Jul 31, 2014
What if Han Solo was the front-and-center star of the original “Star Wars” movies, and what if his team consisted of a talking raccoon, a mutant tree-man, a hulking giant and a hot green woman, instead of a Wookie named Chewbacca, a couple of robots and a clueless brother-sister duo? That’s basically the question asked by the new movie “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and the answer is that you’d still have a pretty good time at the movies, if not a timeless classic.
“Guardians” is perhaps the summer’s most original movie, and I’ll give the folks at Marvel and Disney studios credit for taking a chance on such a big-budget ($170 million) mix of sci-fi action and comedy. The risk really comes from the fact that “Guardians” has no big movie stars like Robert Downey Jr. or Jeremy Renner in its cast, centering instead on the charms of veteran TV actor Chris Pratt of “Parks and Recreation,” with Bradley Cooper merely providing the voice of Rocket Raccoon and Vin Diesel serving almost as an in-joke as the voice of the grunting tree-man, Groot, while Zoe Saldana plays the green chick after establishing her bona fides playing a hot blue woman in “Avatar.”
Pratt stars as a guy named Peter Quill, who has given himself the nickname “Star-Lord” and loves to brag about it to everyone in sight. The film opens with Peter as a young boy watching his mother die in a hospital, before he runs outside only to find himself inexplicably zapped by a spaceship and hurtled into the heavens.
Now an adult, he is a junk collector working with a group called the Ravagers in search of a metallic orb that is wanted badly by a diverse group of creatures aside from his boss, Yondu (Michael Rooker). The green woman, Gamora, is first on that list, as a highly trained assassin under orders from an evil overlord named Thanos to grab the orb at all costs.