While the Marvel comicbook Guardians Of The Galaxy was a
memorable combination of space opera and superhero action, James Gunn’s movie rejects
the original comic’s ‘cosmic Avengers’ - a team of genetically adapted 31st
century humans, in favour of a newer but dumber generation, in a line-up of
supposedly media-friendly stereotypes. Although it’s good to see a blockbuster
‘space movie’ that is not just another pointless addition to the Star Trek
franchise, or an undesirable continuance of the overworked Star Wars universe,
it’s a shame that Disney fare has been crudely shoehorned into a Marvel
venture, and I suspect that many fans of previous space operas, Farscape and
Firefly (TV shows that were frightfully over-rated), might enjoy this GOTG
movie far more than I did.
Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon are primary influences on this
lone-Earthman-lost-in-space adventure, that’s hampered by its affectation for
1980s references (Kevin Bacon was a cultural hero in Footloose?) with a mix-tape
batch of tiredly unimpressive (but, probably, easy to acquire the copyright
clearances for?) pop songs that can hardly be considered ‘classic rock’
exemplars. They add no dramatic spirit or sense, or even faddish
value, to the interstellar warfare scenario that desperately needed some social
concern or political relevance in accessible, if metaphorical, terms.
As green Gamora, a weaponised slave ‘daughter’ of death
deity Thanos (introduced in Avengers Assemble), Zoe Saldana can do nothing more
than overact and strike blank-faced action poses. As blue Nebula, former Doctor Who starlet Karen Gillan so easily out-classes Saldana, especially in
their scenes together, that it’s embarrassing to note the misjudged hierarchy
of casting choices. Champion wrestler Dave Bautista makes a fist of vengeful
Drax the Destroyer, but never manages to grant his intentionally stilted dialogue
the right measure of tongue-in-cheek appeal. Glenn Close plays Nova Prime
(leader of the star cops) as if she’s got bills to pay and is having a bad hair
daze. Michael Rooker makes noble savage Yondu into a blue-skinned variant of The
Walking Dead’s redneck Merle.
Apart from the welcome presence of Benicio del Toro, as the
creepy Collector, there is very little here that is appropriately uncanny with
eerie alien improbability. Cheap TV show Lexx boasted rather more genuinely
imaginative and witty use of its sci-fi weird aspects, and even the Riddick movies had a greater dosage of astronomical and inter-planetary strangeness.
Now if only they could hurry up and remake Blake’s 7 on such a widescreen scale
as this, that might offer us a lot more chills, and real fun!
