starlord | the m0vie blog

My 12 for ’14: Guardians of the Galaxy and “the Day I Left Earth”…

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Darren

With 2014 coming to a close, we’re counting down our top twelve films of the year. Check back daily for the latest featured film.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a Marvel movie through-and-through. It comes with burdened with all the trappings that one expects from a Marvel film. Thanos provides a mostly superfluous element that clouds the narrative while serving as an advertisement for a film several years away. Ronan the Accuser makes for a suitably banal villain, like a cosplaying fan who won’t choose between his deep abiding affection for Thor and his love of the Smurfs. The third act is a jumbled mess, one that occasionally loses sight of its characters amid all the CGI spectacle.

And, yet, it works in spite all this. One of Marvel’s biggest problems as a movie studio is the way that it tends to smother individual creators in pursuit of a more consistent project. The studio’s best films – Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 – are the films that aren’t afraid to let a writer or director’s voice shine through. In contrast, the weakest entries – Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 2 – try desperately to drown out any hint of personality in pursuit of something that can be homogenised; rendered safely within the studio’s comfort zone.

After all, Marvel is a company that likes to play it safe. It is a studio that would replace Edgar Wright with Peyton Reed for Ant Man. It is a movie that would gladly have Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spin its wheels for two-thirds of a season so it can wait for Captain America: The Winter Soldier to arrive in theatres. It is a studio that has build six movies around blonde white actors named Chris without a single female- or minority-led superhero film. (Sure, Black Panther and Captain Marvel are coming… eventually, but Black Widow remains a rotating co-star.)

To be fair to Marvel, this system makes a certain amount of sense. It avoids horrific misfires like Catwoman or Elektra, but also does not allow for anything as transcendental and unique as Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan’s work with Batman. Guardians of the Galaxy is very much a product of this system. It is safe, hitting all the necessary plot beats and offering minutes of screentime (and plot convolutions) as tribute to the shared universe. However, there is just enough of James Gunn left in the final product to make it all worthwhile. The film retains a sense of oddness and charm that prevents it from ever feeling generic.

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The Thanos Imperative (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Darren

April (and a little bit of May) are “Avengers month” at the m0vie blog. In anticipation of Joss Whedon’s superhero epic, we’ll have a variety of articles and reviews published looking at various aspects of “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.” This doesn’t exactly feature the Avengers, but a similarly all-star cast of cosmic Marvel superheroes…

Read our review of The Avengers here.

I have to admit, I have really enjoyed the “cosmic” Marvel crossovers in the past few years, perhaps more than I’ve enjoyed the big Avengers-themed events that they’ve been churning out consistently. Being honest, I think part of the reason that the cosmic line balanced these events so well was because it was smaller, and thus easier to handle. You didn’t have to worry about splitting character beats between the main miniseries and the supporting titles, nor did you have to worry about a dozen other comics feeding into (and flowing out of) your miniseries. At its peak, the line – as helmed by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning – consisted of two titles (Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy), and nobody else was playing in the sandbox. Maybe I’m just a little bit selfish, but it’s always fun to watch a writer play with toys that he’s not being asked to share.

Five cosmic powerhouses walk into a bar...

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: andy lanning, annihilation, Comics, cosmic, dan abnett, Infinity Crusade, joss whedon, marvel comics, marvel cosmic, nova, review, richard ryder, Star Lord, starlord, thanos, the thanos imperative | Leave a comment »

Annihilation: Conquest (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Darren

This is the tenth in a series of comic book reviews that will look at the direction of Marvel’s shared universe (particularly their “Avengers” franchise) over the past five or so years, as they’ve been attempting to position the property at the heart of their fictional universe. With The Avengers planned for a cinematic release in 2012, I thought I’d bring myself up to speed by taking a look at Marvel’s tangled web of continuity.

Perhaps it was the novelty of Marvel’s Annihilation crossover which lent the series its appeal. It took some of the more often overlooked space heroes of the Marvel Universe and tied them all together as part of a gripping narrative fighting against the extinction of life itself. It was loud and bright and colourful and frentic – it was perhaps the best crossover that Marvel have produced in the past five years or so. So I was very much anticipating the sequel, Annihilation: Conquest – hoping that it could be another breath of fresh air in this long trek through Marvel’s shared universe. Unfortunately, it seemed that a lot of energy of the original was gone – the series couldn’t help but feel somewhat anti-climactic.