- UK release: July 2014
- Director: James Gunn · Writers: James Gunn, Nicole Perlman
- Studio / distributor: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney
- Genre: Space-opera superhero comedy · Runtime: 121 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation, Zero Dark Thirty) as Peter Quill / Star-Lord; Zoe Saldaña (Avatar, Star Trek) as Gamora; Dave Bautista as Drax; Bradley Cooper (The Hangover, Silver Linings Playbook) as the voice of Rocket
- IMDb: 8.1 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 91% critics / 92% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
This is the moment Marvel stops playing it safe. Ten films in, the studio has a formula it could run for another decade, and instead it hands its most obscure property to James Gunn, a writer-director who came up through Troma and made his name with the splattery horror comedy Slither. The leads are a sitcom actor best known as the soft idiot in Parks and Recreation, a former wrestler, and a raccoon. There is no Avengers name on the poster to fall back on. By every cautious instinct it should not work, and the surprise of the summer is how completely it does.
The setup
Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is a small-time thief who was snatched from Earth as a boy and grew up among space pirates calling himself Star-Lord, a name nobody else uses. He swipes a mysterious orb on a dead planet and finds half the galaxy wants it, chiefly Ronan, a fanatical warlord with the means to burn worlds. On the run, Quill falls in with a quartet of misfits who each want him, the orb, or both: a green-skinned assassin, a tattooed brute with a personal grudge, a gun-running raccoon and the walking tree who is his muscle. None of them like each other, and the orb is far more dangerous than any of them first realise. The setup is a heist that turns into a reluctant rescue, and the pleasure is watching five selfish loners work out that they are better together than apart.
The cast
Pratt is the discovery. He carries the film on a particular kind of charm, the cocky chancer who is not nearly as smooth as he thinks, and he times a joke beautifully without ever quite winking at the camera. Zoe Saldaña, already a fixture of this sort of cinema after Avatar and Star Trek, gives Gamora more steel and weariness than the green paint would suggest. Dave Bautista is the real surprise of the supporting bench: Drax takes every figure of speech literally, and Bautista plays that deadpan so straight that he lands some of the biggest laughs without seeming to reach for them.
The two effects characters could have sunk the whole enterprise and instead anchor it. Bradley Cooper voices Rocket, the gun-running raccoon, as a small creature with a large chip on his shoulder and a real wound underneath the wisecracks, and the film is brave enough to give him a quiet moment that genuinely lands. Vin Diesel plays Groot, a tree who says only three words, and somehow makes them carry tenderness, comedy and menace by turn. That you come to care about a CGI raccoon and a monosyllabic tree is the surest sign the casting works.
The craft
Gunn directs the thing with colour and confidence. After a run of Marvel films shot in tasteful greys and blues, the cosmic palette here is a relief, all neon and gold and ruined alien cities, lit by Ben Davis with a comic-book brightness. The action is clean rather than frantic, and Gunn is happy to stop a chase for a one-liner without losing momentum.
The masterstroke is the music. Quill carries a Walkman of seventies pop, his one link to the mother and the planet he lost, and Gunn scores the film to it: Blue Swede, Redbone, the Five Stairsteps, the Jackson 5. Pop needle-drops are nothing new, but here they are woven into the character and the plot rather than sprayed over the top, and the result is the most purely enjoyable soundtrack the genre has produced in years. It is the sort of film you leave humming. Tyler Bates fills the gaps with a score that knows when to step back and let Awesome Mix Vol. 1 do the work.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Star Wars, and the film earns it: the cantina-bar aliens, the ragtag crew, the sense of a lived-in galaxy with grime under its fingernails. But the closer cousin is Joss Whedon’s Firefly and its film Serenity, the same blend of outlaws, banter and barely-suppressed feeling, and a little of The Fifth Element in the candy-coloured maximalism. Inside Marvel’s own house it is the boldest swing since the first Iron Man, the moment the studio proves its universe can hold comedy and weirdness as easily as armoured men punching each other. After a stretch of films that started to feel like instalments, this one feels like an adventure.
Critics versus the rest of us
For once the critics and the crowd are in step. Reviews are landing around 91%, audiences a notch higher at 92%, and the praise is consistent: the humour, the soundtrack, the oddball charm, the gamble of going cosmic and selling it. The few reservations are the usual Marvel ones, a villain in Ronan who is more obstacle than character and a plot that comes down to another glowing object everyone is chasing. Both complaints are fair and neither matters much in the watching, because the film is having too good a time to care, and that good humour is infectious.
Verdict
This is enormously likeable, and likeability is harder to manufacture than spectacle. It is funny without being smug, sincere without being soppy, and it introduces a crew you immediately want to spend more time with. The villain is thin and the orb-chase plot is boilerplate, which is what keeps it just shy of the top tier. Everything around that core, the cast chemistry, the colour, the soundtrack, the willingness to be daft and heartfelt at once, is close to perfectly judged. It is the most rewatchable film Marvel has made, the kind you put on knowing exactly when you will smile, and on that count it sits very high indeed. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in 2D and 3D. Worth seeing loud, for the soundtrack alone.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the gamble paid off twice over. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) and Vol. 3 (2023) completed the trilogy, the second leaning harder into the family-of-misfits sentiment and the third giving Rocket the full backstory hinted at here. The crew went on to anchor two Avengers films, and the Awesome Mix soundtrack became a chart success in its own right, an oddity for a film score. The first film has settled in as many people’s favourite of the run and the template for Marvel’s more comic, music-led entries. It streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and 4K.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate fantasy action violence, threat, moderate bad language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: The film contains explosive battles in outer space involving various craft, and scenes of fighting between rival groups. The fighting features hand-to-hand combat as well the use of futuristic weapons, and is occasionally both intense and sustained. The impacts of blows or laser blasts result in no realistic injury. The violence takes place in a firmly established fantasy setting where the banter between characters also brings comic relief to the action and to moments of threat.
Language: The film contains moderate bad language such as ‘dick’, ‘prick’, ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’, and the use of a rude gesture. Milder bad language includes ‘hell’, ‘damn’, ‘bastard’, ‘shit’, ‘fricking’, ‘bloody’, ‘screw this’, ‘buggers’, ‘butts’, ‘jerks’, ‘a-hole’, ‘asses’ and ‘pissed’.
Additional issues: The film also contains infrequent mild sex references.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
