Jedi by Knight

Hopefully you are not actually reading this post.  Hopefully, because it is Saturday night, you are at a movie theater, watching Guardians of the Galaxy.

I had never even heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy, but when that first trailer came out I knew I absolutely had to see it.

I would say I can’t remember when I was this excited for a movie, but I can: it was CA: The Winter Soldier back in April.  And just as that movie lived up to my expectations, GotG similarly delivered exactly what I wanted/needed/expected.

I was laughing (and dancing–good thing we were at the drive-in) from the opening scenes.  The humor mainly comes from the personalities of the characters playing off each other, which is exactly how it should be.  Overall the acting was great, especially the two voice actors, Bradley Cooper as Rocket and Vin Diesel as Groot.  I enjoyed Chris Pratt’s voice work in The LEGO Movie, but here he really proved himself as a leading man with Star-Lord.  Dave Bautista (Drax) was probably the weak spot of the Guardians, and even he was quite enjoyable, especially as the movie went on.

The action was great, too.  I especially loved the space battles and the three-way fight with Gamora, Star-Lord, and Rocket/Groot.  I also really liked that there was no heavy love story, just some light flirtation (with decent chemistry).

I heard some other people online say this, and I agree: the villains could have been a little better.  Villain screen time was the only time the movie dragged at all.  Nebula was slightly overacted and slightly underused (though she looked awesome).  Ronan was quite flat.  Thanos only appeared briefly, but I think I would have liked it better if they had only shown the back of his throne, or only his face for a brief moment, like in the teaser at the end of Avengers.  More build up for later in the series that way.

My husband felt that GotG wouldn’t hold up to repeated viewings, but I think it will.  It just takes so much joy in all the things we love about space adventures and superhero movies.

Speaking of repeated viewings, the drive-in had a double feature, showing Winter Soldier after GotG, so I got to see that for the second time (3rd time for my husband).  Even knowing the HYDRA twist, it was still a great movie.  It’s a very different movie from GotG, but they each did their own thing well.  If Marvel can keep putting these kinds of movies out, they will keep printing money for sure.

Two last things: the GotG post-credit scene was cute, but not *really freaking awesome* like Winter Soldier‘s was.  But that’s because I’m a Scarlet Witch fan and don’t care about GotG’s revealed character.  And can anyone tell me which Infinity Stones from the movies match up with which Gems from the comics?  I don’t know enough about them to form opinions.  They seem to be color coding them, but I don’t think they match the colors from the comics.