The Mixtape That Launched a Superhero Team

The first trailer opens with Chris Pratt in a mask, dancing to "Come and Get Your Love," getting immediately zapped by a security drone, and I was sold—not cautiously interested, sold. Guardians of the Galaxy had been floating around as a lower-tier Marvel property nobody outside the comics world particularly cared about, and then James Gunn got his hands on it and turned the whole thing into something that looked genuinely, defiantly strange.

The cast alone is worth sitting with: Pratt as the swaggering, mixtape-obsessed Peter Quill, Zoe Saldana in green as Gamora, Dave Bautista as the magnificently literal-minded Drax, Bradley Cooper’s voice coming out of a raccoon with a very large gun, and Vin Diesel collecting what I can only assume was a full salary to say three words in various emotional registers. Glenn Close shows up. John C. Reilly shows up. Lee Pace is the villain. It’s a genuinely strange ensemble for a superhero film, which is precisely why it might be extraordinary.

August feels far away. Maybe it’ll be the film of the year. Maybe.