Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy, to me, felt like a less effective Serenity wannabe. (Keep in mind that, despite being more than a little bit in love with Firefly, I don't even like Serenity.) We had the cool rebel outcast types, the motley crew ultimately ending as an unlikely family unit, the guy in the cool coat, the 'hungry for violence' dudes - and, most glaringly, an unwillingly co-opted/surgically altered human weapon girl. Take away the girl bit and you've got Bucky Barnes from The Winter Soldier.

If I wanted to go on and on with the Firefly/Serenity parallels (and I do, rather) I could raise a very quizzical eyebrow in the direction of The Collector/Mr. Universe... thing, that I don't so much see as feel happening there. Although, Mr. Universe had a (consensual?) relationship with a sexbot(?) and The Collector just had... hot slave girls. That he casually abused. Who weren't particularly well treated by the writers of the movie either. But that's just the beginning of the painfully gratuitous sexism of this film. 

I could go on about stuff that other movies did the same/better before, but I guess that's going to be largely related to the comics, which have probably been around a while and evolved alongside or before the things I could refer to, so I'll leave it here.

THERE WERE SO MANY FORCED CLICHES. EVERY LINE IN THE SCRIPT FELT FORCED, ESPECIALLY THE 'FUNNY' ONES.

I wasn't wildly excited about the character of Drax, who was weirdly underutilised, like somehow pretty much everyone in the film, but the instant he turned out to be a revenge machine bent upon getting Ronan/Thanos (why the Hell did we have two equally boring interchangeable villains to keep track of?) back for the murder of his wife and daughter I really just stopped caring at all what happened to him. If you're going to go for a revenge storyline, you've got to dedicate some time to it, make me care for godssakes! Actually, this applies to most of the characters - most of the film. I didn't find it hard to care about little baby Peter Quill watching his mother die in the hospital... but I found it incredibly difficult to care about grown-up Peter Quill being an unamusing 'a-hole' whose tragic backstory was not compellingly tied to anything that actually happened in the film's main plot. The casual sexism of him being the 'I forgot you were here', user douchebag who beds women and promptly forgets all about them tipped the balance between Quill's being someone I didn't care about and someone to actively dislike.

I found it hard to care about the monotonously deadpan Gamora, though her backstory had potential and I really really could have gotten into a well-handled version of the Gamora/Nebula dynamic. Alas, twas not to be.

With a little effort (I know, it makes me both sound and feel like a psycopath to say this) I found  I could care about Rocket and Groot, though the hype killed most of my Groot feelings.

Guardians also had a lot of tone issues - much like the Hobbit movies, there was little or no logic to the emotional shifts. It felt like someone had just dreamed up a bunch of scenes they would like to see in a film and then just lined them up together haphazardly. There was probably character development happening somewhere, but I found it so difficult to invest in anything that I probably missed the moment. There was no logical reason as to why the characters suddenly cared about each other, after establishing that they were a lot of self-involved/cold/downright nasty people, any more than there was a logical reason for Drax (WHOSE WHOLE PERSONALITY CENTRED AROUND HIS INCREDIBLY LITERAL MIND) to randomly call Gamora (who did not at any point use her sexiness for currency, despite Rocket suggesting she do so in what was probably 'casual sexism No. 345')  a 'whore'. IN THE MIDDLE OF DESCRIBING HIS GROWING AFFECTION FOR ALL THE OTHER MALE TEAMMATES, NO LESS.

Speaking of causal sexism, if you're going to fill your film with lovingly lingering shots of Gamora's tightly clad butt, at least do it Avengers style and compensate with four or five hot hero dude butts. Come on, equal opportunity butt shots. It can be done.

When it comes to pragmatically-breezy-about-collateral-damage anti-hero types, my upper limit is about one per movie. This is probably the main reason that I personally could not love this film. Every character was an anti-heroic unlawful/chaotic neutral, a type that I think needs far more careful handling than it gets. It's all very well to compare Peter Quill to Han Solo, but as a matter of fact, I'd question why Rocket the raccoon isn't getting the comparison instead. He even has Groot, the most Chewbacca thing I think I've ever seen in a non-Star Wars movie. Plus, I actually almost gave a damn what happened to Rocket and Groot.

As pointed out by Erin, it’s a crying shame to hire one of the most beautiful men in the industry and then smear his face into what might be a cross between a smurf and a member of Kiss who hasn't washed his face for a week.

Positives: Aesthetically, the space scenes were beautiful. The soundtrack was OK. The CG rendered characters were, uh, well-rendered. Nice things like these aside, the whole experience was more than a bit disappointing.