You probably know this by now. Guardians of the Galaxy is a good movie. A very good movie. It’s good enough that almost all the critique I’ve seen of it amounts to someone saying “Well this part of it wasn’t quite as fantastic as I hoped it would be so I’ll pick on it so I can keep some hipster cred and not look like a drooling fanboy.” So, bottom line, it is worth the movie ticket, go see it.
And in the favorable reviews I’ve read, one reference keeps popping up.
Not the joyless zombie franchise that has been stumbling ever since someone let George Lucas put an Ewok on the screen. We’re talking Han Shot first, non-CGI, pre-Mulligan, “WTF-you-mean ‘New Hope,’” original 1977 Star Wars.
The comparison isn’t hyperbole.
I think we have a contender for Star Wars’ mantle, and, barring an Ewok moment, the birth of a franchise that may outdo whatever joyless spectacle that Disney plans for future “Star Wars” movies. (Scare Quotes because every “Star Wars” movie after the midpoint of Return of the Jedi deserves them.)
Here are the top ten reasons I think this movie deserves its place along with Star Wars as one of the best SF movies of all time.
10) Fuck the Hero’s Journey: Star Wars did the Hero’s Journey well. Too well. As in, every other subsequent movie that tries to do SF/Fantasy— especially if saving the Universe is part of the plot— has to hit those well-worn plot points. Enough already! If you try hard enough, you can probably map Campbell’s Hero’s Journey on Guardians of the Galaxy (after all that was the point of the exercise, create a template than can be shoehorned into almost any narrative) but it’s not Hollywood’s Hero’s Journey. No old sage, wizard, or magical negro comes to lead our misfits to greatness. If any one of these goofs were born “the chosen one” it’s only as an afterthought and a sequel hook. There’s no “call to adventure” or “refusal of the call,” every character is deep in it (knowingly or unknowingly) when we meet them, and everything after is just ill-advised scheme after ill-advised scheme that just sort of evolve eventually into saving the world.
9) “I am Groot”: I predict that will be the “Use the Force” of the next decade.
8) It took a risk: Success always seems obvious in retrospect. (People tend to forget that Star Wars was a completely unexpected blockbuster, there was no part of the premise that would lead anyone in 1976 to think it anything other than another B-movie drive-in flick.) In fact, the only reason this movie could have ever been made is because Marvel Studios has been doing so well picking projects that they could afford to try something that sounds ridiculous: “Ok big summer tent-pole picture. A SF Comedy with characters no-one has heard of, oh and a wise-ass talking raccoon.”
7) And it wasn’t afraid to run with it: If you’re doing a movie with a ridiculous premise there are two ways you can do it. You can make your film with an ironic nod to the audience and let them know that no one is really taking this stupidity seriously. That way you come up with things like Batman Forever or Sharknado. Or, you can look your audience straight in the eye and say, in all seriousness, “No. this isn’t ridiculous. It. Is. Awesome!”
6) And just look at it: SF films in particular have to have a distinct visual style. You can tell the mediocre-to-bad SF films because they make no effort to look like themselves, they make an effort to look like other, better, films like Star Wars, 2001, Road Warrior, Aliens, Blade Runner. . . I predict we are going to see dozens of bad films that try to look like Guardians of the Galaxy.
5) It’s the funniest SF comedy since Young Frankenstein: For the same reason. The humor is all character-based, not mean spirited, and comes from a deep love of the characters complete with all their flaws and eccentricities.
4) All those characters are used: While not often used in the genre, the misfit comedy is a common template for many, many, many films (including half of all films made about sports teams). Often the misfits become just a series of one-note joke characters. . . not here. Every one of them has as much depth as this kind of action adventure allows, and every one of them contributes to the ongoing story (positively and negatively) in almost equal measure.
3) Rocket Racoon: It’s almost a shame he steals the technical props from the other CGI character, Groot. But while Groot is almost expected, looking like so many other well-done CGI characters, Rocket is the best CGI character ever done in a movie. Period. Gollum is a distant second. And, like Gollum, he’s not only technically perfect, he has some of the best lines and most expressive character moments in the movie.
2) Fun: Guardians of the Galaxy knows that it here to entertain you, and it is going to entertain the crap out of you.
1) That kick-ass soundtrack: A space-opera comedy that unironically uses a retro-70’s soundtrack that is embedded in the film itself in a way that fits the movie perfectly. . . I haven’t seen this kind of genius since Reservoir Dogs. I was in love with this soundtrack, and the way the movie uses it, before the end of the first title sequence.
Seriously, buy the soundtrack.
4 Comments
steve.davidson · August 7, 2014 at 5:01 am
Nitpicking a bit: the Hero’s Journey is not a template, its a manifestation of our species’ subconscious in story-telling. And I strongly suspect that Peter Quill IS the “chosen one”. He’s mirror world Spock (human mother, alien, absent father); he gets displaced from his home and has an older mentor (Yondu), he discovers powers he has, though much of this is back story for the current tale…
I think a major brilliance of this film is that sound track. You’ve got the film itself for those youngsters who are going to make it a Star Wars – like hit, and you’ve got that sound track that’s going to draw in the now-adult ‘kids’ who fell in love with Star Wars when it came out in ’77. It makes this a truly cross-generational film. Very cool concept and one that is obviously working (though it was a bit odd to be just about the only one in the theatre who knew the words to all of the songs….)
S Andrew Swann · August 7, 2014 at 7:41 am
RE:Hero’s Journey
Like I said, you can do a interpretation of Guardians of the Galaxy that invokes Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, but that’s not how Hollywood uses it. Hollywood’s “Hero’s Journey” is pretty much “give it the same beats as Star Wars.”
I pretty much think the self-conscious use of Campbell’s work (actually the use of some cribbed notes from a scriptwriting conference that gave a Power Point presentation of the “Hero’s Journey”) is a plague on modern movie-making.
steve.davidson · August 8, 2014 at 6:04 am
Well. First of all, references to Campbell and the monomyth were tacked on to the “story of Star Wars” well after the fact. Nothing of that nature preceded the film into the theaters in ’77; all the discussion at that time (advance notices, press “leaks” etc) were based on two themes: – Lucas wanting to remake Flash Gordon and not getting the rights or Lucas delivering a science fiction space opera that was NOT going to be saturday afternoon kiddie matinee fare. We were all very skeptical at the time considering that 2001 was still fresh in our minds – as was Logan’s Run. Most everything else between 68 and 77 was of relatively pedestrian nature – Planet of the Apes, Stepford Wives, Omega Man; Space flicks were pretty much represented by Barbarella.
However, on the monomyth front. You really can’t escape it. It’s the story the human species has been telling to itself since Gilgamesh; it’s present in the story of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Ulysses, Sinbad, &c. Yes, there does seem to be some templating going on in various story-telling circles, but good, fresh original stories aren’t so by escaping from it, they’re original in the way they present it.
S Andrew Swann · August 8, 2014 at 7:27 am
I don’t think we’re disagreeing so much as looking at it from different angles. Regardless of how Lucas came up with Star Wars, and if the Campbell “influence” was pre- or post- production, the result was a generation of scriptwriters who ended up invoking the monomyth by invoking Star Wars. As you said, the former happens more-or-less organically. The latter is a formulaic construct that more often than not leads to crap– The latter is generally what I’m refferring to.
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