Let's take a quick look-sie at our characters again.
You have the tough female character who's trained to be nothing but a weapon, who naturally ends up being the protagonist's love interest:
You have the Berserker Guy who lost his family to the villains:
You have a walking, talking plant (whose name is two consonants, followed by a double-vowel, followed by another consonant):
You have a very short guy, rendered by special effects, known for both love of coin and a Napoleon complex:
And you have the human male fish-out-of-water guy who seems to wear a lot of red and loves Earth culture:
This brings me directly to my first problem with (Marvel's) Guardians of the Galaxy. See, in Farscape, we continue directly on after Crichton is whisked off to the far side of the galaxy. We see him grow and adapt to the weirdness around him, and we see the Universe through his eyes. Guardians skips all that because it would rather shoehorn in a pair of bookend tearjerkers. By the time we're properly introduced to Peter Quill, he knows his way around the Galaxy (more or less). When D'argo and Zhaan start flinging words around like "peacekeeper" and "Crais" and "leviathan," Crichton's as confused as we are. We learn what these words mean alongside him. But when Quill starts flinging words around like "Ronan"* and "ravager" and "Yondu," there's no Audience Identification Character to go "huh?" and "what?" along with us.
This is important stuff, not just 'cuz the audience doesn't really like being behind the times on really basic stuff like who's who, but because on some basic animal level, if we don't identify with the Audience Identification Character (clue's in the second word, folks), we're not going to care what happens in the film. So yeah it looks nice and is well acted and all, but at the end of the day it's just a series of brightly-colored images and implausible hijinks.
The second problem with (Marvel's) Guardians of the Galaxy is the word in parentheses. This is the first MCU film that was absolutely crippled by the fact that it was part of the MCU. See, the fact that Ronan is working for Thanos is totally irrelevant to whatever-it-is the heroes are trying to accomplish (which appears to boil down to "save Glenn Close, John C. Reilly, and a bunch of pink people... um, because"). (Come to think of it, Thanos was a slightly obnoxious diversion in The Avengers too, but at least there he had a slightly more direct bearing on events.) And there's this thing with Benicio Del Toro and an Infinity thingamabob... if this wasn't part of the MCU, it'd be a blatant bit of filler. New!Uhura and Amy Pond are sisters except one of them's blue and a cyborg and they're not sisters. (Frelling hell, Karen Gillan was wasted in this film.) In short, Guardians is too busy mashing in crap about Thanos and the MacGuffin Mitten** to bother building its own world. The end result is a scene where all of the characters yell at each other over which improbably-named non-character to take the equally-improbably-named MacGuffin to, and it's impossible to care.
Third problem: When, exactly, did the five protagonists decide they were all on the same side? That kind of just... happened. Without any explanation whatsoever. The characters in Farscape were forced together by circumstance and didn't really become a team until at least a third of the way through the first season. The characters in Star Wars aren't a real team until the very end, when Han Solo comes back to save Luke rather than take the money and run. Yeah, there is some character development in Guardians, and yeah the whole "put the team together" thing is at least attempted with more honesty than was done in The Avengers, but it's still really, really superficial.
In short: Guardians of the Galaxy is better than Star Wars. If by "Star Wars" you mean the prequels. Neither film has a proper protagonist, but at least here the "plot" isn't kicked off by a tax dispute.
*Sat through this entire movie thinking it was "Ronin" and waiting for a guy with a katana to show up.
**As I will henceforth refer to the Infinity Gauntlet.
Marvel Movies:
Iron Man: A+
Thor: A+
The Winter Soldier: A
Captain America: A-
The Avengers: B
Guardians of the Galaxy: B-
Iron Man 3: C+
Iron Man 2: C+
Thor 2: D
This movie is made by how fun light it is. Yes all the characters are 2-D and can be sumed up by "I love guns/revenge/Rocket/my honor/the 80's and distrust others" and yes they only decide to team up and save the day because their collective conscience says so. Yes even to the argument that their universe is just clean Space New York, Space Alcatraz, and dirty Space Hong Kong. The key here is that the movie doesn't take itself seriously at all. The 80's Lover has a dance off with the bad guy. Rocket adjusts his crotch in slow motion. Batista is in the movie. Whoever said this was the best Star Wars movie is wrong. This film just looks at other comic book adaptations and asks "why so serious?". Why indeed.
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