Guardians of the Galaxy: a bit of good; a bit of bad; a bit of both.
Perhaps I went in with too high expectations - I am a great fan of the current comics interpretation of the Guardians - but after the over the top critical reaction to Iron Man 3 (which I really, really disliked, primarily because of a dreadful script devoid (we are told) of any ad libs by RDJ that took superb material and debased it) I do not entirely trust critic consensus on superhero movies. I did, however, note that the 92% Fresh rating was accompanied by a 7.7 out of 10 rating, unusually low for a movie with such a high percentage Fresh.
Fans whose opinion I have respect for also dissented a tad ("extremely violent", "sexist and racist" - both of which are justifiable commentary.)
So. First of all, the good. The design. Oh, Ghod, the design. And the SFX (with a couple of noticeable exceptions I'll go into in a moment.) This movie went immediately onto my 'buy this on blu-ray' list. Superb world building. Groot was splendid (and kudos to Vin Diesel here) but Rocket was just not quite lifelike enough. On the other hand, there was some really bad make up on some of the background characters.
It was funny, but not as funny as I had been led to expect. Certainly not as witty as either The Avengers/Avengers Assemble, or Captain America: the Winter Soldier or the first two Iron Man movies. There were some lovely moments, some of them spoilt by the sound mixing. (Bradley Cooper's dialogue as Rocket was often close to inaudible.)
The acting was excellent and the major characters all shone at various points.
The action sequences were also good, and most of them did not go on too long. (It was generally the hand to hand sequences that got a little boring after a while.)
And I loved the music soundtrack.
But... I found myself sitting back and analysing, rather than engaging. Marvel references were thrown out like confetti and some of the plot must have been hard to follow without a solid grounding in Marvel comics history. Thank the Supreme Intelligence for them realising that they had one daddy issue too many and changing and backgrounding Peter's history.
A fun way to spend a couple of hours without using a single brain cell. In a world where most summer blockbusters take themselves (and their FX) far too seriously, this is extremely refreshing. And Groot and Rocket were splendid. They've been my favourites for some time.
Fans whose opinion I have respect for also dissented a tad ("extremely violent", "sexist and racist" - both of which are justifiable commentary.)
So. First of all, the good. The design. Oh, Ghod, the design. And the SFX (with a couple of noticeable exceptions I'll go into in a moment.) This movie went immediately onto my 'buy this on blu-ray' list. Superb world building. Groot was splendid (and kudos to Vin Diesel here) but Rocket was just not quite lifelike enough. On the other hand, there was some really bad make up on some of the background characters.
It was funny, but not as funny as I had been led to expect. Certainly not as witty as either The Avengers/Avengers Assemble, or Captain America: the Winter Soldier or the first two Iron Man movies. There were some lovely moments, some of them spoilt by the sound mixing. (Bradley Cooper's dialogue as Rocket was often close to inaudible.)
The acting was excellent and the major characters all shone at various points.
The action sequences were also good, and most of them did not go on too long. (It was generally the hand to hand sequences that got a little boring after a while.)
And I loved the music soundtrack.
But... I found myself sitting back and analysing, rather than engaging. Marvel references were thrown out like confetti and some of the plot must have been hard to follow without a solid grounding in Marvel comics history. Thank the Supreme Intelligence for them realising that they had one daddy issue too many and changing and backgrounding Peter's history.
A fun way to spend a couple of hours without using a single brain cell. In a world where most summer blockbusters take themselves (and their FX) far too seriously, this is extremely refreshing. And Groot and Rocket were splendid. They've been my favourites for some time.