Why 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' Is More 'Spaceballs' Than 'Star Wars'

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Superhero movies tend to end the same way: with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, two men in silly costumes have a fistfight. But in Guardians Of The Galaxy, when Lee Pace’s glowering, face-painted uber-villain is about to raze an entire civilisation by the mighty power of his phallic hammer, smirkin’ space-cad Chris Pratt responds by dancing. Badly. To his own half-mumbled version of the Five Stairsteps’ O-o-h Child, a reference to the film’s soft-rock soundtrack, which summons AM-radio nostalgia by way of an ’80s-wedding-DJ playlist.

To unleash idiocy in the face of an apocalypse is symbolic of this film’s refreshing approach to the genre. After a decade of being fed a steady diet of starchy reboots ever more ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’, here, we’re served a pure popcorn movie, light and airy.

Guardians Of The Galaxy is yet another Marvel branding exercise, but away from the shadows of The Avengers, it’s free to gather together B-list characters in a B-movie. It’s not just adapted from a comic-book, but retains the trashiness of the form, dares to be fun and fast and trashy even on a blockbuster budget. That budget delivers a wild, visually-ambitious, 3D-spectacular production design, but, tonally, the flick clocks in closer to Spaceballs than Star Wars.

Pratt stars as a junker turned self-styled space-outlaw, whose conception of ‘cool’ was frozen in the year he was abducted from Earth, 1988. Grooving through the ruins of an abandoned planet on interstellar treasure-hunt, he’s part Indiana Jones, part Han Solo, mostly dickwad.

He absconds with a mystical orb, but when Pratt speaks the McGuffin aloud —dubbing it “some real shiny suitcase, Ark of the Lost Covenant, Maltese Falcon type shit”— the script, by director James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, confirms that its irreverence isn’t mere comic relief, but raison d’être. When John C. Reilly shows up, his casting tips its hat to the film’s self-conception as comedy; and, later, when he delivers a dick joke on par with Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, you’re glad he’s here.

It doesn’t begin that way, nor even with a bang. Instead, Guardians Of The Galaxy kicks off by cramming personal tragedy straight down your gullet, as both back-story-building and cheap sympathy-mongering. Another painful early scene seems like my own personal sci-fi-movie nightmare: a po-faced Pace pronouncing the names of endless imaginary space-peoples —Xandarians, Askavarians, Kree— with a portentous weight; before he chops the head off a hapless henchman to show that, even if he looks like the High Pharaoh of the Blue Man Group, he’s evil as evil can be. But his evil eventually goes beyond growling menace into comic camp: when he later lets loose the howler of a line “Nekrokraft pilots! Enact immolation initiative!”, you can almost see the speech-bubble; and his look of lip-wobbling disbelief in the face of Pratt’s prattish dancing borders on mugging panto villain.

Pratt is the star of the piece, but he’s no singular hero, alienated by great power and great responsibility. Instead, once he lands in a hellish-space-prison —like the big house in Tango & Cash, just with body-paint-sporting aliens in safety-yellow jumpsuits— his rivals for the space-orb bounty turn unlikely allies, a rag-tag gang of misfits gathered together for one big heist (montage set to The Runaways’ Cherry Bomb!). Bradley Cooper voices an anthropomorphised, wise-crackin’ Raccoon like a Joisey guido; Vin Diesel a shape-shifting, idiot-savant plant-man with eco-mystical powers; the pair a pleasing take on the comics’ standard shyster/muscle duo. Dave Bautista is a roided-up killing-machine whose literal literalism becomes one of the film’s best running gags. And Zoe Saldana is a sexy warrior-woman the colour of used green play-doh, embodying that old Star Trek trope in which alien babes are ripe for nailin’ as long as they entirely resemble attractive female humans in body-paint.

Like in a sports-movie, these lovable losers band together at the opportune time, but Gunn never loses sight of the joke: when they do the classic The Right Stuff slow-mo-strut to meet their fate, the raccoon is pulling at his jocks and Saldana is yawning.

In their orbit, and on their heels, are Pace’s fleet of killing-machines, a crew of almost-American-Astronaut­-esque redneck space-cowboys captained by Michael Rooker (Henry!), and a dandy-ish collector named, uh, The Collector, played by Benicio del Toro but looking like Jim Jarmusch channelling Will Farrell in Zoolander. The scenes with del Toro summon the hyper-stylised absurdism of Terry Gilliam, and, speaking of del Toros, the comparison to Guillermo’s comic-book-ish comic-book-movie Hellboy is a better one than any ties back to the Marvel empire.

It may be yet another cog in a billion-dollar branding machine, but Guardians Of The Galaxy lacks the self-appointed ‘seriousness’ that turn most super-hero sagas into unconvincing political parables or tasteless riffs on real-life terrorist attacks. Here, Marvel leaves such baggage back on Terra Firma, abandons gravity for levity; alighting into space with a silliness that’s as breathtaking as the special-effects.