Guardians, Take 2

The movie's lighthearted. That's fine. Men in Black and Spaceballs were both pretty lighthearted. So was the Hitchhiker's Guide film. (Come to think of it, Hitchhiker's wasn't utterly awful in its own right, it was just a poor adaptation of the radio show/novels.)

Since I compared the heroes protagonists to the ones in Farscape (and on re-watching Guardians I realized I made a colossal mistake in comparing Gamora to Aeryn - Gamora's probably the most morally "good" member of the team for at least the first half of the film, whereas Aeryn takes a long time to snap out of Evil Soldier Mode) I thought I'd better compare the villains to the ones in Star Wars as well. This might make my point better. Both films have a Big Bad, a Dragon, and a Bigger Bad.

The Bigger Bad is the most evil guy in the setting, but he's really kinda beyond the scope of the plot. That's the Emperor in the original Star Wars film (he never shows up, but Tarkin and Vader are running the show in his name), and Thanos in Guardians (we see him, but he personally does nothing).

The Big Bad is the primary villain of the story, the one with the plan that the heroes need to stop. Tarkin in Star Wars, Ronan in Guardians. Usually - not always (think Blofeld, or Vader in Empire) - the Big Bad will be killed off at the end of the story.

The Dragon is the Big Bad's greatest asset, either the biggest or second-biggest physical threat to the heroes (depending on how physical the Big Bad is - that's one difference between Tarkin and Ronan). Vader in Star Wars, Nebula in Guardians. (They both happen to be cyborg pilots with familial connections to one of the protagonists, but that's just a coincidence.)


Here's the thing: nothing that Thanos did couldn't have been transferred over to Ronan. Lucas kept the references to the Emperor really to an absolute minimum in order to focus on the huge world he had to build for us. They didn't do that in Guardians because they were so obsessed with tying in the Infinity Rocks.

And I whine about the world-building here for a rather specific reason: I have no idea who the bad guys are.

Seriously, Ronan is the only guy in the film whose non-monetary-gain motivations are clear to me. He and his people (and especially his family, apparently) have been oppressed for generations by these Xandarians. Who are the Xanders? Apparently they're this big multispecies melting-pot-cum-mega-corporation. Are they the good guys? Apparently they killed a whole lotta Kree back in the day. Their police is run by their corporation. How does this work? Is this the sort of enlightened democratic thingamawhat that the Old Republic or the Rebellion stood for? I don't think so.

(Kree, you say)

So we hear that the Xeroxes are the "good guys" and Ronan is a "bad guy." See, we didn't need to be told these things in Star Wars.

Ronan was a guy who felt that his people got shafted by a peace treaty.

It's always a damn treaty, isn't it?

Was the peace treaty fair? I dunno 'cuz nobody but Ronan ever weighs in on it. (Apparently it doesn't require the Kree government to interfere if one of their number goes rogue, so I do have to wonder how oppressive/effective it really is.) Why was there a war? Is there even the slightest possibility that Ronan might be justified? (Wiping out all life on Xanax certainly seems extreme, but nobody batted an eye when Luke nuked the Death Star, which according to Wookiepedia had a population of just under 2 million... including 843,000 passengers. Remember that prior to this, we'd seen Ronan kill one enemy soldier and a space station full of criminals. Oh, and Thanos's Mouth of Sauron minion. Yeah. Bad guy.)

So we get to a point in the film where our heroes protagonists are arguing about where to take the Maltese Falcon and its precious cargo, whether to give it to one super-rich guy who is, at worst, a bit of an ass, or to this megacorp. Yeah, give the doomsday object to the megacorp. See how long the planet lasts. So this film's an unofficial prequel to Wall-E, then, yes?

Don't get me wrong, I ...liked the film, it just had some problems. There is a line between "lighthearted" and "beyond the flashing lights, I'm not at all invested in what's happening," and this film teeters very dangerously on that line.