Watcher Wednesday: Movie Guardians
Comic-Con 2012 is now a memory. And, no, I did not attend. But, I was following the Marvel announcements and was glad to hear the future installments of movies the Studios has to offer the coming years.
A couple months ago, Marvel was claiming that a movie they had in the works would not be directly related to the Avengers. It intrigued me, and one of my thoughts on this idea was the final solution: The Guardians of the Galaxy. No Marvel movie has explored the space or sci-fi aspects of the Marvel universe. It would be great to venture into how the comics view the interstellar adventures.
But, who or what are the Guardians of the Galaxy? Well, there are two incarnations of them. There’s the modern version, which the movie will probably be based on, and the older, original incarnation. We’ll take a brief look at the modern incarnation just to start the hype for the upcoming film.
The Guardians are the galaxy’s version of the Avengers, to put it simply. Avengers are centered to earth, but the universe is vast. There are always problems abound, and though the Chitauri are aliens, there are a lot more that are causing problems around the universe. The first team consisted of the last certain species, and even came from a possible future of the universe. They 
were trying to track and combat a certain race that was terrorizing several planets. The modern incarnation is more of a response to a huge war that affected most of the alien characters of the Marvel realm. The huge war brought together many of the galactic characters of the Marvel universe, and changed all of them. Marvel hadn’t addressed what was going on with a lot of these characters, and had been changing up the ones on earth. So, this crisis allowed for a fresh start at the sci-fi series that Marvel hadn’t produced for a few years!
So, members of the modern team were actually old Marvel favorites. Even one of my Marvel faves, Adam Warlock, was featured on the team. Another more recent favorite, Rocket Raccoon, was a playable character in the Marvel Vs. Capcom game that was released this last year. The team was a response to how planets were reacting to crises. The team would be proactive. Nova, a character in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon series, is not a member but someone who set up their base of operations. So, though the team does not have a role to play on earth, per se, they have ties to it. The majority of the members have met many of earth’s heroes.
So, why get excited about this movie? Marvel does sci-fi well. I have a couple of comics from the old team, and they always integrated well with earth super heroes. The Silver Surfer has been a hugely popular character from Marvel Comics, and he is their banner interstellar character. Marvel always tries to keep some connection to our humanity with the space characters and stories, but without making the aliens seem too human. So, I look forward to this film being about a diverse team, but exploring problems that the Avengers could never address. Another reason I’m looking forward to the film is that it is super heroes in space without bringing super heroes into space. What do I mean by that? I think it would be way too campy and not heartfelt to have Iron Man and Captain America in space suits on Mars. It just doesn’t fit the rest of the movie series. Fantastic Four was closest, and…uhm…I’m just not going to comment on that too much. This is a way for Marvel to explore planet travel without compromising the integrity of the other films.
Now, there is speculation that it will somehow tie into the next Avengers movie, but I think it can still be tastefully done…
And until next time, have a Marvel-ous day!
Murray the Bellhop has been with DAPs Magic Geeks Corner for several years now. He is a geek's geek. Knowledgeable about many things, he frequently shares his love of movies, comic books, and the comic book world with Geeks Corner.
