Unique spectacle

Rating: 7/10 (20 October 2014)

I saw this film in 3D at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco.... 3D certainly enhances the visual aspects of the film, which already manage to evoke Star Wars/Star Trek while remaining unique and appealing. There are also a host of solid performances in the film, especially from perennial oddballs and villains like Benicio Del Toro and Michael Rooker. The story is engaging enough, though not particularly original.
There are certain aspects of the film that are disconcerting to me.... the main character's chauvinism, to some extent, but mainly the feminized villain and the sadism present in some action scenes. The film follows the trend from bad films like "300" of presenting a villain who is practically a Gothic drag queen. He's neither memorable nor scary. More disturbing still is the sadism in a couple scenes, especially a cantina scene that features a gruesome game involving large aliens devouring smaller aliens (surely the film would have been banned if it had featured a cockfight, but this is the sci-fi equivalent). There's also the scene where somebody tosses the raccoon a gun and the whole movie slows down and pauses to accentuate his "Oh yeah" before he indiscriminately opens fire on a crowd of prisoners and guards. I've never been big on the gun worship in this culture and I wished it hadn't been transferred to this sci-fi film. One of the cool aspects of "Star Wars" was the fact that the good guys fought with "elegant weapons from a more civilized age."
But hell, the movie's fun..... right from the first moments with Chris Pratt's "Star-Lord" performing a karaoke version of Redbone's classic "Come and Get Your Love" using a rat as the microphone, you know that this film is going to be goofy and weird. Which makes sense, since it's director, James Gunn, started out in Troma Films. This film does a nice job of balancing the characterization with the sometimes corny jokes, and makes you want to feel positive about everybody. Also, it has a really excellent femme fatale in Karen Gillan. While a lot of the jokes seem pretty obvious, some are more visual and subtle (for example, the little decorative collector's items that Michael Rooker's character installs in his spaceship).
All in all, it's a big budget re-imagining of the sort of sexualized and campy vibe that permeated Roger Corman's "Battle Beyond the Stars" -- some of these films in the Trek and SW franchises really take themselves too seriously, and this film has a lot more freedom and spirit. It's not a great movie by any means, but it stands by itself as a solid achievement while stretching the boundaries of the "big comic book movie" in a way that, perhaps, George Lucas only dreamed of doing with his "Howard the Duck" film. Which, fittingly, this film refers to. While the references stretch far beyond expectations ("Footloose", really?) they rarely enter into the domain of the outré. This makes the film an offbeat, but accessible, summer blockbuster that should spawn a series of its own sequels.