Talk about taking things in a vastly different direction.

While the previous Marvel Cinematic Universe movies to date have all contained – and been marketed as featuring – a fair amount of humor, this one positions laughs as one of the central selling points of the movie. But you know what? It’s the better for it, breathing some fresh air into the lungs of the Marvel movie machine and showing that while there may be a formula, it’s alright to mess with it a bit.

There are a lot of things that I like about this trailer in addition to the general tone it strikes. First and foremost is that opening sequence, which is really how I hope we first meet Star Lord in the movie. It starts out as a clear play on the famous introductory scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But then as soon as Star Lord is questioned and we find out he’s not as famous as he thinks he is, it turns into something more along the lines of Firefly/Serenity, with Star Lord as Mal Reynolds, the big tough guy who’s absolutely not going to get into a gun fight he knows he will lose. And that perception continues through the scene of him being processed by the authorities, where we see his clear disdain for said authorities.

While some have called the trailer a risk in how it “tells” instead of “shows,” I think this was necessary. If they had gone the other direction and just shown a bunch of action sequences without some introduction to these characters, who are not all that well known beyond hardcore Marvel Comics fans, the outcry would have been exactly the opposite, with commentators asking why we should care about the characters before we know anything about them or even who they are.