Guardians of the Galaxy: 6/10
Please don't read my post 'til you've watched the film: there're no plot-based spoilers but I wouldn't want your viewing of the film to be coloured by my words here
I was really disappointed with this offering, as I've come to expect better from Marvel. The story was standard comic-book movie fare but the dialogue was atrocious. I understand that theoretically, these are almost kiddy films but I think 12-year-olds (the film was 12-A rated here in the UK) wouldn't have struggled too much with more nuanced writing.
I'd never heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy until the film was announced, so for me this was an introduction to new characters. I came away from the film feeling like a lot of their potential had been wasted. I loved the idea of these characters as I was introduced to them but as the film went on we had countless "I'm going to explain to you what we just saw" and "I must tell you my feelings, rather than actually emote" moments and they killed the whole experience for me. Maybe I'm spoiled for films like this by watching well-written stuff from the likes of Joss Whedon, but this is easily the weakest Marvel film since the two attempts they had to get Hulk right (a mess which Joss eventually cleared up, to some extent).
At one point, Karen Gillan's character is spewing some cringe-worthily cliché orders into a communicator and her character just storms off out of the scene. I am convinced the storm-off was not scripted and the actress was thinking "f*ck this shit, I'm going back to Britain".
I tried my hardest to like this film, and I applaud the leading characters for their efforts to assist me in that. It can't have been easy to work with that material, but there were moments when their talent shone through, nonetheless. The actors are almost solely responsible for all 6 points I gave this film out of 10, along with the basic plot. Everything else in this film would have gotten 0.
I commented on the walk home that it wouldn't surprise me if the writer/director (who I'd never heard of before last night) had come to the project right off the back of some straight-to-DVD Disney project. Looking into him today, I find he had a minor role in the writing of Movie 43 and was a writer on the Scooby-Doo films. With those on your record, how you get a big project like this is beyond me. If I was one of the people in a position of power at Marvel studios and I knew what was going to happen here, I would genuinely have looked into a monkeys/typewriters interface system before I let that guy work on the film.
---------- Post added at 11:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:43 AM ----------
Wow, that got kind of ranty, sorry folks.