One of the Best Marvel Movies Ever Made
Guardians of the Galaxy was never the most popular Marvel super team, so it was a little surprising that out of all of Marvel's back catalog, this property got chosen for the big screen, leapfrogging ahead of so many other projects.
While three of the five member team look pretty human, one is an anthropomorpic raccoon, and the other is a living tree, meaning the film was going to be heavily reliant on CGI characters, not a good sign on paper.
It's also a hard team to introduce with varying and confusing back stories. The plot of the film has Star Lord (a human child kidnapped by aliens, now an adult thief-for-hire) is hired to steal an orb. The same orb is wanted by powerful cosmic entities, one of whom sends one of his daughters to retrieve it. Meanwhile two bounty hunters are after Star Lord, and another individual who opposes one of the cosmic entities also shows up - and those five end up teaming up as "The Guardians of the Galaxy", even though they really aren't motivated to guard anything let alone any particular galaxy.
It also intentionally features a bad retro soundtrack (something Deadpool would later copy. Yet somehow all this stuff that looks like a disaster on paper - it actually works. It all works. The casting is great, and what could've been a sprawling confusing Dune / Riddick space opera mess actually works thanks to really good editing.
