Big Damn Heroes Aim to Misbehave: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

If you had told me back in 2008, before Iron Man came out, that Marvel would one day put out a movie starring a talking raccoon and a sentient tree as major characters, I would have laughed. If you had told me I'd really like said movie, I probably would have thought you were, as a friend of mine used to say, "a little touched." I would have been wrong.

Guardians isn't without its flaws. The tonal inconsistency threw me occasionally: Lee Pace, who seems to have made a career recently out of playing mysterious characters with a taste for ostentatious pronouncements, appears to be in a very different movie than the rest of the characters. His Ronan dwells in the quasi-Shakespearean grandiosity of the Thor movies (only with more Very Important Declarations and less humor), while the rest of the characters are in a space opera where Glenn Close has funny cartoon hair and a foul-mouthed raccoon adjusts his testicles onscreen. The hero is, once again, a White Guy. And occasionally, like a first date who is really eager to please and gets a little too enthusiastic after slightly too much to drink, the movie tries too hard. A few scenes too clearly crafted to be clever fall flat. A big emotional moment between the hero and heroine feels unearned. And for a movie with "galaxy" in the name and a Big Bad named Thanos, it all feels just a little insubstantial. There is a lot of death in this movie, but you wouldn't really know it from how the movie bounces right along.

I have put these objections up front because they still manage to be only minor problems in a giant shiny space opera that is the love-child of the original Star Wars movies and Joss Whedon's witty Firefly banter. (There is a character in the film whose culture does not use metaphors. This metaphor would go over his head, and he would retort that nothing goes over his head. Played by wrestler Big Dave Bautista, he is tall enough that I would believe him.)

The fact that I have only quibbles with a movie starring a talking raccoon and a sentient tree impresses me. The fact that said movie is also one of the few huge-budget sci-fi/fantasy movies in recent memory to pass the Bechdel test is, frankly, astonishing. Guardians is under no delusions about what it is or wants to be. It is fully confident in itself as just what it is. It's big, irreverent, splashy popcorn fun, but it's also surprisingly affectionate towards its characters, and that enthusiasm sells the story hard enough for me to suspend a great deal of disbelief.

The story itself is incredibly standard: band of ragtag misfits must overcome their selfishness to come together and Save the World. There's a Macguffin in the guise of a mysterious Orb, and there's -- of course -- a villain bent on genocide. We've seen this all before, but not quite with these characters, and they make a world galaxy of difference. Much credit for this goes to the cast, who are -- if you'll pardon the pun --  stellar. I fell in love with Chris Pratt as Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation, and his Peter Quill -- ahem, "Star-lord" -- is a sexier, shoot-em-uppier version of Andy: all wisecracks and boyish glee on the surface, a well of real feeling below. Given my little-brother-type fondness for Andy, watching Pratt stride around in tight leather feels a little uncomfortable, as does the gratuitous shirtless scene already immortalized in a thousand gifs:

Which I will nevertheless put here, because clickbait.

Yet, ripped and 'roided though he may be, Pratt's Quill is still a lovable wideyed goofball with just a dash of Captain Kirk's "pelvic sorcery." You can't take him too seriously, and the movie knows this is a good thing. He is a good foil to Zoe Saldana's Gamora, who is all intensity all the time. This is perhaps understandable, given that Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, kidnapped her as a child and turned her into a living weapon. She and Amy Pond Karen Gillan's Nebula have, as they say, issues.They also have conversations. For a mega-budget comic book movie to have more than one significant speaking female role is unusual. For it to have two is shocking. For it to give them a conversation that does not involve their feelings for a love interest, well...I can't remember exactly when that's happened before. I like it. It should happen more often.

The supporting cast is full of delights as well. I wasn't familiar with Dave Bautista, although given his imposing size I assumed (correctly, it turns out) that he was probably a wrestler. His performance is surprisingly affecting. Michael Rooker plays a bluer (no but, like, literally) version of his character Merle from The Walking Dead, and watching him chew scenery is a pleasure, particularly as this movie has given him such splendid teeth to chew with. John C. Reilly exudes his typical Everyman solidity, bringing some needed gravity (there I go with the space puns again) to the flick. And Glenn Close...well, Glenn Close has always been good at playing inherently silly material straight (witness Mars Attacks! or Air Force One). She looks like this:

Look at those curls. Look at them.

But she comes across as a decisive, in-charge type of gal, a throwback to the heightened reality, fast-talking, whip-smart heroines of the 1940s. Perhaps it's the hair.

The single most surprising thing about this movie is the thing I can't help but keep mentioning. This is a movie starring a talking raccoon clearly based on a Beatles song and a sentient tree-creature (admittedly, with a less than Ent-like vocabulary). They are vital to the story. A moment between them late in the film packs real emotional punch. I want to emphasize how weird this is. Delightfully, gloriously, unrestrainedly weird. Despite the White Guy Hero, this movie makes an effort to undermine the tradition of stoic superhero saviorism that more traditional flicks (Batman, Superman, etc.) participate in. I like the adventurousness I see here. I like the emphasis on emotional relationships other than heteronormative sexy times. It makes me hopeful for future Marvel movies. It also emphasizes just how much of a sausagefest most of the Marvel movies have been up to this point.

Nevertheless, perhaps a sea-change is coming. Captain America: The Winter Soldier also featured a  diverse team, and also gave its female characters more to do than get themselves into peril. Winter Soldier was, speaking technically, a much better movie than Guardians; there is no tight plotting or particularly slick direction here, and the action in Guardians isn't tied to character as much as in Winter Soldier. Nevertheless, these two have been the Marvel movies I think I've enjoyed most so far, and they prove that a comic-book feature doesn't have to focus exclusively on the Doings of White Dudes to be successful and fun. Keep going this route, Marvel, and maybe I won't have to kick too much grass.

I'm just gonna leave this here.

"Ape not kill Ape": DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

It's been said that the mark of a great actor is the ability to deliver even ridiculous lines with utter conviction. (It's often associated with Patrick Stewart, although I have never tracked down the originating statement.) It's true for movies too. I enjoy the wink-wink self-aware irony of ridiculous creature features like Sharknado, which are in on how bad they are. But one of the strengths of this new Planet of the Apes movie is that it isn't indulging in ironic distance. It isn't nudging the audience with a wink and a grin: "Hey, we're doing a movie about talking apes and isn't that RIDICULOUS?" It speaks, as Caesar does, with conviction. It is a great movie.

The signal that this movie takes all of its characters very seriously is that Andy Serkis finally -- and oh, so deservedly -- gets top billing as the movie's star. The apes, even more so than in Rise, are real characters here, intelligent and complex. Serkis's Caesar is once again imbued with a calm, deep intelligence and intense reflection, but there is also more raw power here than last time; he has been leader of the apes for a decade, and -- as he acknowledges -- apes follow strength.

Matt Reeves's direction allows people who go to the movies for big action setpieces to get their money's worth: the scenes in the trailer, of the ape village wrapped in flames and of apes riding to battle on horseback, do not fail to satisfy. But those of us who like our movies a little deeper will also get plenty to think about. One of the thoughts that struck me as I was watching this was "Wow, this is what Snowpiercer could have been if it had been more thoughtful and nuanced." I was disappointed by the broad strokes that movie painted with, how caricatured the characters felt. I have friends who assure me that this was intentional, and I mean no disrespect to those who got something out of the movie, but I didn't. I like my social commentary more subtle. Who would have thought a movie about machine-gun toting chimpanzees would have provided it?

But I'm not joking: this is a fascinating, well-written, nuanced examination of sectarianism. Of fundamentalism. Of reactionary politics. Of whom we choose to trust, and why we do so. Of what it means to be human; of what it means than humans are, after all, still apes.

Importantly, all the tribes in the film have good reasons to do what they do. This isn't The Dark Knight, where the villain "just want[s] to watch the world burn." This is a movie about survival and what it means, but it tackles that more intelligently than four seasons of The Walking Dead have managed. Each group knows they're in a fight for their lives, and each group is right in that knowledge. It's in how they choose to react to it that the movie's best commentary lies. There are characters -- it shouldn't be a spoiler that Caesar is foremost among them -- who are interested in mutual understanding and tolerance, even hard-won respect; there are characters who cannot abandon the dogma that years of trauma have embedded. What makes this movie great is that both groups have learning they must do.

Dawn clearly wants you to accept that the new apes and the humans are not that different, but it chooses to emphasize that through visual and narrative parallelism rather than having a character make an obligatory "Oh, apes, they're just like us!" statement. In fact, several characters don't believe that: Gary Oldman's character Dreyfus repeatedly insists that they're animals, and that belief guides all of his actions. But when the mob of angry human survivors scream in anger and fear, they don't sound too different from the family of apes; when Caesar looks at a photo of his first family, the shot is framed the same way as when Dreyfus does it.

What is perhaps most fascinating to me is how the movie presents characters who embrace an uncertain future and characters who cannot leave the past and yearn only to return to it. When Dreyfus looks at photos of his family, we understand why he is so insistent that his little colony get back to how things used to be -- but we also understand that that past is irrevocable and cannot be recaptured. When Koba angrily reacts to Caesar's assertion that the humans must be allowed to do their "human work" to survive, he points to the scars he bears from his past: "Human. Work. Human. Work. Human. Work." It's hard to argue with him.

To say more might damage some of the delight of experiencing this movie without knowing what exactly will happen. It has an epic feel to it at times that reminded me of Peter Jackson's great battles in Lord of the Rings, but there are also intimate, reflective moments too. I would be very surprised if this movie doesn't get several Oscar nominations, as the special effects and cinematography are incredibly impressive. I hope that a way to honor digital performances is figured out soon, as Serkis deserves an award for the depth and power he brings to Caesar, as do the artists who translated his performance into the features of a digital chimpanzee. Go see this immediately. You won't regret it.