I come to this in terms of a comic geek who probably overly-respects continuity, but who, basically, figures that if it ain't broke, it should only be fixed if necessary to some greater purpose.
So I'll start positive and work my way down from there.
Rocket Raccoon – Everyone loves Rocket, and with good reason. For an angry and bitter little critter with an over-fondness for explosives and firepower, he's just plain funny. There's a scosh bit of force-feeding of his origin (a frequent flaw here), but mostly it works, from subtle glances at his back to his drunken I-don't-want-your-pity pity-me speech. In many ways, Rocket is the straight man here, reacting the way we do when Quill proposes another lame partial plan, and embodying the instinct for self-preservation as well as absolute loyalty to his bro, Groot.The trick, of course, is not to overexpose him in the future — he's a great ensemble player, but probably not so much a solo (or even duo) star.
Groot – Everyone loves Groot, too, though there was no great reason for Vin Diesel to have the role other than publicity. He suffers a bit from being used for deus ex arboria, but he's such a pure spirit (whether of anger, curiosity, or cheerfulness) that it's hard to dislike him. And, unlike everyone else, we don't go through a backstory and origin or even how he and Rocket hooked up. That he comes across more as a character than as a plot device is a tribute to the film creators.
The Ships – I wasn't fond of the designs when I first saw them in the trailers, but I have to say the various spacecraft really grew on me over time, from the Ravenger wing ships, to the Nova stars to Ronin's awesome (and morphing, and dark and scary) spaceship. The through-the-windshield shot felt a bit repetitive, but also effective.
Peter Quill – Yeah, he's Han Solo and Cap'n Jack and every other snarky, seat-of-the-pants, scruffy rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold anti-hero of the past half-century. And that's okay. He comment to the Novas at the end that he's going to watch over his murderous band — comes across as sincere and and a sign that this was an actual story that showed character development and change. The Quill at the end of the movie is not the same as the one at the beginning. He makes for a good emotional heart to the movie. There are still a few weaknesses here, though — his attraction to (and self-sacrifice for) Gamora feels a bit contrived. While his origin was cool, there was no basis for thinking that his mom gave him his "bandit name" or, much less, why. (The comic book origin isn't any better, so there's that.) Add the too-coy hinting at his paternal origin (which appears to be being set up to be different from the current comics), and it's a bit of a mess on the edge of an otherwise memorable character.
The Music – The use of the 70s mix tape was inspired, in terms of lending an air of fun and a sense of nostaligic familiary for characters and a setting that nobody here would ever recognize. It also gave Quill a bit of schtick that added to the humanity of his persona. That said, a lot of the music in the movie, vs. the trailer, was much more background, almost annoyingly so.
Knowhere – Well rendered, well explained, a nice set piece.
Drax – I was unimpressed in the trailers, but Drax in the movies was much more interesting and enjoyable, and I found his tats fascinating. Showing him being completely outclassed by Ronan was probably once too much, and it would have been nice for him to be something more than just the Really Strong Brawler Who Isn't Strong or Fast Enough vs. The Big Bad Guy. The badinage between him and Quill was okay, but I never quite got a strong sense of his character (one the one hand he's all about honor and moral condemnation, on the other he has no problems breaking the law or beating up on people who irk him).
Thanos – Thanos is the Big Bad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was a gutsy move to go from "He's a mysterious figure pulling the strings behind bad stuff happening on Earth" and "In Deep Space, everyone knows and is afraid of Thanos," but, unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. Why is Thanos such a bad-ass? We don't know. People work for him, but not for reasons we understand (and by the end of the movie he's lost one "loyal" tool and two "disloyal" ones). He has a plan, presumably, but seeing more of him hasn't added any clarity to it. He sits on a big, looming, floating space throne, but there's no sense of power beyond that. Thanos, comic-book-wise, is more hands-on — he's a Vader, not a Darkseid. He's also a fascinating character, psycho-analyzed by a variety of writers, and none of that comes through here. He's a great character, and we should have seen 95% less of him than we did here, because what we saw was simpy not impressive.
Cosmo – In the comics, Cosmo is a telepathic Russian dog in a space suit. He runs a bar on Knowhere, and, eventually, the whole place, as I recall, and has hung out with the Guardians on numerous occasions. I suppose, for sake of scaling, it wasn't a bad thing to make him a Collector's item, but I'd have loved to see more of the original character (like, oh, running the bar in Knowhere that they spend time at before seeing the Collector).
Xandar and the Nova Corps – Granted there's a ton of continuity around these folk, they seem to have gone for the most boring, and in a vague way that doesn't really engage the viewer. The Nova Corps is centered on Xandar, but is it just a local planteary system, and its army, or is it really an interplanetary organzation of law-givers? Why are they writing treaties with the Kree? Why would the Kree sign? Why do they seem so weak (guys in costumes, some nice robot sentries, some generic spiky space ships, a kind of lame Tholian Web thing), and what does it mean that so much of their force has been now destroyed? And with all of that, why no indication of the actual super-heroes in the Nova Corps? I mean, I understand how that wouldn't have fit well into the story, but even a mention that they're busy somewhere else and can't get back in time would have been useful. As it is, the whole thing is sort of a lame United Federation of Planets, without the cool starships.
The Infinity Gems – Or stones. Or, as here, various bits. We've seen the Tesseract (Cosmic Cube). We've seen the Aether. Here we have a purple gem. One thing missing, both in the backstory force-fed us by the Collector and in what's been shown to date, is whether the gems themselves vary (as in the comics) in their power, or are they just Really Powerful McGuffins each in their own way? In the comics, each of the gems has power over a fundamental force — time, space, power, soul, etc. Here, they just all seem to be Very Powerful Things, sought after by Thanos (and the Collector). (One has to wonder whether the Asgardians will be back any time soon for that Aether they left in the Collector's custody).
Gamora – I love this character in the comics, raised from childhood by Thanos to be the perfect assassin, rebelling against him when his mad nihilism grew too great for her loyalty. But … I found her the weakest link of Our Heroes in this movie. Her fighting abilities are good, but not spectactular, as demonstrated by how eaily she's handled by Quill and Rocket/Groot in an early sequence. Zoe Saldana comes across as weak and whiny in too many places — the arc of her rebellion against her adoptive father is completely glazed over; she's already abandoning him when things start, but for reasons we don't really get, and her shift then into being a Guardian who actually gives a fig about Ronan and the Infinity Gem and all of that feels more contrived than organic (as does the nascent romance between her and Quill — why does this thing have to happen?). A lot of potential there, but not very fulfilled.
Yondu – So in the Comics, Yondu was one of the original set of Guardians, but there's not much left of that character here save for appearance (color and skull ridge) and power (he was a master archer whose specially crafted arrows could be controlled by his whistling). He was also, as I recall, something of a stiff. There are some neat aspects to this iteration of Yondu — the arrow bits, the surrogate fatherhood over Quill — but other aspects I found annoying. He's a superfluous mostly-bad guy, in a movie already full of them. He's tied into Quill's origin, which is already amusing. And he's kind of a redneck mob boss who grated on my nerves whenever he was on screen.
The Credit Sequences – Okay, Howard the Duck was cute (though I hope that is the end of seeing him). And, as someone who actually liked the movie, that didn't bother me. What bothered me was making it the final tag for the film. In the words of someone sitting the row behind me, "I sat here all this time for that?" The credit tags for the Marvel movies have been a combo of (a) humor and (b) foreshadowing. We got the former (twice; the Drax/Groot sequence was even more lightweight, and too long), but not the latter, which gave things a bit of a let-down for me (and worried me a bit — was there no sense of where this, or the parallel MCU, story is going? Is there a reason a bit more of Thanos, showing his plans are actually still intact, bwah-ha-ha, wouldn't have worked? Or something else to tie this into the future of the MCU? Don't they know?)
The Collector – After the setup, he came across as fairly useless, aside from giving us some exposition about the Infinity Stones and (in so doing) tying the other MCU movies into this one. Then a post-credits laugh line. How far is an Elder of the Universe fallen? Hell, the Broker was a better developed character here than the Collector, and apparently had better security, too. Bah.
Ronan and the Kree – So in the comics, the Kree are one of the big powers it the galaxy (actually, it's based in one of the Magellanic Clouds, but let's not get picky). They are a militaristic, technocratic empire, ruled over by the Supreme Intelligence, a big A.I. being that incorporates the wisdom of all their past rulers. Ronan the Accuser is one of the Kree's enforcers, fulfilling jobs too focused to send their fleets. In this movie, however, he's changed into a xenophobic fanatic, working for Thanos (sort of), rebelling against the Kree (sort of) and their namby-pamby treaty, coverd in dirt and ritualistic goo, and determined, for reasons ungiven, to destroy all Xandarian people and culture. In and of himself, that's not bad, but it's a mystery why they actually chose Ronan for that role, since its really nothing like him. Also, for a genocidal lunatic, he's very easily distracted at the hour of his triumph, and spends his last minute sort of watching the events before dying. He has his moments (in particular when thrashing Drax), but it just felt like tampering for tampering's sake.
Nebula – Yes, she is (or claims to be) the daughter of Thanos in the comics. Here, she's really just another bad guy in a movie that is swarming with them. We get very little sense of who she is except being shouty and angry and resentful of how Dad Loves You Better (in His Arch-Villainous Abusive way). In a movie about people and their bad parental experiences, Nebula fares the worse, and is a waste of Karen Gillen. But, of course, she'll be back. Unless she isn't.
A lot of complaints above, such that I reiterate that I really had a lot of fun with this movie, and none of the above takes much away from that. It keeps it from being (in my opinion) as good a movie as The Avengers, but it's mostly about things I would have liked to have seen done better, not things that were, per se, bad.
There was a wonderful line in the latest issue of GotG. Rocket looks around and asks, "Where's my Groot?"
Drax just took on Gladiator in the comic. This overconfidence could certainly play well in the movie.
No mention of Thanos's infatuation with Death? Too bad. That could serve as a motive for all manner of nasty Huge Evil plots.
Cosmo? Yay! We were hoping he'd be in the movie! Well, we were hoping he would be in the movie. You know, have lines and stuff. 🙁
The Nova Corps? Really? Cool! I would not have expected them to be included. But really, if you put them in, you'd better have some serious space cop action. Maybe have them try to arrest Thanos.
Yondu? Yondu??? Is he time-displaced, or just an "Easter egg" for us geezers who were raised on his Guardians?
If I were writing the sequel, you can bet Adam Warlock would have shown up post-credits.
Sounds like maybe the Shi'ar would have been a better choice than the Kree. Of course, the Kree had already been introduced.
(Staying silent lest I be responsible for more even-labeled spoilers. Engage with the movie as it is, then critique it.)
Nice assessment and spot-on, in a lot of places.
As someone who wasn't really familiar with this version of the Guardians, I didn't have too many quibbles about the casting except for Saldana. As an actress, she's o.k, but body type wise, she was too "string beany" for my mental image of Gamora. A nitpick, I know.
As for the ships, I always enjoy when we get to see something that's not your typical "space shippy" model. Proving that not all alien races watch Hollywood films 🙂
+Mark Means Thanks. I didn't find Soldana's body type as problematic (not everyone can be a tall, powerful Jim Starlin character) but her demeanor, her body language, how she was played.
It also occurs to me that, for those who were around at the time, the use of this particular era (70s) of music connects to a seminal era of SF — thinking Star Wars in particular (1976), but Close Encounters and The Man Who Fell to Earth and others were all in that time frame, too. It's a brilliant way to ground characters and settings that are alien in a warm, human, nostalgic era.
(Now I almost wonder if foreign editions of the movie use analogous tunes from that era.)
OK, I'm going to respond to this in detail – quite possibly too much of it – because from the perspective of someone without a background in the comics, there were some things here that worked for me that didn't seem to for you, so maybe I can give you a different angle on them. Um, which means lots more spoilers!! (And still no answers to Scott's questions. Hah.)
Rocket was awesome, and in my view, really the hero of the story. Everything important that got done was Rocket and/or Groot. I didn't feel like his background was too forced, because while I was pretty happy just with, "It's Rocket Raccoon! What more do you need?"… I didn't otherwise have any idea who he was, so it was nice to get some hints.
The ships were neat, although I didn't quite see the point to the way Ronan's changed.
"Classic, but fun", does describe Peter's character pretty well. His attraction to Gamora made fine sense — he seems to be at least tentatively attracted to anything that calls itself `female', and the fact that she said "no" to him was really pretty well done. I did think, though, that his code name (There's no shame in having a code name. It's not that weird.) coming from his mother made sense, though — learning that right after having his half-alien heritage revealed made me think, "Oh, that makes sense." If we presume his mother knew his father was an alien, then "Starlord" is a totally reasonable nickname for her to have given him. (If we also presume that's where she got cancer… I bet it was Dr. Manhattan! Wait, no, wrong franchise. Drat.) The scene in which they revealed that he was half alien was a bit forced, though. One of the only places where I felt the cut was too abrupt.
Drax was really good. The trailers set him up as your basic brute; finding him to be intelligent and introspective was great, and yeah, his bodyart was really cool. The scene where he was brushed off by Ronan worked for me: They built Drax up as Dangerous and Scary, and then the Boss Monster tosses him aside like a mook. About the third time he tried to hit Ronan, Ronan actually deigned to look at him. It set Ronan up as something that was really going to require teamwork to beat, and made the part where they were going in to take him down much more exciting. (Of course, from there, it turned out to be kind of anticlimactic, but.. that's a different scene, with its own analysis.) …With that said, as long as they had Groot, they didn't really need Drax, so from a gaming perspective, I think his player might have been annoyed at not being able to shine in his niche. From a movie perspective, though, his presence added a very interesting tension to the group, and he clearly had his own outlook and goals, which the others had to work with — if only because he wasn't going to leave, whether they needed him or not.
On Thanos I think I agree with you completely, I'm afraid. I know little about him from the established Marvel Canon, but glimpses of him so far gave me, "There's something big and scary out there". GotG established that he.. sits in a floating throne, and… isn't a very good father? I think is what they were going for? "There's something big and scary out there that you don't want to be adopted by" is a little bit of a step down.
On the Nova Corps; I had the impression of them as a basically planetary defense/police force. BUT, I have got to say, John Reilly's Sympathetic Cop was, from his first kind of friendly arrest of Peter as a known petty criminal right through to, "I have a family who's alive today because of you".. and, of course, on to, "Well, then, that would be a crime,"… he was wonderful. For a bit part, he was one of my favorite things about the movie. And I really, really loved that they took that extra moment to show his family before the end. If I had a complaint about the handling of the Nova Corp (again, with no knowledge of their actual canon), it would be that they had to have the One Who Didn't Want To Trust The Heroes. It was cliche and unnecessary.
On the Infinity Gems… I think they're building them up reasonably well, and keeping the idea that so far, the people we're seeing through the eyes of know very little about them. Though I'm not sure how they knew that Ronan 1) had taken his on, and 2) had to actually touch the planet for it to work. There was a jump from, "Never heard of them" right on to detailed knowledge of its capabilities and limitations that I don't remember being shared with the audience.
Gamora… ah, that gets complicated. I thought she was a good, strong character as the team's moral backbone — she was the one who cared about millions of people dying. Her background filled in reasonably well for me as someone who had never been loyal to Thanos, but served him until 1) the stakes got too high and 2) she had a way out. It did bother me, some, that the only fight she was shown clearly winning was against her sister, but… Well. Elektra in Daredevil lost every fight she was in, and it bothered the heck out of me. (Enough that I've never seen her own movie, where, as the title character, she was probably allowed to shine a little more — and it occurs to me now that avoiding that one probably sent Hollywood entirely the wrong message. Blast.) On one level, Gamora seems kind of in the same boat, with Hollywood's tradition of only letting girls fight other girls; but it's better in one significant respect: We also see Drax clearly losing against Ronan and having a hard time just against his lieutenant, and we see Peter mostly running away. (It seemed to me, in the Grand Melee scene, that Gamora would have taken Peter easily except that, you know, he cheats.) It's not Gamora who's being `kept down'; it's the Guardians as a whole, being portrayed as good, but totally out of their league. …and I absolutely loved when she shook her head and wouldn't dance at the end. Despite the smile she gives him on his ship at the very, very end, she says NO when Peter hits on her, and really doesn't change her mind anywhere in the movie. I'm not sure they really did push that at the end, even — I think it might just be such a common thing for Hollywood to mess up that even that little hint of it immediately triggers an eye-rolling, "Why'd they have to do that?" It did for me, too, mind you, it's just as I think back on it… all she did was smile. It was more of a family scene than anything.
Yondu in this was… you're right that he was kind of one more bad-guy in a movie with a lot of bad guys, but I think that was a necessary contrast. If the Guardians of the Galaxy were going to be the good guys, yet remain a bunch of scruffy criminals, they had to be surrounded by people who were, on the whole, worse, and even less likely to save the galaxy. …The scene where they had him kill the dozen-or-so bad guys bothered me a little, though, even at the time. It was cool and showed why people were scared of him — but it took too long, and there was no reason that, like, six of them, wouldn't have shot him before it was done.
Do agree with you about the post-credit scene, though. Not all of them have been heavy Foreshadowing (the Schwarma scene, for example, was pretty innocuous), but this was disappointingly lightweight. Though GotG was a little more `humor' than the other lines have been, so maybe that's why.
With Ronan, reading the `proper' background, I can totally see why them picking that name for this character would be vexing. Taken in itself, I found his character pretty solid, though. His background and motives as I understood them, wholly from the movie, was this: The Kree and the Xandarians had been at war for a really, really long time. They recently signed a peace treaty, probably because the Kree were losing. Ronan didn't accept that, because the Xandarians had killed his father, and his father's father, etc. (Very much the same motivation as Drax, really. They should talk.) Probably other Kree felt the same, but Ronan was the one who went to Thanos and said, "Give me the power to fight this war by myself, then, if my leaders are too weak." So Thanos threw him a couple daughters and maybe a couple billion Units out of his petty cash drawer, and Ronan set himself up as a terrorist. Then word about an Infinity Gem got around to the kinds of people who get word about that kind of thing, and the race was on; Thanos triggered Ronan, promising to destroy Xandar personally if Ronan brought him this toy.
I did find the final battle scene kind of anti-climactic, but actually, his tendency not to react to the people crashing jets into him and whatnot actually did make sense. Even Pre-Infinity-Gem, we saw him brush off Drax, refusing to even look at him for the first half of the fight. That kind of, "You're not even important enough to engage" was part of his motif. Still riding the rush of the Infinity Gem, I can easily imagine he didn't feel particularly "threatened" by these idiots.
Pretty much with you on Nebula. Cliches are a quick way to develop a minor character, but they were piled on pretty high with her. On the plus side: female character, seen roundly out-maneuvering two boys! (Not, it must be admitted, actually beating them in a fight or anything, but… maybe a step in the right direction.)
…whew So, that's it. I don't really disagree with you about most of what you said, but I saw some of it a little bit differently, and some things that felt `out of nowhere' to you I thought were a little better supported. Spent way too much time on this, though!
+Kingsley Lintz Dude! Nice counter-review, though we do agree on most of the points. A few added notes:
1. So maybe I was looking for a bit more backstory on Ronan and the Kree. Not a 10 minute monolog, but just a few lines more could have established what you said and given the whole thing a lot more context.
2. Agree on the girl-on-girl fighting. The daughters (adopted/assumed) of Thanos out to be kicking everyone's butts.
I still feel there was too much Quill/Gamora stuff — but, yes, I do like that she said (for the moment) No.
3. Agree that the Yondu arrow scene was improbably long and, aside from one-off amusement, kind of a waste.
4. I don't mind the "lightweight" part of the credits scenes. The schwarma scene was, in fact, just as light-weight (though someone character-enhancing). But here that's all we got, nothing that advanced the MCU story, the upcoming threats, anything.
(Nebula stumbles up the stairs. "Father. I've failed you. Gamora has betrayed us, defeated Ronan, and turned the gem over to the Xandarians." Thanos smiles. "Everything is progressing according to plan.")
(Or, post-Collector bit, a pair of legs appears in front of him. Nebula. "My father wants to talk with you out how you might rebuild your … collection.")
Give it a bite. Give them something to have them banding their heads that 2017 is so far away. Something.
5. I did like the Good Cop in the Nova Corps — and that we got to see his family. It's the rest of the setup that I thought was kind of muddled and mediocre.
6. That "Starlord" was chosen as a name because of his father … it interesting. It's not exactly what I'd call a normal term of endearment but … yeah, that could work.
Again, thanks for the comments. Good stuff!