‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Photo Revelas Team Lineup

Marvel’s little big-budget space oddity of a superhero movie Guardians of the Galaxy has a new official photo out. The image comes courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter and depicts the titular team of intergalactic superheroes: Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Starlord (Chris Pratt), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista0), and Groot (recently revealed to be played by Vin Diesel)…in a police lineup! What? Actually, this shouldn’t look out of place to anyone who’s read the comic books the film is based on. As you nerds out there know, the Guardians of the Galaxy (the team, not the movie) started out as a group of fugitives assembled by the Kree – think the ancient Roman Empire, but with hyper-advanced aliens – for extremely dangerous missions they wouldn’t dare risk on members of their own species.

This shot of the Guardians demonstrates a couple of things that should set them, and their movie apart from that other, more popular Marvel superhero team, The Avengers. One: the grit. Aside from the Hulk, there’s little debate about whether any of the Avengers are out and out heroes. Most of the Guardians though, stretch the term “hero” a bit far. Drax for instance, fought numerous superheroes in the past, and is known to kill people with his bare hands. In the comics, Gamora is the granddaughter of Thanos – the grinning villain revealed at the end of The Avengers.

Starlord isn’t the least bit evil, but if the movie sticks to his comic book past, it’s quite troubled – without giving too much away, it involves the deaths of millions.

Two: aside from Starlord, none of the Guardians are human. Two of them don’t even look human. Which means it will fall on the strength of the script and the actors’ performances to make the characters relatable and appealing to what will presumably be a mostly human audience.

Guardians of the Galaxy recently came in as our most anticipated movie in August of 2014. It’s due to hit theaters August 1.