Guardians of the GalaxySave

Missouri, 1988. A hospital corridor at sundown. A boy of eight in a Walkman headset is in the waiting room while his mother Meredith dies inside a hospital ward of brain cancer. His name is Peter Quill. He's wearing a varsity-letter jacket two sizes too big and the Walkman has a single mixtape labeled "Awesome Mix Vol. 1" inside it. His grandfather comes for him. Meredith calls him in. She gives him a gift-wrapped package and tells him to open it later. "Take my hand. Take my hand, Peter." Peter freezes. He doesn't take her hand. She dies. The eight-year-old runs out of the hospital into the parking lot screaming, and then keeps running, across the lot, through a wheat field, sobbing in the dark. He stops in the middle of the field. A column of red light descends from the sky. A flying ship the size of a city block lowers down to him. A tractor beam pulls him up. The boy goes into space.

Twenty-six years later. The planet Morag — abandoned, half-flooded, ancient. An armored bipedal figure in a red helmet walks through a temple ruin. Helmet retracts to reveal Chris Pratt's face — Peter Quill, now an adult, calling himself Star-Lord — flicking up his Walkman headset, hitting play, and dancing the entire next two minutes through the ruined temple to Redbone's Come and Get Your Love. He kicks lizards. He uses a small rodent as a microphone. He finds a Power-Stone-containing artifact called the Orb at the center of a vault. He scoops it into a bag and turns to leave. Korath the Pursuer — a Kree warrior with a head-mounted plasma cable — is standing in the doorway behind him with two mercenaries. Korath wants the Orb for his master Ronan. Peter doesn't give him his real name. "Who?" "Star-Lord." "Who?" "Star-Lord, MAN." Korath looks at his lieutenants. He has never heard of any Star-Lord. Peter, indignant, escapes through the temple roof with the Orb in his sling.

Xandar, the capital planet of the Nova Corps. Peter lands in a public plaza with the Orb, intending to sell it to a fence on his behalf. Gamora — green-skinned, the most lethal assassin in the universe, recently sent by her adoptive father Thanos to retrieve the Orb on behalf of Thanos's client Ronan — ambushes Peter in the open and tries to mug him for it. Two seconds later, a four-foot raccoon and an eight-foot sentient tree drop out of a nearby tree and join the brawl. The raccoon is Rocket — a cybernetically modified Subject 89P13, profanity-mouthed, weapons engineer, professional bounty hunter. The tree is Groot — single-vocabulary ("I am Groot"), Rocket's partner of years, capable of growing a fifty-foot trunk on command. Rocket and Groot are trying to collect the forty-thousand-unit Nova bounty on Peter Quill's head. All four combatants — Peter, Gamora, Rocket, Groot — beat the holy hell out of each other in a city plaza in broad daylight until Nova Corps shows up in flying squad cars and tasers everyone unconscious.

The Kyln. A maximum-security space prison run by Nova Corps. The four prisoners are processed through intake side by side, fingerprints scanned, criminal records read aloud over the holographic clerk's voice. Peter Quill — wanted on twelve planets for armed robbery and theft of starships. Gamora — wanted on thirty-six planets for war crimes committed in Thanos's service. Rocket — twenty-three jailbreaks, multiple firearms violations, illegal cybernetic experimentation as a subject. Groot — listed only as Rocket's "houseplant slash muscle." Inside the prison yard, a tall, full-body-tattooed, gray-skinned mountain of a man named Drax the Destroyer recognizes Gamora from the Kree refugee camps where his wife and daughter died at Ronan's hand. He attacks her. Peter talks him down. "I'm gonna die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy." Drax, surprised, decides to honor the alliance instead — Gamora is bait. If Drax doesn't kill her now, she'll lead him to Ronan.

The breakout. Rocket — who has spent his entire criminal career planning prison escapes — explains his Kyln plan in two minutes flat using a chalkboard, a hand-drawn diagram, and the increasingly nervous faces of the rest of the team. He needs three pieces of equipment from the prison's high-security wing: a guard's leg, an inmate's prosthetic eye, and the battery from the high-power yellow lockdown beacon at the top of the control tower. Peter, mid-pitch, walks across the yard and steals the prosthetic leg off the previous owner before Rocket finishes the rest of the sentence. "Oh. Well, that one we need first, actually." Cue heist sequence — Peter on the leg run, Gamora dropping a guard for the eye, Rocket clambering up the control tower for the battery. They overload the gravity field, the prison goes into anti-grav lockdown, every inmate floats in zero-G screaming, and the five of them stroll out the lockdown door to the Milano — Peter's stolen Ravager-class ship — and fly off through the closing blast doors.

Knowhere. A junker city-station built inside the severed head of an ancient Celestial floating in deep space — three hundred kilometers of giant skull, with mining derricks driven through the eye sockets and a brothel-and-bar quarter running through what used to be the cerebellum. Peter takes the team there to meet his buyer for the Orb. Drax wanders off to a brothel. Peter, Gamora, Rocket, and Groot walk into the Tivan Group archive — a museum-collector's mansion run by Taneleer Tivan, who introduces himself as the Collector and whose archive includes a Chitauri exo-suit, a Dark Elf head in a jar, and a young pink-haired assistant named Carina cuffed to a brass post. Tivan sets the Orb on a table and pries it open with crystal manipulators. The white-blue glow of the Power Stone fills the room. Tivan explains, in a rare moment of MCU exposition that actually lands, that the Stone is one of six singularities that existed before the universe began, each one tied to a fundamental aspect of reality. The Power Stone, specifically, can disintegrate anything except a being of comparable power. Carina, who has just had enough of being cuffed to a post by a collector for years, grabs the Stone with her bare hand and the room goes white in an explosion that levels three city blocks of Knowhere skull.

Drax, drunk and angry, summons Ronan to Knowhere via Ravager communicator. He's been planning this since the Kyln. Ronan arrives in the Dark Aster, his Necrocraft warship, with a fleet of soldiers and his adopted sister Nebula. Nebula is one of Thanos's daughters — half-cybernetic, scarred, brutally upgraded after every fight she ever lost to Gamora, jealous of her sister to the point of personality damage. Ronan smashes Drax in a one-sided fight that ends with Drax on the floor of an aquarium, sinking. Gamora steals the Orb from the ruins and tries to escape in a Ravager pod. Nebula shoots her pod down. Peter, in a one-man M-ship, jumps out into deep space wearing his own helmet's last fifteen seconds of oxygen and flies Gamora's freezing body into his arms in the vacuum.

The Ravagers — led by Yondu Udonta, the blue-skinned mercenary captain who raised Peter from age eight after the abduction — capture both of them out of space and bring them aboard. Peter explains the Stone, the war crime in progress, the impending genocide of Xandar in the next twenty-four hours. Yondu, who has spent twenty-six years using Peter as a thief for hire and never once given the boy a fatherly word, hears him out. The four (now reformed) Guardians regroup with Drax (fished out of the aquarium by Rocket) on the Milano. Peter delivers the team speech — the most quoted moment of the film, played as comedy in the trailer but dramatic on the screen. "What should we do next? Something good? Something bad? Bit of both? We'll follow your lead, Star-Lord." "Bunch of jackasses. Standing in a circle."

The Battle of Xandar. Ronan parks the Dark Aster in low orbit over Xandar's capital city, planning to crash-land the warship into the surface and use the Stone to vaporize the planet. The Nova Corps mobilizes a defensive net — every Star-Blaster squadron, every fighter pilot, every reserve unit linked telepathically into a shield grid. The Ravagers join from above. The Guardians' Milano dives into the Dark Aster through a self-blasted entry hole at full sprint. Inside the warship: Drax kills Korath the Pursuer with a Necrosword in a corridor. Gamora and Nebula fight on a catwalk and Gamora wins by a hair, leaving Nebula crippled and crawling for a getaway pod. Rocket and Groot pilot a stolen Necrocraft through the Dark Aster's bridge and start breaking the warship's spine from the inside. Ronan personally guards the command bridge.

Rocket crashes his stolen Necrocraft straight through the Dark Aster's atrium at full impulse. The warship breaks in half. It falls toward the Xandar capital below. Inside what's left of the falling hull, the four Guardians — Peter, Gamora, Rocket, Drax — are about to be crushed by debris. Groot, who has remained quiet for most of the scene, suddenly extends his branches outward into a hollow latticed dome around the four of them. The trunk grows around them like a cage of woven bark. "Groot, no, you'll die, why are you doing this why are you doing this?" Rocket sobs in his fur. Groot looks down at the raccoon he loves and speaks the only words the entire MCU has ever heard him say outside of his three-word vocabulary. "WE — are Groot." The Dark Aster slams into Xandar's main plaza. The wooden lattice splinters. The Guardians are alive. Groot is a thousand splinters scattered across the rubble.

Ronan emerges from the wreckage with the Power Stone embedded in his hammer, raising the weapon to strike Xandar dead from the impact site. He's about to bring it down. Peter Quill — who has nothing left, no weapons that work, no allies that can stand — walks out of the rubble singing. He's singing "Ooh Child" by the Five Stairsteps from his mother's tape. He moonwalks. He hip-checks. He dances directly at Ronan. "What… are you doing?" Ronan stares. "I'm distracting you, you big turd blossom." Rocket, behind Ronan, fires a railgun-charged rifle blast through the head of Ronan's hammer. The hammer breaks. The Power Stone tumbles to the floor. Peter dives for it. He catches it. He starts to die from the power immediately — the Stone burns through any non-Celestial it touches. Gamora reaches over and grabs his other hand. The Stone's power dampens by half. Drax grabs Gamora's hand. Rocket grabs Drax's. The four of them hold hands across the rubble, sharing the burden of the Stone, and Peter — through three other Guardians' bodies acting as ground — points his palm at Ronan and fires the Power Stone like a focused beam. Ronan disintegrates into a column of purple ash that drifts across the wreckage of his own warship.

The Nova Corps grants the four Guardians criminal amnesty. Their records on every planet are expunged. The Milano is restored to fly-worthy condition by Nova mechanics. Rocket, sitting on a workbench, picks a small green sprig out of his pocket — a sliver of Groot — and plants it in a pot of soil. The sprig sprouts. By the time the Milano leaves Xandar's atmosphere, the sprout is a foot tall and has tiny baby-Groot eyes. He's coming back. The film ends on the four (and a half) Guardians flying out of Xandar's gravity well to Awesome Mix Vol. 1's Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Peter Quill — for the first time in the film — opens the wrapped present his mother gave him on her deathbed. It's Awesome Mix Vol. 2. The next mixtape. The one that becomes the soundtrack to Guardians Vol. 2 (2017) in three years.

Mid-credits scene: baby Groot is dancing in a flowerpot on the Milano's bridge while Drax cleans a sword behind him and doesn't notice. Groot stops dancing every time Drax turns around. Post-credits: the Collector, alive but injured, is drinking a cocktail in the ruins of his collapsed archive. A dog in a Soviet space helmet trots past. He turns to a feathered creature sitting on a stool next to him — Howard the Duck, three-foot-tall, cigar in his beak. Howard takes a sip of his drink. "What are you looking at, quack-quack?" Cut to black.