Saturday, August 23, 2014

Five Best Friends

Friendship is the most powerful force in the galaxy.

That's the raison d'être of Disney's Guardians of the Galaxy. Sure, it's a movie about space pirates and gun-toting raccoons, and it has an obligatory supervillain, but the real story is about alienation and friendship.

After a bleak and all-to-everyday prologue, young Peter Quill (Wyatt Oleff) is abducted by aliens. Flash-forward 20 odd years, and grown Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is an intrepid space thief stealing an Orb that contains one of the Marvel's all-powerful substances that can destroy the universe. Little does he know that Kree terrorist/revolutionary Ronan (Lee Pace) and creepily eccentric Collector (Benicio Del Toro) have both sent orphan assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana) after the Orb. After Quill eludes Ronan's henchmen, the brutal warlord puts an astronomical price on his head. Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a genetic experiment gone awry, and his side-kick ent Groot (Vin Diesel) get into a fight with Gamora over Quill in a crowded city center, and the four of them find themselves in a maximum security prison where they meet Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), a muscle-bound ward of the Xandarian state who has a vendetta against Ronan for the death of his family. After a relatively easy jail break, the ragtag quintet find themselves the only ones able to protect the galaxy from Ronan and the Orb.

Guardians of the Galaxy succeeds by telling an uplifting, universal story about the power of friendship. Director James Gunn accomplishes this by establishing that the real obstacle is not the run-of-the-mill supervillain Ronan, but instead the protagonists' social alienation. Quill is the only "Terran" in this galaxy. Gamora is an orphan raised in a loveless and exploitive family like an extraterrestrial Oliver Twist. Rocket "didn't ask to get made," and masks his misery with a vicious sense of humor. His only real tenderness is reserved for Groot. The look in the raccoon's eyes when he realizes that he might lose his best friend is an coup of animation. The look in Drax's eyes when Ronan laughs him off is a coup of acting. Since his family's death, Drax's only purpose has been to fight and kill the man he holds responsible. Instead of taking the macho route, Bautista and Gunn let us see Drax's vulnerability. It's the quintet's shared social alienation that brings them together, as Quill makes explicit: "We're all losers. We've all lost something." Only by establishing bonds of friendship can the Guardians overcome either the intangible or tangible antagonists. The final showdown on Xandar is weak by action movie standards, but that doesn't matter. It's not a story about action and violence. It's a story about friendship. It's the kind of story that withstands the test of time. This critic expects audiences to return to over and over again.

Disney trades in uplifting, accessible stories, and Guardians is no exception. Sure, good Disney movies have brilliant animation and wacky characters, but so do many others that have not become cultural landmarks. Disney movies, by and large, succeed so well because they have heart. Guardians of the Galaxy, from story to acting to design, has as much heart as the best of them.

 

 

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