GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY by Cian Morey
Well, well, well. In yet another attempt to satiate the ever-growing hunger for action-packed comic book blockbusters bursting at the seams with more explosions than a game of suicide Minesweeper, Marvel has brought us Guardians of the Galaxy. And what an action-packed seam-bursting blockbuster it is.
The plot is this (I think): Peter Quill, a space-pirating anti-hero, stumbles upon an orb on an abandoned planet which, unbeknownst to him, is sought after by the fanatical alien Ronan and other space pirates. This is because it contains an Infinity Stone, an artifact (or should I say MacGuffin?) of immeasurable power that can bulldoze entire planets in seconds flat. After a fight with Gamora, Ronan’s green-skinned assassin who has been sent to seize the orb, Peter Quill is captured and imprisoned, along with Gamora, a mutant anthropomorphic racoon called Rocket and a tree called Groot that can say its name, but nothing else. It is revealed that Gamora is in fact attempting to betray Ronan by selling the orb for a significant sum, and so Quill, Gamora, Rocket, Groot and another inmate called Drax the Destroyer unite to escape the prison and claim the reward for the orb, only to be entangled in a greater conflict and forced to play their part as the unlikely Guardians of the Galaxy.
I must admit it took me a long time to write that plot summary and turned out longer than I had hoped, and that is because the plot is, undoubtedly, over-complicated. After a shockingly harrowing scene at the beginning, the film seems to start again in a far lighter mood, and kicks off as a planet-hopping roller-coaster of chaos that can certainly be quite enjoyable, as long as one suspends both disbelief and hopes of a proper, well-thought-out narrative structure. A love of massive explosions and expensive CG battles every half hour or so would also help a lot, and, alas, is something that I didn’t have.
The film had a slightly larger number of flaws than I find acceptable – such as the pathetic name of the villain, several instances in which physics seemed to be totally disregarded just so the main characters could survive in space, the way in which Groot’s constant repetition of his name became extremely irritating after the third time, and the soundtrack’s overuse of 60s and 70s music known only to those who are too old to be interested in this film – but made up for it with a number of comedy gold moments. Drax’s failure to understand metaphors provided some very amusing lines, including “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.” However, when Gamora also failed to understand metaphors, the idea’s appeal started to drop dramatically for me.
Overall, this film is enjoyable as a funny, visually stunning and explosion-filled space opera, but is riddled with many small and irksome problems, and has a plot that is too complex to follow. There are better Marvel movies than this.