But I’m not going to talk about it.

Ah, who am I kidding? Of course I’m going to talk about it, because it was really great.

(The following contains spoilers galore)

I would say it lives up to its hype, more or less. It’s a ten tons of fun rollicking adventure which also manages to work in some genuine sentiment and meaning along the way.

Plus, and I cannot stress the importance of this too much, it has a talking raccoon with a big gun and an attitude in it.

That means a lot to someone like me.

And the very end of the movie promises that the Guardians of the Galaxy will return, and all I can say is, they had better, because I already want more.

And that’s after watching a two hour movie about them!

But you see, this movie was the origin story. You know, how they all met and became friends and formed an ass-kicking team of epic proportions. We haven’t seen them in action as the full Guardians yet.

It was like two hours of foreplay!

And they left the door wide open for sequels. Thanos is still out there, and compared to him, Ronan at his worst is a toddler in a snit. Thanos is one of those big time cosmic villains in the Marvel universe, not as big a threat as Galactus or the like, but in a galaxy littered with petty tyrants, warlords, and dictators, he’s one of the worst.

As usual with modern film, I faded in and out during the pulse pounding action scenes. I paid enough attention to get the gist of what was going on, but for the most part I just let the images pass before my eyes.

I just can’t keep up any more. Movie pacing has continued to accelerate and action density has continued to increase, just like it has all my life, only now I am too old to match speeds with it.

And I am someone for whom, at one point, nothing could ever happen fast enough for me. Everything seemed like it had long boring patches between the good stuff, and the only thing that could keep up with me was video games.

And not all of those, either.

But I don’t regret the loss of processing speed, because I got depth of understanding in its place, and that rocks. Things that I wouldn’t have understood at all as a young nerd, I now grasp intuitively. As we age, our ability to comprehend expands and expands, and time seems to pass more quickly than before because we can understand larger chunks of it, and so a period of time that was once divided into a thousand mental time units is now divided into ten.

What else… man, the scene with Rocket pleading with Groot not to kill himself to save them, and then him reacting to Groot’s death, really tore me up inside. Extremely emotionally moving. The guy who did the voice of Rocket (plus the team that animated him) really made me feel what Rocket was feeling. I felt his grief.

All that emotion, and me already knowing Groot is not dead! I have seen enough other stuff with the Guardians in it to know that Groot can be shattered into splinters and as long as one of those splinters is kept alive in a pot, with some water and nutrients, he will come back good as new.

So I didn’t need that cute little scene before the credits where tiny potted Groot dances to the music to know he was alive. It takes a lot more than that to kill a Groot, or at least, Groot.

The movie makes it clear that there are more where our Groot came from, but they are very rare. I like to think that is is the larval forms of a species that spends most of its incredibly long lifespan as planet-sized forests. That would explain why he has vocabulary issues and is maybe not that bright.

He’s just a baby!

Oh, and I will add my voice to the choir of people saying that they did not stick to the idea that people of Drax’s race do not understand metaphors. There are a number of metaphors he seems to understand perfectly well, like “giving a shit”.

Imagine if he had taken THAT one literally.

Plus, wow, they really took a risk when they opened a feel-good science fiction action blockbuster with a kid watching his mother die in the hospital. Most movies would have stuck that in as a flashback after the characters had been established, but nope, kid listens to Walkman, watches mother die, gets abducted by aliens.

The whole Orb thing left me with the same feeling I always get with that kind of thing : who are these ancient assholes who make something that gives whoever has it massive power and then just lets it loose on the universe where it is sure to cause untold misery just by existing for people to fight over?

Talk about irresponsible! Sometimes they don’t even bother to lock it. You hold the ancient Nya Nya of Power, you got powers like Doctor Strange mixed with the Hulk.

Now there’s am issue of What If? I would buy.

So yeah, the movie was a hell of a lot of fun and kept my attention riveted for the whole two hours, minus the time I couldn’t keep up with the action. I suppose that its overall structure is fairly corny, but originality is overrated anyway.

Better a well written piece of predictable, formulaic fiction than the most innovative and unpredictable piece of crap ever.

Plus, it is good to have a big cultural milestone recent movie under my belt. Next, I need to finally watch the Joss Whedon Avengers movie. I am way past due.

God I hate that Richmond Center doesn’t have a movie theater any more. I am two blocks away from it! I would totally go see movies in the theater if it was that easy.

Oh well, VOD is taking over anything anyhow.

I will walk to you nice people again tomorrow.