Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) was the biggest risk Marvel took at the point it looked least likely to take one: characters nobody had heard of, a talking raccoon, and a tree with a one line vocabulary. Peter Quill was taken from Earth as a child and grew up in space as a thief. He finds a valuable orb, and while running from the people who want it he ends up in a cell with four strange criminals. The difference is the register. James Gunn does not take his heroes seriously; none of them is a saviour, all of them want money, and they do not like each other. The music is part of the narrative. Quill's cassette is the only thing left from his mother, which is why he listens to songs from the seventies. Gunn wrote the tracks into the script and played them on set, so the actors performed the scenes to that music. That cassette was released as an album and reached number one on the Billboard chart, the first album made entirely of previously released songs to do so. Groot's single sentence carries the film's whole comic engine, and Vin Diesel recorded it separately in a number of languages. It runs 121 minutes. Good for: superhero films, space adventure, and comedy. Fine with teenagers. Less good for: there are sections that tie into the wider Marvel universe, the violence sits a little above cartoon level, and some will find the humour too light.