This piece contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Guardians Of The Galaxy.

The McGuffin all the characters in Guardians Of The Galaxy are chasing is an “Infinity Stone,” one of six fragments of a vanished universe that supposedly contains limitless power. This little purple gem is so potent that it can’t even be held by human hands; after it’s removed from its protective case, one character is destroyed simply by touching it, and the ensuing explosion vaporizes a large portion of a space station.

After 100 minutes of chases, fights, space battles, more fights, explosions, and space battles, Guardians comes down to a simple stand-off between an alien despot (Lee Pace’s Ronan The Accuser), and the Guardians Of The Galaxy—human thief Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), alien assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), knife-wielding warrior Drax (Dave Bautista), people-clothes-wearing raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper), and sentient tree Groot (Vin Diesel). Even before gaining control of the Infinity Stone, Ronan possessed the strength of a god. Now he’s basically omnipotent and invulnerable. The Guardians, on the other hand, are a quintet of outcasts, misfits, and weirdos with blasters and knives. They shouldn’t stand a chance. But they have an ace in the hole.

Against all odds, the Guardians drum up a distraction, and Star-Lord grabs the Infinity Stone from Ronan. It should kill him—but his newfound friends come to his aid, and share the burden with him. Together, they’re able to contain its power long enough to defeat Ronan and reseal the stone in a secure orb. It’s the perfect climax for Guardians Of The Galaxy, not only because it’s exciting and funny, but also because it encapsulates the key reason why the rest of the film works so well. In this scene, and in Guardians as a whole, the special effects are no match for the people surrounding them.

To their credit, Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn and his team of visual-effects artists have assembled an impressive collection of offbeat science-fiction images. There’s a fleet of space cops whose ships can combine to create a protective energy web, and a space station housed in the severed head of a long-dead alien. Fully computer-generated characters like Rocket and Groot bear convincing details; the individual whiskers on Rocket’s snout flex and shift with his expressions, while the vines and twigs on Groot’s neck and back twist and turn with uncanny life. Even the backgrounds—derelict planets and shimmering nebulae—leap off the screen with vibrant beauty.

But the film still shines brightest in its most human moments: Drax misunderstanding Star-Lord’s Earth slang; Gamora hearing pop music for the first time; Star-Lord rescuing Gamora from death in the vacuum of space, probably at the cost of his own life; Rocket’s rage at being called “vermin.” Guardians has quotable lines spoken by characters with great, rich personalities. And it has an incredibly deep supporting cast, with small but crucial roles for hugely talented actors like Glenn Close, John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Rooker, Peter Serafinowicz, and Benicio Del Toro. Some of them might have taken a job in a Marvel movie for the money, but every one of them earned their paychecks with committed, engaging performances. If, as the old expression goes, directing is 90 percent casting, then Guardians Of The Galaxy is at least 90 percent perfect.

Scanning a list of the summer’s best blockbusters reveals Guardians isn’t an anomaly in this regard. Although this is supposedly the time of year when the cinema loses every drop of its humanity, the past few months have yielded a surprisingly strong crop of good actors doing good work, even amid green screens and massive setpieces. Just last week, Brett Ratner’s Hercules assembled a group of thespians charismatic enough to rival Guardians’, including Dwayne Johnson, Ian McShane, John Hurt, Rufus Sewell, Reece Ritchie, Joseph Fiennes, and Peter Mullan. Hercules was sold as an action movie about a demigod, but many of its highlights were mortal in nature, and took place off the battlefield: Sewell busting Johnson’s chops about his newfound moral compass, Ritchie inspiring crowds of soldiers with tales of Hercules’ (mostly fictitious) heroism, McShane’s oracle predicting his own death over and over. Hercules’ battle scenes are technically proficient, but the reason they work as well as they do is because Ratner and his cast actually created characters worth caring about before putting them all in jeopardy.

The same goes for X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which almost had too many characters worth caring about, along with too many good actors doing good work; a few even got left on the cutting-room floor. But the somber regret provided by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, and the mental chess games between James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, enriched all the film’s time-travel turmoil. Edge Of Tomorrow is similarly buoyed by strong work from Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—and a cast that includes Brendan Gleeson, Bill Paxton, and Noah Taylor. In both of those films, the primary villain is technology—mutant-hunting robots and cybernetic aliens, respectively—and, like Guardians, victory is only possible through hard work and team effort, values reflected in the films’ first-rate ensembles.

On the other side of the spectrum, the films this summer that put technology ahead of humanity suffered as a result. Few 2014 blockbusters had more impressive visuals than Transformers: Age Of Extinction, and few generated less excitement or interest, thanks to a cast that was mostly treated like living props to be shunted around the globe in one enormous chase after another. Compare the specificity of Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord in Guardians—his stolen childhood, his haunting memory of his late mother, his pop-culture references that cut off right at the date he was kidnapped from Earth—to the mess that is Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager—an inventor who looks like a weightlifter, a Texan who sounds like he’s from Boston, and a father who wants to protect his daughter at all costs, who makes her rappel from a spaceship thousands of feet in the air, without any kind of safety harness—and the difference is obvious.

For all Godzilla’s badass monster fights, the movie around them also felt lacking, for much the same reason: It all but abandoned its best characters and actors, killing some off early, and sending others to hide in fallout shelters once Godzilla and the other giant monsters started to rampage across the American West. That left the broad but bland shoulders of Aaron Taylor-Johnson to carry all the film’s flesh-and-blood drama—which, in the end, didn’t amount to very much.

In other words, credible CGI is nothing without credible human emotions. Godzilla was cool, but cool only goes so far. Godzilla may wind up making more money in theaters than Guardians Of The Galaxy, and the clip of Godzilla using his fire breath for the first time is sure to become popular on YouTube. But which movie, do you suppose, will be the one the children of this generation can recite by heart in 20 years?

Earlier this year, David Ehrlich defended Godzilla in The Dissolve, calling it “the first post-human blockbuster.” He meant that as a compliment, and he made some compelling arguments in favor of the film as a story of mankind’s inadequacy in the face of nature’s wrath. In one sense, Guardians Of The Galaxy is “post-human” as well; after all, it contains only a single “human” character. But Guardians also offers a sort of rebuttal to the idea that the blockbuster has evolved beyond mortal concerns. All the heroes, even the one that looks like Wrigley Field’s outfield wall come to life, are wonderfully, tragically flawed, and full of humor and charm (albeit not always the most diverse vocabularies). And the film overall is infinitely richer for it.

Just as you might include a ruler in a photograph to show scale, the characters in summer movies are the audience’s unit of measure for madness around them. If their characters are out of whack—too big, too boring—they throw off the ratios of everything around them as well. This year’s most satisfying summer movies have proved that a good cast with irresistible characters really is the most powerful force in the cinematic universe. Viewers may go to blockbusters for spectacle, but these movies’ biggest pleasures remain some of their simplest and smallest. Or, to put it another way, I am Groot.