Retro Review - Guardians of the Galaxy (12)

We're just like Kevin Bacon.

The first five minutes of Guardians of the Galaxy encapsulate the spirit of the whole film. They involve a scene of heart-rending pathos, quickly swallowed up in a moment of cartoon sci-fi craziness. It's going to be a ride, we're assured - thrilling, recklessly silly and tear-jerking by unexpected turns. What follows more than lives up to those opening moments.

Guardians was the Marvel Studios wild card - no Iron Man, Hulk or Thor in sight, just a ragtag bunch of misfits no one other than hardcore comic book fans had heard of. Chris Pratt in the lead role had yet to prove himself as a leading man, so the whole enterprise sold itself on the energy and humour of its trailer. It didn't mis-sell either. Audiences loved the finished product, making it arguably the biggest cinematic surprise of 2014.

Pratt plays Peter Quill, cheerfully amoral space mercenary (think a more upbeat Han Solo) and self-styled 'Starlord', who will steal and sell any item that'll fetch a decent profit. In this case it's a mysterious orb, for which everyone, including some very unsavoury bright-blue characters, is searching. Quill's attempts to hold possession of said orb land him in prison and in the company of the aforementioned motley associates - a green-skinned female assassin called Gamora, a tattooed man-mountain on a revenge mission, a genetically engineered wise-cracking raccoon and a giant sentient tree with a comically limited vocabulary. 

Why they stay together and how they attain the 'guardians of the galaxy' label would involve way too much tedious recounting of plot - and plot is not primarily why this film works. The orb is a classic Macguffin as Alfred Hitchcock termed it, i.e. the object that serves as an excuse for all the running about and dodging of danger. What matters primarily here is the character interaction as they run, duck and fight - incessant well-honed comedy bickering, rapid-fire and consistently funny. Our heroes are clumped together out of necessity, have nothing (obvious) in common and can't wait to be rid of each other. And we all know how that's going to end. 

Guardians of the Galaxy takes the much-vaunted 'fun' of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and cranks up its volume to near deafening. This film is colourful in more senses than its characters' rainbow skin-tones and the bright pastels of its numerous settings. It's as vivid and bizarrely populated a galaxy as that in Star Wars, with an added Hitch-Hiker's Guide sense of lunacy. It also finds a good pretext in Peter Quill's Earthly origins to pepper the soundtrack with 70s/80s soft-rock and disco classics, to massively crowd-pleasing effect.

Pratt and a spiky Zoe Saldana are splendid as the male and female leads, ex-wrestler Dave Bautista entertainingly po-faced as the good-hearted but vengeance-driven Drax and Michael Rooker wickedly funny as Quill's one-time mentor Yondu. But it's a coin-toss between Rocket and Groot (the raccoon and his tree-bodyguard) as to who steals the film. In fact the heroes are such an entertaining bunch, that the actual villains can't quite match up. Maybe in the sequel...

For sequel there will be, and its arrival on a screen near all of us is imminent. So if you feel like a double-dose of action-comedy space-opera with added touchy-feely moments, catch up with the original now. 

People assured me I should do just that. People were right.