sageoftruth said:
My only concern is, will they be able to juggle so many different characters? I suppose they can get away with it if the movie doesn't take itself too seriously, which seems to be the case.
Well, the thing about "Guardians Of The Galaxy" is that they aren't putting too many big names into it. Guys like Batista and Vin Diesel aren't exactly "A" or even "B" listers right at the moment (and Vin is just doing voice work). Nor do there seem to be any major talents like "Robert Downy Jr." involved, his role in Iron Man was less a surprise more than a redemption story since he was a disgraced celebrity, but one everyone knew was REALLY talented, so it wasn't a massive surprise when he nailed the role. What this means is that it's pretty easy to effectively focus on one or two main characters, say Star Lord and using the others largely as his supporting cast. With "The Avengers" half the problem was that they had so many big names involved, and even the lesser actors themselves became big names by starring in their own successful movies first. This created the problem of having to seriously play up "Black Widow" for example because it's Scarlet Johansson's character, and of course we have Jeremy Renner doing "Hawkeye" who again should have been more of a supporting character but he has a blossoming action career in his own right, and similar problems.
Basically in this movie you've got three major characters to worry about, Star Lord, Gamorra, and Drax. Drax is more or less a powerhouse who is pretty much a one note "I must kill Thanos" character fully in line with Batista's acting ability. If the guy looks like he can hit on the level of The Hulk (and really I think his physique has that covered) you pretty much have Drax covered, he's there more or less to punch things in some of the fight scenes and to explain why they are just WTFpwned when they fight cosmic entities since Drax is pretty much on the level of Thanos (without the Infinity Gauntlet of course). Gamorra is there to largely do fancy finesse fighting with her sword, and Star Lord is pretty much in the opposite direction except he uses guns (most recently the usual array of sci-fi hardware, but originally he had an element gun that could pretty much create any of the four elements and do things with them). Groot and Rocket are cool, but are cool largely as backround characters/support and being CGI this means they can generally be used to fill things out as needed without having to worry too much about the actors feeling like they are getting shafted, and I mean really Vin Diesel probably only needs to say "I am Groot" about 20 times in slightly different ways and give them a tape of it, and his acting is pretty much done with no matter how many movies they do.
If this catches on it seems like it's going to be easier to work with than "Avengers" was.
My biggest problem with it though is that they seem to be trying to turn Star Lord into too much of a goofus, that could just be the trailers (and intentional misdirection) but that's really not the essence of the character. In those trailers he seems like a combination of a less cool Han Solo and Jack Sparrow right up there with the whole "who calls him Star Lord?... himself mostly" combined with the "infamous outlaw" bit. You just don't see how a guy like this could call himself "Star Lord" with a straight face, never mind being the acknowleged leader of a group like this. He's one of those master planner/tactical types conceptually right up there with Batman in DC. Not to mention for a lot of his career he's worn some rather intimidating looking armor that helped sell the entire thing.
