Countdown to Doomsday: Guardians of the Galaxy
A decade on, the film that taught Marvel to trust its filmmakers is still the high-water mark of the Infinity Saga.
There is a version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that never escaped the gravity of its own competence, a run of perfectly serviceable films that entertained you for two hours and asked nothing more of themselves than that. For its first phase and change, that is largely what Marvel was: a reliable machine that made movies you were glad enough to have seen and rarely thought about again, even the weaker entries clearing a bar of basic watchability. The thing that changed all of that, the moment the studio stopped being a factory and started being a place where movies could be something more, arrives the instant a giant talking tree and a wisecracking raccoon turn out to carry more genuine feeling than most of the human characters who came before them. Rewatching it now, well into a countdown through the entire Infinity Saga, Guardians of the Galaxy holds up not just as a good film but as the load-bearing pillar of everything Marvel got right for the next five years.
Set in a corner of the galaxy the films had only gestured at, Guardians of the Galaxy follows Peter Quill, a human abductee turned petty outlaw, who steals an orb that turns out to house something far more dangerous than a payday. He falls in with a green assassin named Gamora, a literal-minded warrior named Drax, a gun-toting cybernetic raccoon called Rocket, and a tree-creature named Groot whose entire vocabulary is three words, and the five of them are forced into an uneasy alliance against Ronan the Accuser, a Kree fanatic bent on using the orb to burn a planet. Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, and Vin Diesel give the central five their texture, and the film wrings real pathos out of a premise that, written on a whiteboard, sounds like a dare nobody at the studio should have taken.
To be clear, this is a 5 out of 5, and the case for it starts with what the film proved was possible. The defining lesson of Guardians is that Marvel could trust a filmmaker to make a Marvel movie, and that the result would be better for it. James Gunn, who would go on to direct two more Guardians films, consult heavily on Infinity War and Endgame, and eventually run DC Studios outright, is all over this thing in a way that almost none of his contemporaries were allowed to be. Compare it to the competent studio product surrounding it. There is nothing about the Russo brothers' The Winter Soldier that screams a singular authorial voice, however well-built it is, and Joss Whedon's fingerprints on Age of Ultron are visible mostly as dialogue tics rather than a worldview. Guardians feels authored, the way you can squint at Captain America: The First Avenger and catch the DNA of Joe Johnston's The Rocketeer underneath it. Marvel looked at the box office, looked at the reviews, and drew the correct conclusion, which is that you hire a person with a vision and you pay them to execute it.
That said, the film is not flawless, and the place it stumbles is the same place a lot of these early movies did. Ronan is underdeveloped. He is a tall man in blue makeup with a hammer and a grievance, and the film never finds the time to make him anything more than the obstacle the plot requires. It is the one real knock against the movie, though it matters less than it should, partly because the film is canny enough to position Ronan as the immediate threat while a much larger one looms behind him. The other soft spot is a problem the whole franchise developed a bad habit around, the death that isn't. When Groot sacrifices himself near the end, the moment should land harder than it does, and the reason it doesn't is that by 2014 you had already watched Loki fake his death in two separate Thor films and seen Nick Fury fake his own in The Winter Soldier. You learn quickly that death in these movies is a temporary inconvenience, so when a beloved character goes, a part of you is already waiting for the pot to start growing a new one. It does, of course, by the post-credits stinger.
It is worth noting how much narrative groundwork this film quietly lays for everything that follows. Guardians is where the Infinity Stones stop being a vague rumor and become a cosmology. The orb is one of them, the film pauses to explain their origin in the singularities that predate the universe, and it gives us our first real look at a Celestial. More than that, it does the patient work of building Thanos as a presence before he ever becomes a problem, introducing him as the overarching architect behind Ronan, betrayed by the very accuser he was using, and tying nearly every major character back to him. Gamora and Nebula are his adoptive daughters, Drax's family was slaughtered by his armies, and so the entire ensemble is already orbiting the villain the saga is building toward. Clearly Marvel knew where this was going, and the contrast with what came later is stark. There was no equivalent moment in the Multiverse Saga, no single film that built out its mythology with this kind of confidence. The closest thing was the slow elevation of Kang, and the studio cannot be blamed for not knowing Jonathan Majors would be fired, but the deeper problem was structural. Quantumania made the mistake of putting Kang on screen as a beatable antagonist, and the moment Ant-Man can plausibly survive him, the fear evaporates, and you stop believing anyone further up the food chain should worry.
At the end of the day, that contrast is the whole argument, and Guardians wins it without trying. This is a film that works on two levels at once, as a standalone adventure you can hand to someone who has never seen another Marvel movie, and as a foundational text for the universe-spanning story to come, and it never sacrifices one for the other. The soundtrack alone, that Awesome Mix of dad-rock needle drops doubling as Quill's only tether to his dead mother, would be enough to recommend it, and it is nowhere near the best thing here. The tragedy buried in how the MCU turned out is that Disney got greedy with its golden goose, carving the studio open to feed Disney+ and absorb the Fox acquisition before anyone had a plan for what to do with the pieces. Guardians of the Galaxy is the high-water mark for a reason. It is the film where Marvel believed a strange idea could be a great movie, trusted the right person to prove it, and was rewarded with something close to perfect. If you can revisit it, you should.
