Was Guardians of the Galaxy Necessary?

Okay, this is a weird question to ask, seeing as how I just wrote a review singing the movie's praises, but there is still a point that needs to be talked about. Yesterday, before I got to see the movie I asked one of my friends who had seen it what they thought about it. His words were "it was good, but felt unnecessary". To a degree, I can agree with that. While Guardians is a part of the Marvel universe, the events of the movie didn't really seem to have much weight on what has happened or what will happen. For the most part anyways.

There are two reasons why I think this movie needed to exist. For starters, even at their strongest, most of these Marvel movies serve the purpose of setting up for the movies to come after it. Some do a better job than others, but if you had gone into The Avengers without seeing the first Thor or Captain America movies, anybody who had could fill you in on the importance of both movies in about thirty seconds. The same can be said of Guardians of the Galaxy. There are two things that needed to be set up in this movie so that when they show up in the future, people aren't scratching their heads.

Warning: Some spoilers to follow

The first, and most obvious thing about the movie to be set up is the character of Thanos. You know? The purple guy that showed up and smiled at the end of The Avengers? Yeah, he appears in this movie, and we get to hear him talk to! While his character is still left in a lot of mystery, he still gets a little bit of backstory. Without spoiling too much (in a section marked 'spoilers' of all things) all you need to know is that he's an asshole, and he has hired the film's villain Ronan to recover an orb thing. What's in the orb? Nothing other than an infinity stone. What the hell is that? It's basically another tesseract. A source of great power but also a tool of destruction, and Thanos is looking for five of them. Seeing as how Thanos is going to be showing up later down the line to fight the Avengers, it is pretty important to get all of this information out there. And to a non comic book reader like me, who had no idea who Thanos was prior to seeing The Avengers, I'm actually kinda glad to be getting all of the important information now.

So, is it necessary? Well, if you already know this crap, then I would say not exactly, though the movie is still worth the watch. If you are like me, who is a fan of the movies, knows nothing about the comic books, but is still looking to get immersed in the lore, then I would say yes, that way you aren't totally lost when Thanos shows up to battle the Avengers, whenever that is going to be.