Guardians of the Galaxy review!

Hello and welcome to the July 29th edition of The Comic Shop!

Lots of news coming out of the San Diego Comic Con, but I'm not going to get into any of that today.  Let's jump right into the review shall we?  As always I will try to avoid spoilers and specific plot points, but read at your own risk.

The Good:  There is a lot to love about this film.  The soundtrack is fantastic and integral to the film's storyline.  Director James Gunn uses the soundtrack several times to nod to the audience in a bit of fourth wall chicanery.  The humor in this film is also top notch with almost every character having their moment to shine on that front. 

Chris Pratt absolutely owns his role as Star-Lord/Peter Quill in this film, and I would say he's Marvel's best casting job since Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.  Pratt definitely has the leading man material and he absolutely does not miss a beat.  Zoe Saldana is good as Gamora but I'll get into my issues with the characterization of Thanos' adopted daughter later on in this review.  Dave Bautista certainly doesn't act like he is a former professional wrestler as he makes the very literal Drax the Destroyer his own.  If it weren't for Pratt; however, Bradley Cooper's Rocket Raccoon and Vin Disel's Groot would have absolutely stolen the show in this movie.  I realize they are CGI rendered characters only voiced by the actors, but they bring a lot of the fun to the movie.  Michael Rooker plays Michael Rooker in blue make up as Yondu, but he's good enough as that as well.

A certain mad titan may or may not make his film debut in this movie, and it may or may not be absolutely glorious (wink, wink).

The Bad: I often have a hard time being overly critical about a film after my first viewing.  It often takes me a while to digest the information and really think about which things I have issues with.  With this film my issues became a little more apparent initially. 

My biggest problem is the way Gunn, his partner in writing the film Nicole Perlman, and Saldana chose to bring Gamora to the screen.  In her history Gamora is the adopted daughter of a certain Mad Titan, and she is quite powerful.  With superhuman agility, healing, and superhuman strength to boot she was trained by Thanos to be one of the more gifted warriors in the galaxy.  With that history in mind it was quite disheartening to see her portrayed as incompetent at times, and as love fodder for Quill.  Now it's not terrible, but when you give your warrior princess character dialogue that explicitly states "I am no helpless waif...." you should probably have the character live up to that on screen.  It's safe to say that there will be several sequels to develop this character and I hope to see her become more of a brooding bad ass warrior in the future.

I also had a bit of an issue with Lee Pace's Ronan the Accuser and Karen Gillan's Nebula who went to the "bad guys are bad because they are bad school".  Meaning they had enough motivation, that we learned about through exposition, but they were rather flat characters outside of that.  They are good enough in their perspective roles; however, I feel like this movie was trying to accomplish a little too much to flesh out these characters.  That said they still weren't on the crap level of marble mouth and "Batman Forever Electro" from "The Amazing Spider-man 2" but there is really nothing that stands out otherwise.

The Ugly: We have to wait three years to get the next installment of this wonderful movie!

The Verdict: Disney/Marvel has hit a home run with this out of left field film property.  This film doesn't have a ton of exposition and the they get through a lot of it rather ingeniously. The humor and the action are top notch, which has come to be a common expectation from these Marvel releases.  "Guardians of the Galaxy" is this summer's must-see, and it is accommodating to those that may have not seen other Marvel movies because it does not really tie-in to the other films at this point.  The only real thread to the greater Marvel universe is a certain mad titan that made a post-credit cameo in "The Avengers".

 That is all for today I will be back as soon as I can to talk about comic-con news, but get out Friday and see "Guardians".  I'll see you next time at The Comic Shop!