Popcorn to the stars

Rating: Null/10 (6 July 2015)

For me this movie is a shining beacon of hope. Because the fact of the matter is that the new millennium has been a dark time in cinema. And I don't mean that the movies have been bad, they're actually pretty good. It's that they dark. They're brooding, melancholy, painted with black, blue and grey, full of themes like fallibility of man, loss, consequences, despair...
So you can imagine what it must have felt like for me walking into this movie, sitting down and watching the first few minutes of this minutes as we set up the backstory of our hero. And it is dark. Like did I walk into a wrong film kind of dark. Where's the talking raccoon I was promised kind of dark. But then something magical happens. We see our hero, Peter Quill a.k.a. The Starlord, played by Chris Pratt, years later as he walks into some ruins. He rotates his shoulders, walks forward, the music start playing, and it's just... perfect. It's the movie telling you that it's here to have some fun, to make jokes, to play funky 70s music and to simply entertain you.
And from there on out the movie is one of the finest examples of popcorn film there is. It's pure cheese, hearkening back to the 80s, where the heroes are cocky, invincible, always quick with a quip, where the sets were colourful, the action had a sense of grandeur and the main goal was to have an adventure.
And yeah, the plot has some holes, the villain is kind of one-dimensional and the only female member of the team still has the least amount of character development and screen time. But those are minor problems for me, and for most of the people, I'd think, because the majority of the film is simply so entertaining.
Guardians of the Galaxy might very well be the best Marvel movie yet made, aside from The Avengers that is. Who would have thought.