Guardians Of The Galaxy
“Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: August 4th, 2014
Guardians of the Galaxy is a dark universe. The group of titular Guardians are far more than a rag-tag bunch of unlikely heroes. At their center they are severely broken people. Peter Quill’s last memory of normalcy before being whisked away to fantastical space land is his bald-headed mother dying right in front of him after he is too scared to hold her hand. Gamora watched her parents be slaughtered before being abducted into servitude to be raised as an assassin. Rocket is a lab experiment whose body was taken apart and put back together with anthropomorphizing technological enhancements. Drax witnessed the death of his wife and child, and now has no motivation save vengeful bloodlust. This level of darkness might seem like a positive, offering an unexpected nuance to this band of misfits. But in execution it plays like a missed opportunity and, worse, a willingness to trot out tragedy for the sake of an emotional scene or confession, then tuck it back away again never to be mentioned. Like most Marvel films the narrative, not the story, takes front seat. The villain wants to ruin cities and kill people, the heroes want to stop that from happening. The film eventually sets out a theme of familial bonding as a salve for wounds and strength through unity prevailing over the singular desires of a power-hungry madman. But there’s no throughline for this thematic arc, no sense of it growing and developing as the film progresses. Instead, it is atonally wedged in between scenes of wise-cracking and action mayhem for the sake of tugging at heartstrings. Gunn, Marvel & co. refuse to explore the ramifications inherent to these lonely, devastated characters.
One can imagine a film where the fantastical space journeys, romanticized outlaw lifestyle, and live-for-the-now violence becomes a representation of escapism as an unhelpful band-aid on a deep psychic wound, and it's only through establishing a legitimate connection to other people that you gain perspective on the tragic conditions of your life. Each character sets up the opportunity for a character arc in multiple ways. Quill/Star-Lord is the most obvious, as he is given a litany of character flaws, from ceaseless braggadocio to casual emotional abuse of women to all of the aforementioned traits regarding romanticizing lawlessness and violence. Based on the various backstories, any reader could probably come up with similar trajectories for Gamora, Rocket, and Drax. Even if none of this would have necessarily been new territory, it at least would have been territory. The film would have felt like it was headed somewhere. Ronan, the film’s villain, has a similar lack of purpose in the story. He, like the others, seems to suffer from a wounded past, but his motivation is made even less clear (something about a genocide against his people committed by other people and subsequently being forced into a useless peace treaty which, I suppose, could be a metaphor for Israel and Gaza but is so half-baked I feel uncomfortable even mentioning the connection). There could have been a narrative rope tying the arc of Ronan to the arcs of the heroes, as Sam Raimi manages in Spider-Man 2. In that film, Doc Ock and Spider-Man are essentially the same person (smart, caring people trying to make the world a better place) who react to unexpected obstacles based on their support systems. Heroism and villainy are not binary traits inherent to people, but the result of a life’s worth of circumstances. Guardians of the Galaxy had an opportunity to make a similar connection, and argue that Quill, Rocket, Drax, and Gamora are able to make the correct choices due to their growing bond with each other. Each person adds humanity to the group, and makes the others better people due to their participation. Ronan, stranded in isolation, lacks those opportunities.
The script does actually try for some of these ideas, to give credit where credit is due. But the film is so busy pushing the narrative towards its inevitable conclusion that it can’t take time to seal the motif together. The audience never fully grasps what makes Ronan tick, or how the people of Xandar could be the genocidal murderers Ronan claims. This makes his motivation extremely one-note, and almost every scene with him is a chore to sit through. The camaraderie between the titular Guardians feels similarly underwhelming. I never got a solid sense of why any of the characters liked each other, or what even pulled them together. Comparing this film to Marvel’s earlier feature from this year, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, only highlights this film’s chemical shortcomings. Chris Evans, Anthony Mackie, and Scarlett Johansson all play variations on roles they have been doing for some time now. But the bond feels real, earned, and experienced. Even in a fantastical world of danger and ridiculous situations I always understood what qualities each person valued in the other, and why they would trust and work together. Guardians attempts a pretty obvious variation on Star Wars, but with every character except Gamora playing Han Solo. Each person starts off basing their actions in self-interest, and eventually they come together to begin putting the common good before their petty concerns. Only it never rings true. No one does or says anything that defines them in a meaningful way. Their attempts at pathos fall flat. I just couldn’t buy that they would be friends.
I almost feel that I would have liked the movie better if they hadn’t tried to make them friends. The film offers an undeniable reason for doing the right thing. Ronan, consumed by the misery of his existence, eventually plots to destroy the entire galaxy. When faced with the choice between money and survival, most people will choose survival. Money really doesn’t make sense as an option in that instance. If the film admitted that all the characters were pretty bad people, and that they were only working together for the sake of self-preservation, I feel like a lot of the film’s poor emotional beats could have been avoided. In a lot of ways the film tries to have it both ways anyway, with Star-Lord saving Gamora’s life in a self-sacrificing, stereotypically noble way (the score swells with strings to highlight the emotional effect it should be having on the audience) only to undercut the emotion it just raised in the audience by having him brag about how noble he was for saving her in the next scene. If the film simply committed to its premise of bad people inadvertently doing good, there’s a lot of goofy postmodern fun the film could have. It could pitch itself as a goof on how self-serious most superhero films are. There are plenty of films I enjoy where most of the characters are reprehensible. But since the film can’t decide between one or the other, it ends up satisfying neither.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
