thing because of some non­sense look at my silly hat

Erin: LOOK AT THE HAT

Bill: It is real­ly the sil­li­est of hats. I mean, I get that it’s an attempt to adapt the comic book cos­tume, but it was a silly hat there, too.

Erin: I just wish that Gamora had been more inter­est­ing or that any of the space stuff felt more real. I still feel like the galaxy is alien. And not in a fun way. More of in an Avengers “Deus Ex Villainus” way. Like the whole uni­verse is not an end-in-itself. Which is such a waste!

Bill: Yeah, it’s real­ly unclear how the galaxy works out there. It does­n’t have its own iden­ti­ty — it just feels like Star Wars Lite. You’re right, though, that the most dis­ap­point­ing thing about the movie is that Gamora is so bor­ing. Her back­sto­ry real­ly ought to make her super cool, but she’s one-note, flat, and dread­ful. Also, I’m not real­ly clear on what her super­pow­ers are — I guess at one point she jumps real­ly high?

Erin: I am not sure she real­ly super­pow­ers. So, once again, the wom­an’s only real power is her ass, and that she is a gener­ic “femme fatale.” Boring.

Bill: Yarp. A lot of other peo­ple real­ly like this movie, so I feel like I ought to spend a lot of time explain­ing why I don’t like it, but I real­ly don’t have very much to say. This movie does­n’t inspire funny rants from me. I don’t hate it, it’s just bor­ing and silly. Silly in a flighty and triv­ial way. I just don’t care about this movie.

Erin: I think that is the take­away, yes.

Well, that’s it for Guardians of the Galaxy! Come back tomor­row for our thoughts on Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the day after for our super nifty bonus round first-day thoughts on Ant-Man!