Hey guys! You remember that Black Panther and Doctor Strange movie we have been waiting on for years! You're not getting it! Instead your getting a talking raccoon, Treebeard's cousin and some dude apparantly named after the male genitalia. Yes I am speaking of Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel studios most daring and most non-Avengers related project coming out in 2014. As we all know Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t as well known as Spider man or even Thor. I didn’t even know who they were, and being a teenager I know everything. With such an unknown sci-fi superhero group we have to look back on the last sci-fi superhero film. It’s the film we all love to hate…Green lantern. Now I analyzed that film with a group of comic book nerds and we came down to a unanimous decision….that we should turn this crap off and go watch Firefly. After watching Firefly and arguing over how much we miss that show, we decided to create a list of things necessary for making Guardians of the Galaxy good. Oh and by “we” I mean my imaginary friends and I.
1). A Good Script : It’s the most important thing. If you don’t have a good script then give up now and go make another Iron man film cause you seem to only give the good scripts to him. You need a solid script or else the movie will fail. The script GOTG needs is one that can balance humor and sci-fi action in a rich and epic way. We should get great comedy from our favorite little gun-wielding Raccoon and some big scale sci fi action.
2) A director who actually cares : One of the failures of Green lantern was that the director obviously didn’t care about the movie and didn’t know anything about the genre. One of the many wonderful things about The Avengers is that the director Joss Whedon *aka Jesus according to fans here* cared a lot for the comics and fit the movie perfectly. Guardians of the Galaxy needs somebody with experience in sci-fi or at least ensemble films. The director needs to be capable of directing action, comedy and drama on a large scale. Basically we need somebody epic…and sadly Whedon is busy.
3) We all are anticipating Avengers 2 but please don’t shove it down our throats : One of the flaws of “Phase 1” was that they basically were Avengers prequels. Many characters, events and Easter eggs were thrown in just to foreshadow Avengers. While it’s not technically a bad thing, it kind of prevented the films from becoming great solo films that you can watch without thinking of Avengers. In Guardians of the Galaxy I can’t see there being many opportunities to throw in Avengers references and foreshadowing outside of Thanos. I really hope that they don’t throw in some unnecessary Stark reference *like have Star-lord work for some Stark-funded space exploration program or something*, or have some cameo by a character who we’ll later find out is in Avengers 2. In my opinion they should have Guardians of the Galaxy mostly work as a stand-alone film and have the after credit scene be the thing that leads into Avengers 2.
4) We’ve seen Earth dozens of times, give us something new : A major flaw with some of these sci-fi films is that they tend to stay on Earth too much, Case in point, Green lantern and Thor. Both films tended to focus more on Earth than the fantastical realms that are much more interesting. Whether it be budget or “wanting to play safe and relatable”, it gets old. We know what Earth is like. I hope Guardians of the Galaxy is mostly set in space and that we get to see new cool parts of the Marvel universe. Leave Earth to the Avengers, because we all know people will be asking “Where are the Avengers during all of this?”.
5) Casting is key I don’t need to speak much about this because Marvel usually does a good job at casting. My bet is that they’ll probably cast some young mid-20s-30s actor for the lead and surround him by bigger name stars. I hope that they don’t feel like since this is an unknown comic group that we need to cast all A-list stars in order to get attention. That was the same logic for Green lantern and other than for Mark Strong that didn’t work out too well. Cast actors based off how well they fit the part rather than how famous/safe they are. In fact the only well known actor I want cast is this:
Yeah that’s right…I think Kirsten Stewart would make an amazing Groot.
6) Don’t mess up the marketing : You see what John Carter and Green lantern did? Do the opposite of that. You need to hook the general audience and have them not see it as a joke. The first trailer needs to wow us completely and not have us worry about things like "The CGI looks terrible".
7) Don’t fail A lot is riding on this film. It’s a perfect chance to make a really unknown character(s) popular and give a huge middle finger to WB for getting a sci-fi superhero film right while they failed with a far more popular character. Please Marvel…give Dc the biggest middle finger ever. We all want you to.
If Marvel gets everything right we could get a pretty amazing sci-fi film that will further Marvels status as "King of the Comic book movies". Lets just pray that everything goes well and we dont end up with yet another sci-fi flop.