Spoilers and such
We start off with a moody kid in 1988 listening to a Walkman as his mother dies in a room nearby. He goes outside for a cry and is taken up by a very large spaceship. 26 years go by and we meet our hero on a deserted planet where he is doing a bit of looting and dancing to some classic rock. We can assume that he’s been doing this sort of thing for a while. He steals a shiny metal orb and kills a number of people who try to stop him. He calls himself Star-Lord. In classic Captain Kirk fashion, he has a colorful and scantily clad woman hidden in his ship that he forgot was there.
Soon enough, he ends up in the company of a band of random fellow travelers. A talking raccoon, a not very talkative tree, a very literal minded bald fellow, and another colorful woman for our hero to fall for. They then find themselves in jail, and then doing battle with a sort of demigod who wants to do a bit of genocide.
The story is standard issue nobody overcomes impossible odds to save the galaxy stuff. Endless unlikely and simply impossible things happen and our heroes-surprise, surprise-save the day.
Like pretty much every movie made in the last twenty years or so, Guardians of the Galaxy is a CGI-fest filled with all kinds of way cool looking effects. The only difference between the effects seen here and the ones seen, in say, Harold Lloyd’s 1923 Safety Last, was that you actually had some feeling that Harold might be in some kind of danger. There was never any sense of danger here, though there were one or two emotional moments where it sort of looked like someone might be in some kind of danger. Of course, the only people who do die are either bad guys or random strangers.
Guardians of the Galaxy was a fun film and there were a few laughs to be had here and there. It was nice to spot Stan Lee in his cameo as a dirty old man.
