Sensibly, Peter’s chosen alias is roundly mocked by his fellow Guardians in the film—as is his masculinity, wooing capabilities, general leadership, and other qualities that usually endorse newbie heroes in tights. Pratt is at the point in his career when critics would label him an “unlikely leading man”; here he actually plays one to his scrappy, squabbling intergalactic crew. As the title suggests, they’re the real heroes of this kinda-sorta-superhero movie. If Guardians of the Galaxy is an origin story, it is also a satire of the origin story, one that emphasizes the power of the “We” over that of the “Chosen One.”

Every member of the Guardians has known deep trauma. Chris Pratt’s lead Peter Quill lost his mom (cancer); Zoe Saldana’s Gamora is practically dead to the last surviving member of her family Nebula (Karen Gillan); her previous colleague-in-crime Ronan (Lee Pace) slaughtered the family of Dave Bautista’s Drax; and Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) doesn’t even have a family since, as a human experiment in anthropomorphization gone wrong, he’s basically a lab animal.* As for his pet, the sentient tree Groot (Vin Diesel), who knows? He can only string together three words (the innocuous truth, “I am Groot”). Judging by the way he tortures his adversaries—pushing his roots into their nostrils, out other orifices—it’s safe to assume the tree has issues, too.

But in contrast to the rest of the genre, these sob stories don’t bestow nobility. No one’s particular woes are more “super” than another’s. In fact, any attempt at tragedy one-upmanship would counteract the movie’s shaggy, communal comedy. The Guardians aren’t superheroes so much as they are a heterogeneous mix of losers, bandits, and outlaws who know just how unexceptional they are. As Chris Pratt's character says to rally the troops, “I look around and I see losers. Like, people who have lost something.”

The real reason they connect is because they’re all lucky sellouts, not Chosen Ones. The point of their big entrée into superherodom is to scrape together some prize money by selling the mysterious Infinity Stone, this franchise’s equivalent of the equally irrelevant MacGuffin in The Avengers, the Cosmic Cube. The film then becomes a series of encounters that all lead up to the faceoff with the slithery highest bidder. While Guardians welcomes comparisons to Star Wars, there’s no Luke, paragon of high-minded heroic ideals—our heroes are all a bunch of opportunistic Hans, ineloquent Wookies, and cowardly C-3POs. Yes, they’re a strong, sad bunch, but in total it’s a managerial nightmare to corral a team around a single crime-fighting objective sans incessant arguments.

In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy makes the case that a hero’s individual strength amounts to merely a culturally acceptable form of pigheadedness. Take the movie’s portrayal of Drax, a conflicted vigilante with only one thing on his mind—avenging his murdered wife and child. It’s a generic motivation, and another movie might try to use him to bring us to tears. But here he nearly dies in the attempt for revenge, thus endangering the greater mission, to make money. “We’ve all got dead people!” his compatriot Rocket Raccoon scoffs. And for one moment of wonderful lucidity a Marvel movie makes sport of Marvel’s big, profitable trope: the prolonged mourning of buff guys in tights.