'Guardians Of The Galaxy'

Because The Galaxy Needs Guarding

Months late, I'm coming at this year's big Marvel blockbuster.

The dripping irony of the title is a giveaway that the film is going to work with cheesiness. After all, if you were going to put together a crack squad of people to guard the Galaxy, you sure as hell wouldn't start with a Wolfing human, a green assassin, a wrestler, a talking raccoon and an Ent. Then again, it's an action film where the said characters acquit themselves very well, so maybe there is no irony at all.

The comic-book slickness of the narrative covers up a lot of strange things as it moves towards the inevitable climax. It's that kind of film and if you expect anything otherwise, you're looking for the wrong film.

The cast is brimming with energy as the film races through the story with nary a pitstop in the land of expositions. There are bad guys, there are many of them, and there's a lot at stake. Now hit play.

What's Good About It

Rocket Raccoon and Groot are the standout characters in this one. On some level it's all about the glory of portraying the angst-ridden trigger happy raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper and the empathic plant-giant Groot voiced by Vin Diesel. Next to that, Star-Lord seems like the narrative centre without much to offer except the sentimental backstory.

CGI has come a long way. Back in the days of the first 'Toy Story', hair and fur was considered the distant future challenge. In this one, the fur on Rocket Raccoon is seamless. Groot is materially made of wood, and the crisscrossing spacecraft and aircraft have tremendous verisimilitude, even though we've never really seen a real life spacecraft of the sort.

What's Bad About It

Some times the mode of story telling switches gear too much. It doesn't takes it self seriously in certain parts which deflates tension, while it takes itself too seriously towards the end that you wonder how they ever got to make a talking raccoon such an integral character to the plot.

It's an otherwise lovely film that deserves a sequel, but it struggles with tone in quite a number of places. It was pretty disappointing because the trailers were so good at pitching the film with the right kind snazzy irony. The film isn't always hitting on that cylinder.

What's Interesting About It

The film is on the whole far less polemical about the universe than 'the Avengers' and the related solo movies around Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. In its stead, there is something a lot more psycho-sexual and internalised going on. The state of the Galaxy and the characters' place in it is ironic. What we're made to investigate is the the nature of these misfits, and asked to extend our tolerance for 'the other'. Star-Lord's companions are very metonymic - much like Dorothy's companions in the Wizard of Oz. There is the animal, the plant, the un-ironic and destructive masculine and a green-skin woman who is an assassin.

The villains of the film are either nondescript drone-like warriors who are easily felled or preening white men with coloured skin makeup.

The Afterlife Of The Lonely

There's nothing more saddening than the thought that the whole movie you are watching is a kind of dream state before death. While that might not exactly be true, there's a quality to the setup of this film that suggests everything that happens is a kind of dream that happens in a coma. It occurred to me that the social realist rendition of the film sees the young Peter run out of the hospital and gets hit by a truck, rather than get picked up by a band of space brigands. The rest of the events in the film would merely be a dream state before he drifts offing the sleep of death where his mother awaits.

Of course, the film is not that at all, but it's weird how the effect of the dream-like good humour has is that it makes one very suspicious of the narrative space. After all, how many talking raccoons appear in social-realist films? None. Raccoons don't talk.

Still, the underlying sadness of Peter Quill /Star-Lord is such that you never really shake the beginning of the film as you watch his adventures through space. His attachments to the things he brings with him from earth - the Sony Walkman and cassettes - give away the deep sense of nostalgia for the absence of things, including his mother. The character is doused with this deeply oedipalised sense of distress and loneliness.

From Uhura To Green Chick

Zoe Saldana plays Gamora, the green skin assassin. Of course the green skinned chicks are the ones Captain Kirk seduces in the rebooted Star Trek, so it's kind of weird to see the actress who plays Uhura don the green-skin. I'm not even convinced this is politically correct or incorrect casting but seeing that Star-Lord is a decidedly white heterosexual anglo male, it's safe to say the tolerance implied in the film might be entirely bogus. Maybe there's something of a tokenism thing going on. Maybe not.

Maybe America hasn't moved on much form the Kirk & Uhura kiss from the original series, but I don't recall Star-Lord kissing Gamora. This might have been the case because Marvel simply didn't want to go there - but then neither did the TV Network when it came to Kirk and Uhura kissing. Is inter-racial relationships that difficult to take - even after the 'multiracial' (what an awful word) Derek Jeter and his twenty year career of doing starlets of all races and varieties? Is this still a problem for America? For the world? Maybe - just maybe - it is. In which case I plant my face firmly in my palms.

I have to say I hate this kind of covert-racism-dressed-up-as-problematic. There is no problem. There is no problematic. Just get on with it if you have the bravura good sense to cast Zoe Saldana as the leading woman.

The Injustices Of The Universe

Some characters are simply an expression of the childish refusal to accept the injustices of the universe as being fair. Rocket Raccoon asks, "what if somebody has something and I wanted it more. Can't I just take it?"
He is told it is criminal to take it. "But you're not understanding me. What if *I* wanted it more?"
It almost sounds like a legitimate question coming from the angry raccoon.

While Bradley Cooper may have voiced Rocket Raccoon, it may have equally been voiced by Danny DeVito. Racked with the mismatch between desire and identity, Rocket Raccoon is the most vexing of anti-heroes on the screen. The palpable self-loathing and the impatience with other living beings that talk evokes some of the most complicated and conflicted figures in fiction. As creations go, Rocket Raccoon is a kind of masterpiece of emotional complication. We never really find out too much about his back story but we can guess there's trauma-aplenty in there.

In the mean time we have this unique character wandering the universe, getting into adventures and stuff. The bizarreness aside, he's a pretty kick-ass kind of creation.