Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3

It wasn’t until very late in the film – midway through the first post-credits scene, in fact – that Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 finally clicked for me. It is not spoiling very much to mention that a band of characters sits around and listens to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” mutually agreeing that it is one of the greatest songs in history. It’s an unapologetic lure on the fishing line of nostalgia, made all the more hollow by the fact that many of the aforementioned characters we’ve only just met. (Certainly none of them had been there for Peter Quill’s opening dance number in the first Guardians film.)

While this post-credits scene ostensibly points toward a future for the franchise (including, it pains me to say, one particular inflection that reminded me all too much of the dismal Thor: Love and Thunder), it is also trying desperately to serve as an evocative coda to a trilogy that hasn’t held together as well as its finale would like to pretend. Writer/director James Gunn is juggling too much, straining like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man to hold it all together, and while the film is competently told and engaging enough, it is overlong and baggy, and it serves more as a love letter to itself than anything else. 

 

Vol. 3 finds Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) wounded in a battle with Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), leading to the revelation, finally, of the horrific circumstances that created Rocket. Peter Quill, the Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), and his ersatz band of Guardians team up with the Ravager Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) to break into the vaults of the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) in search of Rocket’s salvation.

 

If I’m daydreaming or almost falling asleep, there’s something very wrong with the movie. And while I should have been trying harder to separate the movie from off-screen drama, vast swaths of this bloated movie failed to hold my attention. (It wasn’t, however, as dire as Black Widow, the only Marvel movie where I’m not convinced I didn’t nod off.) And so it was that I found myself wondering how many moviegoers had seen last November’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which already introduced the concept of the Guardians defending Knowhere alongside the revelation that Peter Quill and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) were half-siblings. I wondered if we were still in trilogy territory, and then I remembered that the Guardians trilogy had a significant detour through Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which looms quite large over Vol. 3. 

 

Here, Gunn has to accommodate the time-travel shenanigans that killed off Gamora but restored her from a decade-old past, and Gunn never quite figures out how to fit Gamora back into the franchise. Moreover, the film takes time to air Gunn’s own grievances about the way “his” characters were handled by the Russo Brothers in the third and fourth Avengers films (a complaint no one else shares); in one of my least favorite superhero movie tropes, Star-Lord has a long monologue about the unfortunate and nonsensical circumstances that have led to his current state of affairs. It’s a scene that is meant to play for laughs, but the joke is on the source material and on the fans for taking any of this seriously; in short, it’s another iteration of Gunn’s “comics are for bozos” mentality, and of his bizarre insistence that only he understands these characters. (See also his recent claims that Star-Lord would never have lost his temper in the fight against Thanos.)

 

Indeed, throughout the film, Gunn is trying to play the hits, his hits, as in the Redbone sequence, but all of it feels simply like thumbing through a scrapbook – which the end credits actually bear out, showing still photos to remind us of the foregoing entries in the franchise. But each echo misses what made the originals special. The first Guardians film was a breath of fresh air in a genre that was beginning to take itself too seriously, and it was a welcome treat to see on-screen interpretations of characters that even comics fans thought too ludicrous for primetime. Even the second film, which hasn’t aged well in my estimations, overly reliant on emotional insincerity and crude humor, still had that Marvel heart when it came to the idea of family. Never mind the iconic soundtrack of the films, mashing up unlikely oldies with shots of spaceships and laser blasts; here, however, none of the songs is really very memorable, and the gag about swapping a Walkman for a Zune seems to have yielded only a paucity of good tunes. (Even the Guardians fanfare gets short shrift in this one.) Here, however, Vol. 3 is an ending that doesn’t have the heart to end, striking a false chord in the final twenty minutes, which consist of (as Neil Gaiman would put it) people standing around saying good-bye to each other.

 

In the middle of it all, though, is a very compelling performance by Chukwudi Iwuji as one of Marvel’s better villains of late. His High Evolutionary is a far cry from the cosmic source material, but Iwuji’s version is fantastic, entirely unsympathetic and intrinsically evil without needing to twirl a mustache. As great as he is, though, there’s a beat where Star-Lord cuts short his supervillain soliloquy with snarky remarks about why villain monologues don’t work and whether the High Evolutionary’s mother loved him enough. Iwuji barrels on, almost as if he’s sick of these jokes too, and one almost wishes that this spine of the film had been its own Rocket Raccoon feature – inspired by, or perhaps plagiarized from, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 comics about animal experimentation. (Floor the Rabbit is, at least, plundered wholesale from We3’s Pirate.) In fact, Iwuji’s performance is so engaging that one wonders if he shouldn’t replace the beleaguered Jonathan Majors and retroactively enroll the High Evolutionary as one more ageless Kang.

 

Look, I’m no fan of James Gunn, but I went into this thing with an open mind. I did, after all, love the first one! Vol. 3 is not, thank God, the nightmarish brand of misanthropy we saw in The Suicide Squad – a film that I’m still convinced would like nothing more than to shove me into a locker – and it’s at least effective on an emotionally manipulative level. The action scenes aren’t anything special, and the script is working overtime to resolve too many concurrent plots. But it lacks sufficient grounds for me to be able to say it’s a bad movie; it’s just not as good as it ought to be, nor as good as it hopes, striking an indelicate balance between ridiculing its characters for having emotions and then expecting us to play along when those same emotions are played sincerely.

 

Vol. 3 is, in short, attempting to eat its cake and have it too, but it’s a cake with a hollow center that tries to convince us that it’s a better, earlier cake. Worse, this particular cake smacks of self-congratulation, yet at the end of the day, I’ve eaten 32 slices (plus whatever the television shows are in this analogy), and I’ve come too far to quit just yet. 

 

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements.” Written and directed by James Gunn. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Chukwudi Iwuji, and Will Poulter.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Avengers, assemble – Avengers: Infinity War brings together ten years and eighteen movies’ worth of stories to pit Earth’s Mightiest Heroes against the strength of Thanos (Josh Brolin) as he gathers the six Infinity Stones in order to impose his will on the universe. From Wakanda to Scotland, from New York to the moons of Jupiter, the Marvel Universe has never seen a threat quite like this one, and so it will take the gathered forces of the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more to repel Thanos and his forces to save all of existence.

I don’t know if it’s possible to give a full review of Avengers: Infinity War without spoiling at least something (I’ll certainly try), but I do want to take a moment to applaud the “spoiler culture” of 2018, which has done a fairly remarkable job of not ruining the film. It’s a critic’s burden that a film this big carries with it the necessity of preserving at all costs the sanctity of narrative surprise; then again, I do have a sense that my main audience here will have already seen the film at least twice. Mum is, however, the word here; I can’t, for example, talk about my only major critique of the film because it’s a mammoth spoiler. Reserving a fuller take for later, I’ll say only that I think the absolute ending of the film doesn’t quite accomplish what it sets out to do, both for reasons that are extratextual and because the film doesn’t quite position the last character we see on screen as the film’s protagonist in a way that would make that figure’s journey the center of the film. (It does, however, stick the emotional landing, in an extraordinary way.)

What Avengers: Infinity War manages to accomplish very deftly – and very quickly, I’d say, within the first ten minutes – is establish the stakes of the film with remarkable precision and weight. For a film that assembles eighteen other films and umpteen million cast members, this is a film that feels amazing well-balanced, and it rises to the gravity of the occasion by presenting a story where it truly feels that anything can happen: not just that X favorite character will meet up with unlikely ally Y, but that any important character could die before this is all said and done, that this story will matter more than we might have been led to expect. At one point, Thor says something like, “It feels like it’s going to stick this time.” Despite all the fakeouts, both within this film and within the Marvel Cinematic Universe at large, Infinity War achieves what I call the “Indiana Jones in peril” moment, where – despite knowing that Indiana Jones won’t actually die – we gasp in shock as his car fritters near the edge of a canyon; only in Infinity War, that car might veer off the road and take a hero or two out with it.

As a film that is more a collision of stories than a singular narrative – Iron Man’s addiction to his technology, Captain America as a man out of time, Black Panther opening his kingdom to the world, etc. – the film very nearly buckles under the sheer weight of what it’s called upon to do. And yet the only characters who don’t get a fair shake are the ones who don’t appear at all; everyone else is placed in subplots that use them to their full range, bouncing them against unlikely but pitch-perfect foils. I wasn’t left wanting more of any one character; I was just left wanting more, period. In this way, Infinity War is almost a new ur-blockbuster, mashing together a decade’s worth of blockbusters to create a super-film that was, as early as Sunday morning, already the biggest opening of all time.

Infinity War is such a roaring success because it understands both its core audience and the audience who may not have caught all the preceding films. We don’t necessarily need to have seen Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, for example – though Star-Lord fills us in, just in case – because the film is much more invested in its characters than in their continuity. That’s the reason that each character’s arrival (and in at least one particularly electric case, a re-arrival) is such a crowdpleasing moment; regardless of where we left Captain America in Civil War, we’re just so glad to see him again because the Marvel folks have put the “care” back in “character.” From major players like Rocket Raccoon and Spider-Man to supporting cast like Wong and Okoye, Infinity War remembers why we love these characters and wisely keeps them to their strengths while nudging them out of their comfort zones. To review the performances in the film would require a scorecard – and maybe that’s a feature for another time, once the spoiler-warning reins have loosened – but suffice it to say that no one phones it in, treating each scene like just one more installment in their own films. Part of the electricity of the film, then, is the unforeseen chemistry between characters who might otherwise be poles apart (though, once more, it’d be terribly rotten to give all that away just yet), and on this count the filmmakers have continued to do the largely admirable work of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Aside from the popular appeal this film is likely to have, the ultimate “good time” popcorn flick, it represents the apotheosis of the very idea of the franchise – we now know that the largest film franchise can spawn the largest film of all time (dethroning The Force Awakens, which is really saying something in terms of hype), but what next? Avengers 4 seems poised to remind us one last time why we started down this journey back in 2008 and why we kept coming back for more, but it seems equally likely that it’ll set up the next ten years. If you don’t believe me, turn to the Marvel Zombie in your life after you see the post-credits sequence. The fullness of the universe is a major theme of this film, but the film is equally a reminder of the fullness of the Marvel Universe – and not just the Cinematic one. There’s always more, as the “_________ will return” credit acknowledges, and so too will the audience – return, that is, for the as-yet-untitled Avengers 4, for the two films (Ant-Man and the Wasp this year, and Captain Marvel the next) in the interim, for another viewing of Infinity War, and for whatever your personal favorite Marvel movie has been (for me, it’s still the masterful Winter Soldier). The Infinity Stones have been with us since the dawn of creation, and the success of Infinity War seems to promise that Marvel will be with us until the end of it.

Avengers: Infinity War is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, language and some crude references.” Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Jim Starlin. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Don Cheadle, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillen, Pom Klementieff, Zoe Saldana, with Josh Brolin, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and Chris Pratt.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

It’s a bit weird to reflect on the idea that, three years ago, there had been speculation that Guardians of the Galaxy, starring a talking raccoon and a walking tree, might be Marvel’s first box office bomb. In 2017, though, we are Groot; put another way, it’s Star-Lord’s galaxy, and we all just go to the movies in it. As for Vol. 2, it’s a real delight, often more of the same but in a way that feels like qualitatively more.

Having saved the galaxy once before, the Guardians have inflated their prices and their egos to match. In disparate plotlines that coalesce in surprising ways, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) meets the omnipotent Ego (Kurt Russell), his long-lost father; Gamora (Zoe Saldana) takes up anew her feud with wicked sister Nebula (Karen Gillan); and Rocket and Baby Groot (voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, respectively) find themselves caught up in a war between Yondu (Michael Rooker) and his mutinous band of Ravagers. And then there’s Drax (Dave Bautista), the metaphor-less marauder, who’s happy just to slice and dice as needed.

I’ve got a soft critique of the film, though it’s more a bit of a backhanded compliment, and it’s that the film is wearingly funny. And I don’t mean that Vol. 2 ever becomes unfunny, but around the second act I had this surprising and acute desire for the jokes to take a breather and get back to the character work that made the first film such a rousing success. Indeed, a more cynical moviegoer might lament that the film is undercut by the overabundance of jokes, gags, and giggles, and I certainly feel the balance tipped in favor of humor this go-around.

That is not to say, however, that there isn’t really compelling character work being done, although surprisingly it’s the supporting characters that really get developed over the core five. Ego has a pretty engaging story arc, and writer/director James Gunn was right to make the film less about the mystery of Star-Lord’s paternity and more about what he does with that knowledge. If you’d told me that Yondu was going to be the most interesting member of the cast this go-around, I’d have thought it had something to do with the size of his red fin, but Gunn and Rooker did the pleasantly unexpected and gave Yondu a plot arc that goes over the course of the film and also clarifies a few bits about his role as Star-Lord’s erstwhile stepfather.

It’s the main cast that doesn’t quite make the leap from A to B as they did in the first, discovering their capacity for working together and finding a kind of family. Star-Lord grows, sure, but how could he not, where Gamora’s arc mainly consists in convincing other characters of things; Rocket and Groot are the same lovable violent pair, a kind of Rocketcrantz and Grootenstern for the cosmos. It is – and this should come as no surprise – Groot who steals the film wholesale, from his opening performance of ELO’s “Mister Blue Sky” to the perpetual challenges he faces in expressing himself. These characters are, however, fun enough that it’s still a treat to spend two hours with this particular “bunch of a-holes.”

Gunn continues not to play ball with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, eschewing the usual batch of cameo appearances (though Stan Lee appears, naturally, in what might be a kind of game-changer). There’s nary an Infinity Stone in sight, yet as we dash apace toward Infinity War, there’s something refreshing about that; as much as I love the shared universe, there would have been something inorganic about seeing Iron Man or even Thor wander in. Lest we forget, though, Gunn maintains and exacerbates the central rule of Marvel Studios with not one but five post-credits sequences, which suggest that the shared universe will bend toward the cosmic, if only because there’s more nodded toward than can possibly be encompassed in a Vol. 3. And while I can’t say I’ve ever been a big fan of “Cosmic Marvel” – The Silver Surfer is about as far as I go, and Marvel Studios doesn’t own him (yet) – if Gunn is guiding the Guardians, I’m on board.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language, and brief suggestive content.” Written and directed by James Gunn. Based on the Marvel Comics by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, and Kurt Russell.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

The very first thing that must be said about The Magnificent Seven is that any movie directed by Antoine Fuqua that stars Denzel Washington is automatically worth a look. Having said that, one can’t help but feel that The Magnificent Seven suffers a bit for being an ensemble piece because we don’t get as much Denzel time as we deserve. That’s not to say that The Magnificent Seven is ever boring or unwatchable, but it is underwhelming.

In a remake of the eponymous 1960 western (which was itself a remake of Seven Samurai), Denzel Washington stars as Sam Chisolm, a bounty hunter recruited by Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) to save her village from a mustache-twirling robber baron (Peter Sarsgaard) who wants the exclusive mining rights to the valley. Chisolm assembles a posse comprised of the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest lover” (Chris Pratt), a mountain man (Vincent D’Onofrio), a traumatized Confederate and his Chinese comrade (Ethan Hawke and Byung-hun Lee), a Mexican outlaw (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and a Comanche (Martin Sensmeier) on his own path.

Here’s a pretty good cast, and it’s really very evident that they’re all having a terrifically good time together. D’Onofrio is delightfully strange, as is his wont, and the rest of the cast seem to enjoy playing off that peculiarity. (Ten points to anyone who can identify that accent, incidentally.) Washington and Pratt are, essentially playing variations on the Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, with an engaging chemistry between the two of them.

It is, however, a chemistry predicated on Pratt playing the clown and Denzel as the straight man, which is a tragic underutilization of the latter’s skill. It’s no surprise that Pratt is a success as a character that boils down to “Star Lord by way of John Wayne,” but it’s a wonder that Denzel loses to his costar so many opportunities for clever one-liners and sarcastic reactions. This isn’t to say that Denzel himself is a disappointment – in a sense playing both the leads of Django Unchained, Denzel is charismatic and heartbreaking, determined and haunted, and (we sense) withholding a part of himself from his exterior out of a sense of duty and propriety. But it is a bit of a letdown to come to expect a leading performance out of an actor who’s modest enough to embrace his role as 14% of an ensemble.

The Magnificent Seven is not, as its title promises, magnificent. It’s not a transcendent moviegoing experience, but then again in late September I don’t think it has to be. Because on the other hand, The Magnificent Seven is not a disappointment of heroic proportions. It’s fun and fluffy and diverting, and it doesn’t do anything egregiously wrong. It’s in that Baby Bear territory of “just right,” and perhaps it’s gluttonous of me to want the Papa Bear portion of a Denzel Washington western. Moreover, it’s different enough from its predecessors to justify its existence as a variation on a theme. At any rate, keep them coming, Denzel, because I’ll be in the front row every time.

The Magnificent Seven is rated PG-13. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk. Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Haley Bennett and Peter Sarsgaard.

Jurassic World (2015)

When I saw the trailer for Jurassic World, I asked the same question twice, once of the characters in the film and once of the filmmakers themselves: “Why did you think this was a good idea? We saw what happened last time.” Honestly, why anyone would build an actual Jurassic Park seemed unfathomable, given the fate of the original, but I also wanted to know why the filmmakers were ostensibly remaking the original with a higher body count. Now that I’ve actually seen the film, I can say that the answer to both versions of the question is, “But this one’s bigger,” and I’m actually not as disappointed with that answer as one might expect.

Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) manages the successful theme park Jurassic World, with little on her mind but business. On the eve of the park’s newest debut, the genetically modified Indominus Rex, Claire’s nephews (Ty Simpkins, late of Iron Man 3, and Nick Robinson) visit the park, but it’s also the day before disaster in the park – disaster to which Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his trained velociraptors respond.

I’ll try not to get too philosophical about the difference between spectacle and storytelling here, though the difference is key on the subject of Jurassic World. It is, in short, the difference between The Maltese Falcon and Transformers. In The Maltese Falcon (the 1941 John Huston version, of course), we have a brilliant story and very substantial character work, leaving the audience feeling satisfied and accomplished by film’s end, even though (spoilers) very little is actually resolved. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the Michael Bay movies, which are spectacles turned up to eleven, with next to nothing by way of plotting or characterization. Both can be entertaining in their own right – though, of course, Transformers is patently offensive in some of its disregard for storytelling (and offensive in other insensitivities as well).

Now, Jurassic World clearly values spectacle more than storytelling. There was some controversy about whether or not the film chastises the character of Claire for being professional at the cost of her personal life, for not wanting to follow the cliché of marriage-then-motherhood. I don’t agree with that assessment of the film (I actually think her sister comes off quite poorly for nagging Claire to “settle down”), but I think it exposes a problem with the film – the characters are so thinly written that it’s quite easy to impose an interpretation like that onto the film. That is, the characters consist of one personality trait (Claire=business, Owen=badass, kids=imperiled), and the screenplay doesn’t quite bother with value judgments on those traits.

On the other hand, while the characters are fairly flat, director Colin Trevorrow is much more interested in the theme park atmosphere of Jurassic World, about the fleshed-out attractions such a park might include, and naturally about the ways all that could go horribly, horribly wrong. It’s almost as though Trevorrow has anticipated the detractors’ cries of “Been there, done that” and responds with, “Well, of course it goes wrong. That’s what this franchise is all about.” Jurassic World doesn’t have the same kind of cautionary allegory as the Michael Crichton source material.

Jurassic World is not better than Jurassic Park, nor, I would say, is it even as good. But it is good enough. Less than three-dimensional characters aside, the horror movie-inflected direction works surprisingly well, overcoming the cynical me that came to the theaters that day and giving me that “Oh, this isn’t good” feeling in the pit of my stomach. Trevorrow does something quite intriguing, by way of comparison to Jurassic Park, which began with a tour of the grounds and devolved into chaos. Jurassic World, however, intermingles the two; as the park’s security measures fail sector by sector, the film carries on in tandem with the ignorance of the park attendees. It’s a nice change-up that keeps Jurassic World from feeling too much like a retread of the original while substituting the escalating sense of menace borrowed from, I think, home invasion and slasher films.

You can sum up the film quite nicely with a key moment from its climax, in which the human characters step out of the way and let about a dozen dinosaurs fight it out amongst themselves. Indeed, the last word of the film (if we can call it that) belongs to a dinosaur. Trevorrow has said he’s not terribly interested in a sequel, but if one existed, a) would we call it Jurassic World 2 or Jurassic Park 5?, and b) would it consist almost entirely of dinosaurs? The lesson of Jurassic World seems to be that a skeletal narrative can support a spectacle, providing that the spectacle is diverting enough. Either Jurassic World 2 will dispense with the pretext of a human supporting cast, or it’ll find a way to use them more effectively; either way, I’m decidedly less cynical about more Jurassic films than I was before seeing the film.

Jurassic World is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril.” I’m not really sure what more to add by way of description: there are dinosaurs, some of them are scary, and a lot of them eat people.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

By now, we’re all familiar with the Marvel formula and its somewhat unique brand of adapting comic book properties into blockbuster fun.  Guardians of the Galaxy reads almost like a challenge to themselves – can the Marvel method work on characters the mainstream audience has almost certainly never heard of?  It worked at the beginning with Iron Man, and as we approach the second Avengers film, Guardians proves that Marvel is unstoppable, taking everything that worked about their earth-bound adventures and applying that to space.

Intergalactic outlaw Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) wants to live up to his self-applied moniker of Star-Lord, but what he gets instead is a bounty on his head, pursued by Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and Groot (Vin Diesel), a machine-gun-toting raccoon and his talking tree partner.  After the trio is arrested, they align themselves with fellow inmates Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to escape prison before preventing a mad warlord (Lee Pace, as Ronan the Accuser) from destroying the galaxy.

Has anyone called Harrison Ford to congratulate him on the buckets of money that Guardians has made thus far?  I ask this because Guardians feels like the love child of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, very heavily inflected by the cavalier confidence of Ford’s characterization of Han Solo and Indiana Jones.  It’s especially evident during the opening credits sequence, in which Peter Quill steals a precious artifact from a temple, only to incur the wrath of its protectors.  (The film’s conclusion, with one scene set in the Nova Corps vault, seems to echo Raiders as well.)  Indeed, from the start, there is question of who Peter’s father is, and I wonder – now that Disney owns Lucasfilm as well – if Han Solo might be up for paternity.

That aside, on its own merits, Guardians is enthusiastically engaging, taking the “band of misfits” conceit and injecting it into the space opera genre in a way that seems effortless.  Comics devotees will be amazed at the breadth of concepts introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the Celestials, the Nova Corps, the Kree – and for those who don’t know what those words mean, fear not, because Guardians delivers them with a deft expositional hand.  In short, Guardians works better than one might suspect because it immerses you in the fantastical world(s), explains quickly and capably what you need to know, and leaves you to wonder in slack-jawed awe at the rest. 

What Guardians does best, though, is characterization, especially through humor.  The movie is uproariously funny, even in places you might not expect.  All of it serves to give us characters that are astonishingly well-crafted, a double blessing for those of us who know next to nothing about them.  But where most of the characters’ personalities emerge through humor, as when we discover that Drax is incapable of understanding metaphor, director and co-writer James Gunn is careful to balance these gags with genuine moments where we sympathize with the characters.  Take for example the moment when a drunken Rocket Raccoon declares how he really feels about being the only one of his kind; it’s a surprisingly moving moment in the middle of a film where you wouldn’t expect it.  As fun as Thor: The Dark World was, I don’t remember feeling touched by it.

As much as the film links up to the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its talk of Thanos (played well in a cameo by Josh Brolin, who is perfect in the part) and the Infinity Stones, I’m glad to hear that there’s already a sequel in the works, helmed once more by Gunn.  I’m glad, because here is a film that does many unexpected and wonderful things, a film which establishes its own identity without relying on anything more than the “Marvel” brand name.  The rumored appearance by Robert Downey Jr. does not occur, nor should it, because Guardians deserves to be its own thing before it lines up with The Avengers (as it inevitably will).  As fun as it would be to see Iron Man walk on screen, it might take the audience out of the mesmeric spectacle Gunn & Co. have crafted.  Come for the CGI walking talking foliage; stay for the heart and wit of a fresh direction and voice in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Guardians of the Galaxy is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language.”  Honestly, the action in it is roughly equivalent to most of the Star Wars films, with laser guns and explosions more than visceral gore; some bodies are pierced or thrown around, but even in one shot where a body is seriously maimed, it’s more limbs akimbo than bloody geysers.  There are a few defecatory profanities, one middle finger, and the occasional insult; overall, the grit is tempered by the wit.

We’re at ten Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, which sounds suspiciously like something ripe for organizing in ascending order of approval... could something like that be in your future?  Check back with us at the “Top” of next week to find out, and don’t forget that Thursday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!

The Lego Movie (2014)

It’d be a very short putt to brush off The Lego Movie as an extended toy commercial, but it would have been even easier to make that version of the film.  Instead, and fortunately for moviegoers, The Lego Movie more than lives up to its theme tune, “Everything Is Awesome,” by being exuberantly fun, deliciously creative, and containing a whopper of an important message.

Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt) is your average-joe Lego minifigure, indistinct in every way until he finds the Piece of Resistance, an object which freedom fighter Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) tell him is the key to saving the Lego universe from the dastardly plans of President Business (Will Ferrell).  Emmet joins the other Master Builders – including spaceman Benny (Charlie Day), Unikitty (Alison Brie) and Batman (Will Arnett) – to discover his awesome destiny.

Critical approval of The Lego Movie is currently holding at 96% over on that tomato-based review site, and it’s no wonder.  Rather than pander to what we’d expect from a film based on a toy (looking at you, Transformers), The Lego Movie does some very creative things while building that creativity into the very fabric of the narrative, literalizing what amounts to a cogent critique of the current state of cinema.  The dystopia of The Lego Movie is the consequence of a cultural apathy for innovation, a contentment to follow instructions, ingest empty pop music, and consume expensive coffee.  The Lego builders rely on old formulas, stable sets of instructions to shape their world.

As a remedy for the plight of creativity, Emmet learns to build outside the box, without the crutch of directions.  Like the rest of the Master Builders, Emmet has to think in new ways, assembling extant pieces into original and fantastic shapes, utilizing the old forms only when absolutely necessary.  It’s a wonderful commentary on Hollywood’s remake-happy philosophy; rather than give moviegoers something they’ve never seen before (Emmet’s double-decker couch), filmmakers are all too reliant on proven formulas (cars with a wheel... and three other wheels).

It’s perhaps ironic that Batman is included in the Master Builders in the film, as he’s one of the most frequently deployed “pieces” in Hollywood’s toybox.  But even in the case of Batman, The Lego Movie proves its point.  We’ve seen possibly every incarnation of Batman on the silver screen – a deliberately campy one in 1966, Tim Burton’s comic-booky version, Schumacher’s homoerotic-inflected hero, and back to Nolan’s ultra-gritty realism – but The Lego Movie avoids falling into the stereotype of any of the previous incarnations by taking Batman in a new direction, guided by Arnett’s perfect voiceover work.  Taking a satirical bent on the “Dark Knight” and all his grim trappings, Arnett’s Batman is performative and growly, but it’s moments like Batman’s hatred of rainbows that add something new to the character.  Taking the pieces that filmmakers have already used, The Lego Movie shows us how to be creative by reinterpreting and revising (emphasis on “vision”).  Take note, Zack Snyder!

The Lego Movie is so delightfully self-aware, casting Morgan Freeman as an omniscient sorcerer but continually undercutting the character with delightful one-liners.  The film is full of surprises, best experienced and not spoiled, so I’ll refrain from my usual litany of review bullet points and conclude by saying that The Lego Movie is, simply put, awesome.

The Lego Movie is rated PG “for mild action and rude humor.”  Really, the movie is quite tame, and were it not for a scene or two where Lego figures are threatened with being melted, it’s entirely appropriate for all audiences.  I mean, my goodness – the characters won’t even say “gosh” as a swear word (Emmet spells it out to avoid speaking it).