"Guardians of the Galaxy"

[Elheru Aran]

They did have a military response, actually, a fairly reasonable one considering the short warning they had. This was essentially a Pearl Harbor type attack, except the equivalent would have been Washington DC. They say explicitly that they don't have any warships within range to arrive in time.

I also don't think they were expecting the Dark Aster to actually attempt landing; as it was, the energy net they created with their ships was holding it up until Ronan unleashed his Infinity Gem powers.

But a.) comic book movie and b.) facilitated the plot. Dumb? Little bit. It's a minor distraction to an overall fun movie.

[Vanas]

Okay, so. Just got back from seeing the movie and I enjoyed it, a lot. I've not read the thread beyond post 1, so I'll just dump a stream of conciousness behind spoiler tags to avoid ruining it for anyone interested.
Spoiler

Okay, wow. That first 5 minutes or so.
The Nova Corps seems to have suffered from a distinct lack of super-powers. On the other hand, that's a fuckload of tiny little fighters defending their city, so props for the speedy response time.
Ravager ships are cool; I really like those designs, not what I was expecting from space pirates or whatever.
Celestials. Freakin' Space Gods, man! Although my nerd senses tell me that one was either the Surveyor or the Searcher (I forget the names), and not Arishem the Judge, who'd make more sense to be reformatting a planet. Also, what would a freakin' space god need an infinity stone for?
Wow. Ronan's minions have been violently smacked by the villain bat. I really hope that non-lunatic Kree use ships that less look like rusty pieces of shit. The Dark Aster looked pretty decent though, even with it's weird rotating helix wings. What.
Ronan himself... Hm. Not overly sure there. Effective, but we don't really find out too much about him andt would have been nice to see more hammer of justice action. And now he's dead. I'll come back to that later.
Thanos looks ridiculous. On the other hand, this is entirely true to the character. We'll see how this whole thing pans out.
I am Groot. (Weirdest typecasting ever.)
Star Lord's outfit looks pretty great in live-action. The full-head helmet may have looked better, but I don't think I can complain there. That and the character himself is pretty wonderful. He reminds me of new-Kirk, to be honest.
Thanos is (unsurprisingly) a terrible father. Also, how come Nebula gets all of those regenerative and obvious cybernetics and Gamora doesn't? Other than Thanos being a dick to one or both of them, which is admittedly a convincing explanation.
Rocket Racoon. More please. Seeing more of his past, even if I know some of it from the comics, will be interesting.
Also, that escape.
Okay, so I've not seen Thor: the Dark World yet, but the Cube and the black goo from that are infinity gems? Huh. I suppose that with Thanos around, that makes sense. Also, apparently they're feisty and they do *not* like the human skeleton. Which kind of explains what happened to the Red Skull, except it looked more like he was pulled in. Also now trying to work out which gem is which.
The Collector's a slave owning dick with a no-doubt easter-egg filled room. Also, wasn't Carina Korvac's girlfriend as well as the Collector's daughter in 616? That raises all kinds of weird questions that I am going to ignore for now. la la la la.
Drax was pretty great and developed surprisingly well. Another!
While the Dark Aster is pretty cool, um. That interior needs serious work.
Speaking of interiors, ew, Quill.
Ronan didn't get much of a fight-scene at the end. I am surprisingly okay with this, given how things worked out. Apparently, just being near a hammer of Purple grants you magic survivability and the like. Pity it doesn't appear to apply to the hammer as well. Purple is fickle like that.
It occurs that Ronan really seems to be quite leisurely about trashing Xandar. Sure, he gets stuck in a Nova net, but you could have zapped them. Or even just cut the engines and dropped a fair way, I dunno. On the other hand, I'm not crazy.
And then he dies. In a manner so very similar to a scene from Metalocalypse that I mentally over-dubbed 'My god, what is this?' and 'These are not men, they have the power of gods!' at the appropriate moments.
I could keep going, but there we go.

Edit: Wait, something occurs to me. We saw every skin colour under the sun except brown, that I recall. Not to be that guy, but... um?

All in all, there were a few spots that I wasn't such a fan, of but given that the rest of it was basically having raw awesome pumped into my eyeballs, I'll let it slide. It's a fun ride and a story about family.

[Darmalus]

Cyborg Ronan leader minion who fought Starlord for the ball at the start was brown.

[Dominus Atheos]

Groot was brown.

[Vendetta]

Also now trying to work out which gem is which.

Spoiler

The Tesseract is the Space gem, the Aether is the Reality gem, and the one in the orb was the Power gem.

[White Haven]

Spoiler

So the blue tesseract is the purple Space gem, the red aether is the yellow Reality gem and the purple gem is the red Power gem? Why?

[Vendetta]

Spoiler

Presumably because they decided the colours weren't terribly significant, and they probably did the tesseract in blue before they really planned it out.

People also keep saying that the gem in Loki's scepter will be the Mind gem, but IIRC Kevin Feige has specifically said he doesn't want that to be the case and will only do that if they can't make it work any other way.

[Vanas]

Cyborg Ronan leader minion who fought Starlord for the ball at the start was brown.

I sit corrected. The guy made an impact on me that would require specialist equipment to detect apparently.

Also now trying to work out which gem is which.

Spoiler

The Tesseract is the Space gem, the Aether is the Reality gem, and the one in the orb was the Power gem.

Spoiler

Which gives me the wonderful mental image that the Cube-powered weapons used by Hydra teleported people instead of vaporising them. There's a planet somewhere with lots of confused Howling Commandos and equally bewildered nazi generals.