We Are Groot

Guardians of the Galaxy is everything you’ve heard it is. It’s action packed, funny and it’s full of sci-fi clichés that were thrown into a blender and served up on the rocks with a skewer of fruit and a paper umbrella. So delicious.

It’s also something more. Like any good sci-fi story set in the future – really, an alternate universe – it’s subversively and incisively about the here and now.

[Yeah, spoilers after jump. Why haven’t you seen this movie yet?]

Guardian’s villain, Ronan the Accuser, is hell bent on death on a planetary level. He would make war against the planet Xandar and kill every man, woman and child who lives there. He justifies this on the basis of the hundreds of years of war, death and destruction that have come before. A tenuous truce has been struck between Xandar and Kree but Ronan will have none of it. He will have peace only through genocide, using a quasi-religious weapon of mass destruction that has the power to wipe out all life on Xandar.

Sound familiar?

Our good guys aren’t merely multiculti, they’re multi-galactic. White and green and textured (the best I can do for Drax), flora and fauna, male and female and monoecious (the best I can do for Groot) and mostly not of this earth. They’re not perfect. They’re a sort of Breakfast Club in Outer Space. An interplanetary band of misfits overcoming their fears, suspicions and prejudices, learning to trust each other and finally becoming friends, all to a kick-ass soundtrack.

Not that the choice between genocidal hatred and dancing with your friends is a tough call but it is a choice. The correct answer may seem obvious to you but it’s also clear that some of us would rather hate and kill than get up on the dance floor, even if Come and Get Your Love is playing on the juke box. We see them on the news every day. Those people brandishing guns, their faces covered; they may believe they belong to a group but they are alone. They lack empathy. They can’t share the feelings of hurt and joy and pain and happiness that we all experience. They only have their own hurt, their own pain.

Groot has only two lines in the movie. “I am Groot” is repeated multiple (20? 30?) times. His only other line comes when his sidekick Rocket asks him why he is sacrificing himself in an effort to save the other Guardians. 

“We are Groot.”

Guardians of the Galaxy will make you laugh. If you let it, it will make you cry, too.

In a good way.

We are Groot.

Let's dance.