Originally I wasn't planning to see The Guardians of the Galaxy: I sort of felt that I'd filled my quota for comic book movies this summer, they're not the first gen Guardians that I'm familiar with, and even then, to a certain extent the Guardians were B-side heroes in the Marvel universe (no offense).
However, the movie hit with a box office bang, so I succumbed to curiousity, recruited a couple of willing co-workers, and headed off to the Scotiabank Theatre earlier this week to see it in 3-D with full Dolby 7.2 Surround Sound.
Guardians is a lot of fun - it's got a quirky, entertaining script, Chris Pratt is a great casting choice for alien abductee turned outlaw Peter Quill (who desperately wants people to refer to him as Starlord but doesn't have much luck with it), Drax the Destroyer was surprisingly funny, Groot and Rocket were better than I expected, and overall, I felt that it almost lived up to the hype.
However, it's not perfect. The plot is more than a bit dodgy, the romantic relationship between Quill and Gamora, the female assassin played by Zoe Saldana, seemed to come from nowhere, and both Saldana and Karen Gillan, who plays Gamora's sister Nebula, are hugely underutilized, both as actresses and characters.
All that aside, the movie made me feel like a genius: it appears that in some ways, I accurately predicted the next five years of Marvel Comics movies a full two years ago, when Thanos the mad Titan made his post-credit appearance in The Avengers.
After the movie, I tried to explain the significance of Guardians to my two co-workers Glen and Terry over a pint, but ran into a minor problem.
I think that it's fairly clearly established at this point that I'm a geek.* As such, for me, Guardians of the Galaxy was filled with hints, references, foreshadowing and Easter Eggs. To my educated eye, it's not so much a movie as a huge teaser for Avengers 3 - and yes, I realize that the second Avengers movie isn't even out yet.
Glen and Terry, although admirable people in their own right, completely lack the background for any of that. (Apparently they spent their childhoods enjoying fresh air and sports, that sort of thing.) Because of that, I actually felt a bit cautious in asking what they'd thought about the movie, I wasn't sure how much sense it would have made without some kind of back story. They both cheerfully announced that they'd really enjoyed the movie, but I couldn't help but be aware of how much they were missing.
As an analogy, imagine going to see a movie about D-Day with two people who had never heard of World War II. D-Day certainly stands on its own as a significant event, filled with drama, excitement, sacrifice, and so forth, and as such would probably be accessible to people who skipped History class in high school.
But think of all of the depth that they'd be missing - they wouldn't know anything about Hitler, the National Socialist movement, the Holocaust, Neville Chamberlain, Dunkirk, the Battle of the Bulge, Pearl Harbor, or Hiroshima, just for starters. (Not to mention the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.)
Taking that as a comparison, Glen and Terry don't know about the Kree, what the Nova Corps should really look like, Supremor, Captain Mar-vell, Jack Kirby's Celestials, Thanos' romance with Death, the possibility of the Skrull Empire showing up (or the Shi'ar, for that matter), the history of the Infinity Gauntlet (seen briefly in the first Thor movie), the other Infinity Stones (seen all over the place if you know where to look), the sad semi-suicidal life (and death - or not) of Adam Warlock, the Watcher, Eros/Starfox, Moondragon, the Magus, Pip the Troll, Gamora's death (or not), and how Spider-Man saves the galaxy.
Not to mention the identity of Peter Quill's father.
I did my best to explain some of this to Glen, and then asked him if he thought that he would retain any of the information until the third Avengers movie comes out.
"Sid," he replied, "I don't think that I'll ever forget this conversation, but I know that I'm gonna try really, really hard."
- Sid
*Anyone who is reading this who hasn't figured that out, maybe you should go to the first posting and start reading, I'll wait.
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