"Guardians Of The Galaxy"

If Super indicated that James Gunn doesn’t understand satire, Guardians Of The Galaxy proves that he at least understands nostalgia. With its “ragtag band of adventurers” premise, its pivotal stop at a lawless den of crooks and its conclusive spaceship battle, along with its tease of a greater evil lurking behind its foremost villain, Guardians Of The Galaxy’s plot beats, structure and setting echo those of the original Star Wars almost perfectly all while having a distinctly different plot. What it sorely lacks that Star Wars possessed by nature, however, is the timeless call to adventure and sense of wonder common to all great epic adventures.  If Star Wars has often been used as the quintessential example of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, it’s because it tapped into something deep within the heart of great stories and fairytales that stimulate our collective imagination, helped by a fairly modest budget by contemporary standards and George Lucas’s Kurosawan influences.

In today’s cooler, more knowing and ironic world, such sincerity is rare and it sadly isn’t present here, because this isn’t the vision of a young auteur but rather that of the same commercially-driven corporate forces that later corrupted him. Where George Lucas made Star Wars mostly for himself, James Gunn here is in the service of a multi-franchise media empire. It explains part of the film’s calculated appeal to nostalgia, playful tone and quasi-slavish adherence Star Wars’s plot beats: The same kids who grew up with Star Wars are now running Hollywood and constitute much of its audience.

That isn’t to say Guardians Of The Galaxy is a bad film at all. The nostalgia and playfulness work at their best when combined together, usually in the form of lead protagonist Peter “Starlord” Quill (Chris Pratt), a character whose very conception – a boy from the 1980s abducted by aliens – flatters a specific target audience. What could have been a generic charming rogue becomes the very incarnation of wish-fulfillment, dancing and joking along to fantastical situations with a mixtape of 70s-80s pop music that fills most of the soundtrack to considerably better effect than Tyler Bates’ derivative score. Much like the inventively designed worlds they evolve in (certainly a step above the blandness of the Thor films), the chemistry he shares with his colourful co-stars compensates for a certain excessive sense of familiarity. No doubt taking cues from geekmeister Joss Whedon, Gunn draws most of his film’s strengths from the comical bickering and verbal jousting between his characters. A pity that, like the story they’re inscribed in, this self-made family cannot help but call back to its superior models. In Whedon’s short-lived TV series classic Firefly as well as Bioware’s wonderful Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic and Mass Effect video games, the disparate crew reflected a multiplicity of cultures and points of view that Guardians Of The Galaxy, too busy with the plot imperatives, doesn’t give itself time to build.