I know this movie is good because I didn’t understand half of it and I still had a great time. The original Guardians of the Galaxy is a film that I saw, and enjoyed, exactly once three years ago. The finer points of any dangling plot threads or unresolved character arcs in it have disappeared from my memory like a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on my kitchen counter. What kept me dazzled as I strained to remember who everyone here is and what they’ve got going on is writer/director James Gunn’s relentlessly clever, eye-filling, retro vision of outer space adventuring. My guess is that Gunn not only digs Star Wars, but he also likes the low-budget rip-off movies that followed in the 1970s and 80s. Here, he gets some of the best CGI artists and technicians in the world to create a near B-movie level artificial cosmic backdrop. It’s not as cheap as the Christmas light stars in Starcrash from 1978, but there’s usually a weird purple mist or some kind of light show happening that makes outer space look like anything but a void. Meanwhile, the character and set designs exhibit a campy opulence worthy of Flash Gordon (the 1980 day-glo meisterwerk). Check out the race of gold people here who are NOT digital creations, but live actors merely painted gold—today, something as simple as that is rare in movies—and whose queen sits on a throne that Ming the Merciless would admire.
The whole film is an eccentric triumph of design—a confident 21st century psychedelia—from a director who seems to miss practical special effects as much as I do. He uses them whenever he can, and when CGI is necessary it’s some of the best examples of it that I’ve ever laid eyes upon. I REALLY want to see this again. It’s so busy that I feel like I’ve missed a dozen brilliant details.
Other directors of comic book movies should stand in awe. James Gunn is the best one in the world doing it right now. A few directors in the genre today are so afraid of being Joel Schumacher that they err on the side of rigid OVER-seriousness. By contrast, Gunn is comfortably wild, goofy and free without a speck of pretension. After all, part of the character of comics is that they’re limitless. There are no physical laws to obey. Anything can happen. That’s why they’re such a challenge to translate to the live-action screen.
Gunn’s figured it out though, with a little help from a nine-figure Marvel blockbuster mega-budget. I guess that’s the cost of a limitless visual canvas on film and Gunn is intent on using every dollar to keep comic book movies weird.