Guardians Of The Galaxy finally has an official trailer, and it’s good. Sort of. It hints at a problem, though, that might be just a little worrisome.
Not the quality of the movie; that actually looks great. It just seems like Marvel hasn’t come to grips with how to actually sell the movie James Gunn is making. Watch the trailer again and answer us this question: Do you have any idea what the hell the movie is actually about?
Seriously, Ronan the Accuser is actually the main antagonist, and he’s barely in this trailer. How about the fact that the MacGuffin in this movie is one of the Infinity Gems? That would have been good to know, too, considering Marvel put a lot of effort into establishing those were lying around elsewhere.
That’s not the only problem: It’s fairly clear that Gunn has handed in a movie that both a bit goofier and… shall we say, earthy compared to other Marvel movies. We seriously doubt Peter Serafinowicz says “a-holes” in the actual movie, or that Star Lord’s organ grinder is blurred out. This might mark the first time a PG-13 movie really needs a red band trailer to get across its tone.
Similarly, it would have been nice for the trailer to actually let the characters say lines and do things, instead of having John C. Reilly tell us about them. Overall, it’s a neat teaser, but of course we want more.
It’s easy to forget that this is unexplored territory for Marvel. To this point, their movies have all centered around one character. Even The Avengers had pretty much everybody in the cast short of Hawkeye and Black Widow with their own movie to introduce them. This is not only a team movie, it’s one based on a relatively obscure property. Marketing is going to be important because there are no fond memories of cartoons to fall back on, unless you count showing up in Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes for an episode.
This won’t be the last trailer, of course, and in truth, Marvel’s got both six months to better introduce us to the movie and can fall back on the fact that Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be unimpeachable advertising. Still, we hope that in the coming months, Marvel lets the movie speak for itself.