Horribly Overrated and Unoriginal

Rating: 5/10 (28 April 2015)

It's been a while since I've seen a Marvel movie that I genuinely liked, and Guardians of the Galaxy is no exception. From the moment it came out to now even, when its been out for a while, its held nothing but good reviews and ratings. I watched the movie with high hopes, but those hopes were completely shattered several times over by the end.
The movie is extremely formulaic. Its the usual Hollywood set-up. There are good formula movies, but this one isn't one of those. Throughout the movie I could imagine the writers holding a checklist of typical events for a movie and checking them off as the scenes played out.
The plot of the movie is cliché and unoriginal. Find something, oh no its dangerous, get rid of it. But wait! Our antagonist wants it, oh no! Speaking of the antagonist, he's the stupidest thing in the world. Of all the clichés in this movie, he's probably the most cliché. His character design is stupid, his objective is as unoriginal as the rest of the movie, and his character is underdeveloped.
Speaking of character development, these ones have as much character as an peanut. I genuinely didn't care about what happened to them. As someone who believes that character development is extremely important to every story, this was immensely disappointing. If I don't care about the characters, why would I care how the story drives them forward? I felt like their relationships were extremely rushed. At first they all hated each other, then all of a sudden randomly they're best friends. Where that came from I have no idea, but that ruined it for me if it wasn't already ruined.
The character designs are pretty dumb as well. "Just paint their skin a different color and BOOM!, entirely different species!" is probably what the character designers said when designing all the 'different' species. These 'aliens' are even less inspired than Star Wars VI's DJ blue elephant. At least that thing didn't resemble a human so stinking closely. Seriously guys, put some effort into this.
On top of all that the characters are a copy-paste of the Avengers, except now they're in space. I understand that in the comic books that they were sometimes referred to a the Space Avengers, but then that's the Marvel comic books' fault. Its no excuse to be lazy with the characters. Step up your game Marvel.
What did this movie do well though? It was genuinely funny. I found myself laughing a several various points throughout the film, mostly at the character Rocket. The only thing that eased the pain of watching this movie were the jokes.
Copious amounts of CGI and flashy fights aren't enough to warrant a good rating, at least not in my eyes. I heard someone once say that this was the best movie of the decade, and that made me feel like eating his face off. Overall this movie did almost everything wrong. I would not recommend this movie to anyone. Although with the very high ratings and high praise you'd probably still adore this movie and wonder why I didn't like it. But I hated it. This movie has destroyed any faith I had left for Marvel.