How Guardians of the Galaxy Tricks You Into Feeling Things

I've heard the news: Marvel is bringing back both the Russo brothers and even Robert Downey Jr. That is apparently what Co-President of Marvel Studios, Louis D'Esposito meant when he said that they had "learned their lesson" after a disastrous 2023 and were going to get their output back on track ...

As is often the case in Hollywood, Marvel has deflected to the conclusion that what actually made their movies great wasn't carefully finessed storytelling, but a laundry list of factors, like you can just plug Robert Downey Jr. into whatever movie, and that movie will strike gold. There are obviously a number of developments at work both within larger Hollywood and Marvel specifically that are feeding into Marvel at present, such that I can't really begin to guess whether 2025 will be the year that Marvel makes its grand comeback, or if bringing back not-Iron-Man will have anything to do with it. But I would be remiss not to acknowledge that this retreat into the arms of Mr. Downey Jr. reads like a level of desperation that could have only been anticipated by Marvel's most dutiful detractors ...

But while we're here, I guess it might be worth reflecting on what it is that actually makes the MCU work when it is performing at its peak.

Guardians of the Galaxy is one of those cases where the movie is just so darn good that it's straight-up annoying. When the first film premiered ten years ago, it served more or less a similar purpose for the MCU as Thor in 2011. “Guardians” was here to expand the canvas of stories that could be told in the space of this cinematic universe. Thor brought mythologies onto the scene, “Guardians” brought spaceships.

By the time the Guardians were scheduled to land, we were still two Avengers movies away from seeing them interact with Captain America and folks: if this ended up being a flop, there was still time to prune this branch of the MCU tree and march forth unfettered (which is exactly what I am sure is happening right now behind closed doors as Kevin Feige tries to decide which of the eight dozen Disney+ Marvel heroes we are actually going to see again). The fact that this project was kind of this disembodied head in this sphere had to be a part of the reason why Feige allowed it to develop in such an uncontrolled environment, leaving the door open for a certain James Gunn to make something really off-beat. 

    Prior to his work with Marvel, Gunn had helmed almost exclusively low-budget niche projects that popped up on the internet. Probably his most high-profile work was writing for 2004’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. It was in this unsupervised stage that Gunn was allowed to hone his unique filmmaking sensibilities, which he would continue to be protective of as he was courted by mainstream studios. Gunn said of his opportunity to work with Marvel, 

“I made a decision early on that I wanted it to be a hundred percent a James Gunn movie and a hundred percent a Marvel movie. I didn’t want it to be a compromise. I wanted to make a great Marvel movie that I wanted to see, that was also my movie, that had my personality in it.” 

         There’s a lot about Gunn’s directorial style in these movies that show off this personality. Their weird juxtaposition of bright colors with such a gritty story, the pop soundtrack, the loud humor, etc. But these little quirks have always felt like symptoms of what has really made Guardians of the Galaxy such a unique entry not just within the MCU but the larger film world.

         There’s a really charged moment in Volume 2 where Mantis is using her empath abilities to relay Drax’s feelings as he’s thinking about his daughter. This causes her to start sobbing all while Drax is looking out in the distance perfectly stoic. Mantis becomes an interface to visually express the hurt and ache that Drax does not know how to articulate. 

And that’s more or less a reflection of how these films function for the audience, and it also keys in on what actually made James Gunn’s "Guardians of the Galaxy" trilogy such a cultural touchstone.

Mostly, it's reaching across the cosmos and across the giant silver screen and showing an audience that sees itself as beyond saving that, yes, there is room for everyone on the hero's side. The trick is that the audience that needs to hear this the most is the audience that wants to retreat from such sentimentality. So for a film to know how to reach that space without compromising its message, well, that's a film worth talking about.

Who Are These Movies For?

Guardians of the Galaxy is a 2014 comic-book adventure film following a band of hardened criminals living at the edge of the galaxy. These guys all have checkered histories and are viewed by the society they live in as low-lives, but as they are forced to work together to stop a weapon of mass destruction from being weaponized by an alien war lord, they come to not only form a family unit but also find opportunities to act as real heroes in service to the universe that turned its back on them. The film was directed by James Gunn, who would return to direct the remaining two films in the trilogy. 

This was also a favorite movie of my dad--my dad who never had more than a casual interest in any specific item of entertainment. (Seriously, it's a wonder this dude ever had a son who went into liberal arts.) He was somewhat partial to this sort of film, but even within his chosen brand of shoot-em-up movies, he returned to this one quite a bit. He would put this on when he stayed home sick from work. I never really asked him why, he would pass away a little under a year after the release of Volume 2, but I get to imagine what it was that he and people like him responded to in how this movie diverged from similar films on the shelf.

Broadly, “Guardians” shares the same set-up as a lot of other films. Michael Bay’s Armageddon sees the earth turn to a ragtag team of crass ne’er-do-wells who are the only ones who can save the world from being destroyed by an incoming meteor. The powers that be look down on them at the start of the film, but by the end of the adventure, they sure have learned their lesson. A couple of these guys end up dying to pull this off, including Bruce Willis’ character, and receive a hero’s processional, and the rest get to come home to a world that will never take them for granted again.

Now, when I refer to the “crass ne’er-do-wells” in Bay’s film, I don’t just mean working-class hoodlums who snarkily demand that the government never make them pay taxes if they pull off this mission; I also mean the kind whose spouses have actually set restraining orders against them. The movie never actually spells out why Will Patton’s wife won’t let him see their son, but we do know that in the world off-screen, restraining orders are the kinds of things implemented where domestic abuse is involved.

These are not issues Will Patton has to resolve, apologize for, or even acknowledge for his wife to graciously welcome him back into her house once he’s done saving the world like a boss. All he has to do is blow up some stuff. It’s played as a redeeming storyline, but all it really ends up demonstrating is that some dudes will literally blast off to a flying space rock before they will pay their alimony or go to therapy.

      There tends to be an overlap between the crowd that feels validated by Armageddon and dudes who will say they see themselves in a property like Guardians of the Galaxy. That really factored into the marketing of the first movie at the start which mostly showcased these folks sowing chaos while the authorities remarked about “What a bunch of A-holes” they were. But this winds up serving a different purpose than what we get from Bay's film.

    The heroic framing is an essential part of Bay’s model, but the Armageddon glow is all about being placed on pedestal for admiration—these guys would be horrified if anyone ever felt sorry for them. And this is where the differences between Armageddon and Gunn’s films start to emerge.

I'll use Drax as an example. By the time he enters the picture, he has already accrued a reputation as a “Destroyer,” this immovable monolith of rage and violence. But this sort of thing is situated within histories of pain and loss. This is a man who has great capacity for love but has had everything he cared for cruelly taken from him, and so he disassociates by turning himself into this machine of devastation—something that can’t ever be hurt again. Drax presents one way, but is another. That is where the film starts to reveal its finessed eye for character and audience—and also where you see what it is that James Gunn really brought to the project. Describing his experience with the first major meeting for the Guardians of the Galaxy, Gunn said,

“I was driving home from that meeting, and I thought, ‘Rocket is the saddest creature in the universe. This is a little animal who was taken and turned into something he shouldn’t be. He felt completely ostracized and alienated from every other life form in the galaxy and was angry because of that. He’s scared.’”

    The movie imparts this duality, this contradiction, with naught but the most rudimentary of filmmaking tricks. Without getting too much into film language and Soviet montage and whatnot, film imparts a lot of meaning not through spoken dialogue, but in the juxtaposition of images. Film had mastered this idea before spoken dialogue was even available.

    Early silent films told most of their story based just on the mindful juxtaposition of images. In The Big Parade, you can display an array of soldiers marching impressively off to war, but inserting shots of Jim and Melisande struggling to find one another in the crowd before he ships off for good, and you get a sense of the human cost of war that cuts through the pageantry of the affair. The characters in the film display one attitude, the film itself argues something different.

           One moment I keep coming back to comes from the Hooked on a Feeling montage where Peter actually sees the mechanical modifications on Rocket's back, and Peter gets that this angry ball of fur is scarred in ways he can't imagine. Peter in this scene is acting as an audience surrogate, allowing us all to process that these folks have scars that they like to keep hidden. The real reason why Peter gets to be the sort of focal point of this group is because he is the first to really key in on the idea that these guys have a lot in common—they’re all dudes who were majorly screwed over by the universe.

    I want to linger on Peter for a moment because he is not only the series' protagonist, but he is also the character whose arc does the most to deconstruct what parts of the script have been unhelpful to guys like him. In the grander Hollywood tradition, the male hero is allowed to carry any number of toxic traits, secure that his birthright as the main character will justify him the full promise of a glorified hero’s ending, including the girl of his choice. His thorny attributes may occasionally be remarked upon, but his love interest will inevitably forgive him either way.

And the films honestly display Peter's rough spots in a fairly realistic way. Even though he only spent a good nine years absorbing earth’s atmosphere, Peter has still internalized a lot of that good old toxic masculinity, and the film doesn’t shy away from that. He shrouds himself in his ego, especially when trying to court Gamora. Makes sense. That’s the reality of how men behave. Yet the films aren't content to leave them unremarked upon, but neither do they just resign him to some object lesson.

I find a lot of the contemporary deconstructions of the bad-boy/manchild to be well-intentioned, but they tend to miss the mark for me. A lot of that has to do with the fact that most of them aren't actually curious about these folks and what they're really after, and so they're not really interested in solving the problems that create these dudes in the first place.

People like Peter want to be heroic but can't imagine a scenario where a person like them can really fill the role, so they overcompensate in unhelpful ways. These films walk a fine line with Peter especially, but they manage to honestly display the toxicity of his behavior without endorsing it, affording him sympathy without validating unhelpful activity. Unlike many other Peter types, the film does not reward him with romantic consummation just because "that's what happens." Peter and Gamora are allowed to find each other on their own terms as they both sort their business and become better people.

        This sets the bedrock for Peter’s arc in Volume 3. Here, Peter is basically stuck because he needs to have those feelings for Gamora validated, but he cannot have a real relationship with this woman because the person he is interacting with is in no position to reciprocate his love. (This is after the "Infinity War/Endgame" stunt where Gamora is killed by Thanos, only for a version of Gamora to return without any recollection of their time together.) Even if this new Gamora did decide to give Peter a try, it wouldn’t feel right because Peter does not share that history that bonded them together.

Peter didn’t need alternate-timeline Gamora to become that person, but she still helped heal his wounds by telling Peter, “I’ll bet we were fun.” And that’s really what he needed, to have those feeling recognized. The fact that he could not just pick up where he left off with this duplicate shows that the experiences he had with Gamora were special, unique. As I said when I talked about this movie when discussing A Perfect World, the Peters of the world were always deserving of attention, they just required the right kind of attention.

         If the difference between Armageddon and Guardians of the Galaxy can be summed up in a single creative decision, it’s that Gunn doesn’t take his characters’ flaws for granted. They are situated in specific emotional contexts that probe at questions of why people do what they do–and always with an eye toward becoming the best person you can be. Armageddon paints over the sore spots of its heroes–"Guardians" actually heals their wounds. It lets them say the things they're afraid of out loud and find peace and renewal through it.

         For these characters, the process of finding that peace rises in tandem with their capacity for heroism and looking out for others—which itself emerges as they start to look out for one another. This all culminates in that moment where Peter takes on the full force of the infinity stone and all the other Guardians reach out to join him so that he can abide its power. This saga’s whole emotional throughline can be described in that one scene: taking on the weight of the world on your own is impossible, but in linking with others like you, that burden becomes bearable. Back in 2014, Chris Pratt described Peter, saying that at the beginning,

    “… he is on a quest to escape, essentially. But in the same way that a lot of people are on Earth. Like, he, you know, he’s got like a hope to him, the kind of hope that you have when you buy a lottery ticket. He thinks that if he could just make that score, everything will be fine and everything will be taken care of. And I think he learns through the course of the movie that that’s not ultimately where you find true satisfaction with yourself or real happiness. It’s really gonna come from doing something bigger than yourself and giving yourself up to something that’s bigger than yourself.”

Character-Centric

One of the weird things about Volume 2 is its relative lack of an external conflict for most of the film. Most superhero movies will want to show the bad guy relatively early on so that we can start generating hype for the big showdown, but while we meet Ego in like the first twenty minutes, it’s not clear he is a bad guy until we start closing in on the final crisis.

This felt a little weird to me upon first watch in that the entire conceit of a hero is conquering not just one’s own demons, but in making the world safer for other people as well. Ego’s universe-domination plot emerges by the time we reach Act III, but these acts of destruction are all occurring at sporadic locations across the galaxy, and all in places the Guardians themselves have never visited. Protecting the innocents becomes wallpaper against Peter’s little family quarrel.

But what that does is turn this superhero film into a character piece that traffics heavily in psychology. Most of what we get in Volume 2 is the Guardians interacting with one another and gradually unearthing their individual insecurities, and these are the things that build across their adventure, such that by the time everyone starts shooting things, we’re obviously concerned about the fate of the world, but our investments are built into the characters first and the plot second. Same thing we talked about when we looked at that “Power Rangers” reboot. And I think one of the things that does is show a measure of confidence in the strength of these guys as characters, capable of revealing aspects of the human condition, and not just action figures we can use to take down the bad guy.

         There’s something similar at work in Volume 3 where the majority of the film is concerned exclusively with the fate of Rocket. But, as with Volume 2, this conflict segues naturally into this plot of the Guardians acting as saviors when they learn that the guy who tortured Rocket actually has his whole ecosystem of genetic experiments who need rescuing. The Guardians of the Galaxy films are fairly unique among other blockbusters in how they put character at the center of their storytelling.

So, let's back up for a minute and talk about what it means for a story to be "character-centric" or "character-driven." The term gets bandied around a lot in the discourse as some signifier of elevated storytelling, but … what does that even mean?

Notorious (1946) vs North by Northwest (1959)

       There obviously isn’t a set list within academia, but broadly let’s say that to be character-centric is to root the momentum of a story primarily within the psychology of the characters versus the acrobatics of the narrative events. Character and plot obviously co-exist within a story, and in a lot of ways to build up one is to build up the other. A good character will respond to an interesting plot, and an engaging plot will be acted out by compelling characters, but a story's interests can definitely lean one way or the other. 

On the character-centric end, you have something like Gilmore Girls, a show about a mother and daughter and the people who help them grow, the personalities involved are all very rich and endearing. Plot stuff obviously happens, but our investment is in this community of characters and whether they find happiness. Compare this to something much more plot-driven like Foundation, an epic centuries-spanning science-fiction story about a group of people trying to preemptively stop an entire galactic civilization from future collapse, the characters themselves acting as little more than mouthpieces for the plot information and/or competing philosophies.

    Mind you, the dividing line isn’t always as straightforward as having a fantastical premise or not. Stranger Things is a solid example of a show with a rich supernatural conflict that still remains very character-driven in practice. Yes, I’m hyped up for the big Vecna showdown, but if we’re being honest, the real reason we’re chiming in for season five is to see if [redacted] wakes up.

It bears mentioning that plot-centric is not itself necessarily a worse method of storytelling, but you see its opposite discussed with a lot more reverence in the modern day as this sort of sacred method of storytelling, something lost in this modern landscape where audiences plug into exciting escapades over finessed character studies. The thought is that once filmmakers figured out how to blow things up more convincingly, Hollywood became a place where you went to watch a bunch of human eggshells act out whatever nonsense the story demanded of them.

    And so this kind of discussion is particularly relevant within the context of the Hollywood blockbuster and especially in the framework of the MCU. One of the biggest points that critics of the superhero craze will lobby is that these films are not suitable vehicles for studying the human condition because the focus is instead on the pyrotechnics.

This point is broadly used to disqualify all superhero movies, which flattens much of the dialogue. But Gunn’s films are character-driven, almost aggressively so. The films obviously have a vibrant external conflict between the Guardians and whichever alien lord is trying to create havoc this time, but the movies also have strong running internal conflicts that trace out the psychologies of the characters inhabiting these battle arenas.

We're dropped into this galaxy sort of in media res. We get a very quick explanation of things like the conflict between the Kree and Xandar. More important, though, is how quickly we learn about the characters on the deck. Very little of this is communicated through expository dialogue. Rather, it's in how we see them interact with their environment--and with each other. The feel of a history is often more essential than the articulation of that history. 

There’s a scene in Volume 2, for example, where Peter and Gamora are walking in the woods, and you see Peter confiding in her about his mixed feelings at finally discovering his dad. It’s also full of little moments like Gamora reminding Peter of him telling her the story of wishing David Hasselhoff was his dad. There’s a level of vulnerability here that shows just how comfortable they feel with one another. You get the feel that this relationship has been developing and deepening even when we aren't pointing a camera at them, and this is a large part of what makes watching these guys feel like coming home.

    But it's not just that the characters themselves are so engaging--these guys and their interior messes spawn the larger conflicts that the superhero experience depends upon. That coordination between character and action is the key to "character-centric" storytelling. The exact shape of this will change across the films as the heroes themselves evolve, but there’s a running theme in these films with the tension that emerges from being told you are unnatural or that you deserve your misfortune.

    In the first film, it’s the Nova Corp who get to look down on these disturbers of the peace, but these guys will eventually come to accept them as heroes. Later films will make them work even harder. In Volume 2, this comes from the “perfect society” of the Sovereign as well as Ego who tells Peter he is only good enough if he sheds his human essence–including his ties to his friends. In Volume 3, that’s The High Evolutionary and his obsession of growing the “perfect society” in his lab. There are a lot of people telling these guys that they are not good enough. The individual quests to thwart the bad guy run in tandem with the Guardians learning to recognize not only their own worth but that of the galaxy in which they live.

But this opposition is how the strength of the Guardians unit proves itself. And these situations are made so much more satisfying in that the bizarrity of the characters feeds directly into the resolution of these conflicts. These haphazard dance routines only become opportunities for the guardians to flex both how well they work under pressure and how creatively they solve their problems. When you live on the outskirts of your system, you get to see things not privy to those in the crowd--the best laid plans are no match for "the biggest idiots in the galaxy." The conflicts within each of these films becomes less about which side can create more elaborate fireworks and more about which side believes more in their cause and in their self.

Redemption

Another part of why Armageddon has always bothered me is that it feels like propaganda written by your deadbeat uncle. The devices of storytelling make it really easy to take any unfavorable figure and spin them a scenario that makes them look like decent dudes who just needed to be given the chance (or as many chances as it takes), which is exactly what happens with the guys in Armageddon. The whole ordeal essentially guilt-trips you over a sacrifice no one ever actually made.

    At a passing glance, it feels like that’s what “Guardians” is going for in positing that these numbskulls have actually been good guys all along, but the films put in a lot more hard labor into developing their redemption stories. Similar to how their character flaws aren't just table dressing, their character arcs entail more than just freeriding to gold medals and applause.

A better analogue for these movies might be something like Tender Mercies. This film follows a washed-up country singer who's messed things up with both his career and his first marriage. RE: He's a good companion to the kind of character represented in Guardians of the Galaxy, and his redemption arc does a lot of the things that movies like Armageddon ought to do.

    His arc has him doing what he can to cast out the demons that spurred his destructiveness in the first place--giving up drinking. Moreover, Robert Duvall healing his heart has more to do with opening himself up to love again than becoming famous again.

And that's the real revelation with Guardians of the Galaxy. Having them recognized as heroes is obviously really gratifying, but it isn't the applause or the medals that heals them. That's just how we know their process of self-improvement carries forward momentum upon their environment. Redemption isn't about changing how other people see you, it's about changing your own patterns and bringing your actions in closer alignment with what you know to be true.

An essential factor in the redemption equation, especially when situated in these epic hero quests, is the trust that these characters did have some ingredient for genuine goodness right from the start—that it didn’t just show up one day once they started smelling money and glory. That display is often small at first, but there needs to be some seed that can be nurtured.

    And something I didn’t necessarily appreciate until I started rewatching the movies specifically for this essay is that if you watch that first film really carefully, you’ll see that Peter is something of a closet pacifist right from very early on. Most of what Peter does in that first film is keep the peace between the warring members of the Guardians in moments of heated confrontation. He does this all insisting it is all for selfish reasons, and he’s often speaking in exclamations himself to do so, but he is still the first to try to defuse a conflict, especially when the threat of physical harm hangs in the air. You remember that Peter has seen his share of needless violence, and he does not invite any more.

    I want to return to the moment where Peter goes to bat for Gamora in the Kyln when the other prisoners want to kill her, because this is arguably the inciting incident for the Guardians as a group--this is where you see one of these ruffians sticking his neck out for someone else. At first, Peter plays like this is just a strategic move, insisting to Gamora, “I couldn’t care less whether you live or die!”

    But Peter gets a chance to repeat this feat later on when Gamora is left drifting in space after her space-pod explodes. This time, there is no reward or potential ulterior motive that he can hide behind. He just sees a person in distress, and chooses to put his life on the line for her, knowing that the best-case scenario is that he will get picked up by the folks who are actively wishing him harm. In this way, the film draws a throughline between these two points, revealing something of a pattern in Peter’s behavior. By the time he is willing to sacrifice himself to secure the infinity stone, we are not surprised because we know who he is.

    You see this even more overtly with Groot. In the first film, Groot plays the role of the gentle giant, that quiet beating heart of the group that none of them want to admit they have at first. There’s that very telling moment in the first movie where the Guardians land on Knowhere and are instantly swarmed by a bunch of kids. The larger group responds to the little ankle-biters with irritation and telling them to move on.

   But Groot sees these little guys and gifts one of them a flower, a small parcel of beauty and softness in the hard world they are all forced to inhabit together. Groot serves as a sort of token for the buried altruism inherent in these guys that they don’t quite know how to tap into yet. It makes sense that for a group that doesn’t know how to express affection, the most altruistic among them is the one who cannot speak. And his sacrifice at the end of the first is a huge part of what seals their bond. (Mantis comes in to fill a similar function in the second and third movies.)

    Gamora's situation is unique in that she is the only one of them who is at the start of the series living by her principles. (This admittedly does make the sharp divergence of alt-timeline Gamora’s personality a little befuddling in Guardians 3, but whatever, it serves a thematic purpose, I’ll go with it.) Her service to Thanos and Ronan is essentially a self-preservation mechanism, and the moment she sees an opportunity to defect, she takes it without anyone coercing her into it.

But when she realizes that this death orb is effectively a weapon of incredible destruction, she is the only one of the group who feels that sense of obligation to forget the money and just lock it somewhere no one can get it. Gamora’s transformation in the first film is more about learning that she doesn’t have to fight this fight on her own. As she says in the first film, “I have lived most of my life surrounded by my enemies. I would be grateful to die among my friends.” She says this because that seems to be the best ending the universe can offer someone like them.

And that was sort of everyone's main question heading into Volume 3: who among these guys is going to make it to their happy ending?

Happy Endings

Lost (2004)

Killing off your cast is sort of how we decide that a story is done—when you can’t possibly bring the characters back for any more sequels or follow-up seasons. This tends to show up particularly in stories centered on characters who have some kind of shady history or who have maybe done things they’re not proud of. If a characters' ledger becomes so red, sometimes it's easier to just grant them an exit than to imagine a way for them to make honest repairations.

    I drew a parallel, for example, between the "Guardians" movies and westerns back when we talked about classic movies. The running theme of those movies was that even as they occasionally offered their services to the real world, their dark history and moral ambiguity kept these guys from ever actually partaking in the civilization they were building. In the proper western tradition, the best the lonesome cowboys can typically hope for is either a noble death or escape into the sunset.

Seven Samurai (1954)

    Moreover, the fear around having too nice an ending, especially in something like an action-piece where we’re supposed to believe there are stakes, is that you betray a sort of code of “realness” in letting all your favorite characters emerge unscathed. This “great and final sacrifice” tends to be the means by which you communicate to your audience that your anti-hero has in fact evolved into a true hero: who can argue against this person literally laying down their life for the greater good, right? (Another thing used to feed the fantasy for the Armageddon crowd.)

    And so that was the question on everyone’s mind—which of these guys is going to seal the Guardians of Galaxy saga with their life? And in the end, none of them did. All the Guardians find some form of a happy ending, and that ended up being the best possible stamp Gunn could have put on this story.

      The "hard truths" contained in a more downer ending? Well, that's already part of their package. These guys don't have to learn to appreciate the weight of living in a fallen world because they all emerged out of heartache and loss. What they do have to learn is that there is something to choosing to remain in this world and pick up the pieces with other survivors. There is something profound and even compassionate in telling these cowboys that they have more to look forward to than just drifting untethered through the cosmos.

    It’s broadly the same kind of conclusion that Toy Story 4 reaches for in dissolving the core group so they each can confront their issues, but it lands much more nicely here. Yes, most of these guys are retiring from literal superhero work, but it’s not fair to say that they’re hanging up their boots. Their new destinations have them confront the things they’ve been running away from and let them plant roots in new spaces where they have the chance to live as their most authentic, helpful selves. Eric Vespe wrote for Slash Film,

“No, the final period on Gunn's trilogy isn't a tragic one, but rather a hopeful one built on the strong found family foundation Gunn has been putting together for three movies. And that's shocking in a day and age when we're conditioned to only accept finality in our media through death, and even then we start trying to figure out how these stories with multiverse timelines can bring said dead person back to life.

“What's a better ending for Drax? One where he sacrifices himself to rejoin his lost family in the afterlife or one where he realizes that his true calling is as a dad, not destroyer? Definitely the latter and I found my biggest tears were seeing him accept that and dance with those orphaned children that need him.”

  Gunn’s films have always understood that the best thing that can happen to a person isn’t getting excused from participating in this rotten world, but exhuming its dead parts and building a safer world for all the other broken people. And even before each of the characters reach their final resting place, that idea has always been a huge part of why I've loved these movies. This kind of ending asks for more from its audience than just dissolving into the nether once they've had enough. That's much less of a copout, and more, it's a statement that even when they feel they have cut themselves off, these people do belong to the community, not to the oblivion, and they always will.

But these are all the protagonists, the “good guys,” the fellas who we all kinda knew were going to figure things out eventually. What really sets Gunn’s vision apart is the way that he applies it so broadly: there’s room for everyone on the good side.

    I recall actually having mixed feelings after that first viewing of Volume 2 when they posited this idea that Yondu, the guy who threatened multiple times to eat Peter as a child, was Peter’s true father figure and a guy we were all supposed to like. On first watch, it kind of felt like they were just giving him a pass, especially since his purpose in the first film is more or less to serve as a contrast to Peter’s “new family.” But I don’t think I was giving due credit to a lot of things at the time.

For one thing, Yondu is himself a flawed, scarred figure. He has also known abuse, and that has poisoned him too and his ability to show love. In a way, Yondu is the picture of what would have happened to any of the Guardians if they had not found one another, if that anger toward the world had been allowed to fester even further. Yondu was not lucky enough to find the same kind of companionship that helped buoy the Guardians in their moment of need (except arguably with the Ravagers, who end up betraying him anyway).

But even as he is much further gone than any of them, once he has the means and opportunity to aspire for something better, the story grants him that grace. Part of the tragedy of his death is that he doesn’t really get the chance to have these feelings fully blossom and find his footing as a genuine good guy. Everything he could have been gets traded for that one action of rescuing Peter. 

And Yondu has also always shown that soft spot for Peter, something that other characters have noted. At the very end of the first film where we see that Peter has swindled him out of the infinity stone, he actually looks pleased, like he is proud that his boy is doing better than him. In the second movie, we also learn that him choosing not to deliver Peter to his father was a deliberate act of mercy once he figured out what Ego was doing to all his children. Yondu recognized that though he was not the ideal father figure, something far worse awaited Peter if he did not act.

These two things coexist within Yondu at the same time. That is the complexity of human nature. In the end, I don’t think that the movie was papering over Yondu’s abuse of Peter. I think it was celebrating a beautiful contradiction in life that even a flawed figure like Yondu was also capable of genuine love and goodness.

         You also see how these films commit to this line of thought in how they treat both minor characters. The films delineate between bad guys like Ego who never learn the errors of their ways and those like Yondu, Nebula, or Adam who learn to defy their programming and become genuine heroes. You also see it with someone like Kraglin, a third-tier character with like four lines in the first movie who gets to have his own culminating moments in the final film. There’s room for everyone on the right side.

    And the larger audience recognizes the alchemy at work here and the role Gunn played in pulling that off. That’s a large part of why there was such outrage when Disney briefly fired Gunn from Volume 3. It was also a chapter where we saw how the vitality of the Guardians bond displayed onscreen carried over into the lives of the people who were charged with bringing it to life. The cast and crew really rallied behind Gunn, which I think speaks to not just his prowess as a storyteller, but of the kind of culture he tries to create as a person of influence in Hollywood. In one of those blue moon moments where Hollywood actually admitted its wrongdoing, they gave Gunn his movie back, and we’re all better off for it.

In some ways, the magic of Guardians of the Galaxy is as simple as “James Gunn,” but I think it’s essential to note that Gunn wasn’t some lab scientist who happened to stumble upon the secret formula that made a movie work: a lot of the things we associate with Gunn’s Marvel trilogy–the humor, the tone, the loudness of it all–they work together in a specific arrangement that collectively reveal something about the human condition. Gunn found a slot in the MCU orchestra in which he was allowed to use his resources to tell a deeply personal story, and more than anything else, that has been the real ingredient to the success of these movies.

What Did Marvel Learn from Guardians of the Galaxy?

Marvel never really knew what they had with Guardians of the Galaxy, and here in 2024, you see how they have taken mostly the wrong lessons from this experiment.

As is often the case, the studio heads looked at the optics of what made this film unique–its humor, tone, color palette–and assumed that these were the things that audiences were responding to, and so they threw themselves into putting out more low-brow comedy romps. Except the context in which “Guardians’” comedy becomes funny, and even meaningful, isn’t applicable to every story or every character. 

    Thor: Ragnarök is probably the apex of this trend, and also the turning point for when the “Guardians” treatment went from a specialized skillset to the thing Marvel did when it didn’t know what else to do (I'm sorry, I know you kids all love "Ragnarök," but I just can't get on the train, fellas). For a while there, that did sort of become the default for Marvel and its 70 million Disney+ shows that I lost track of a while back. This sort of casual anarchy that pervades newer Marvel is particularly frustrating in comparison because unlike these new outings, Guardians of the Galaxy absolutely took itself seriously.

 It also seems that the “Guardians” jewel itself only really glows when Gunn himself is there to polish it. Gunn has mentioned having to step in a couple of times for when the Guardians were present for the “Infinity War/Endgame” segment of the MCU to make sure his babies were being taken care of.

    As one instance, in the scene where Gamora is begging Peter to shoot her before Thanos can abduct her and use her to find the Soul stone, the original script called for Peter to back out because he couldn’t follow through with it. Gunn was the guy who stepped in and insisted to the Russo brothers that if Peter made that promise to Gamora, he would absolutely honor it, no matter how much it destroyed him. And so the scenario was rewritten to have Peter pull the trigger but let Thanos use some infinity magic to nullify his sacrifice.

    Gunn has also said he dislikes the moment in “Infinity War” where Peter lashes out at Thanos at that critical moment when they’re pulling the gauntlet off his hand and him losing his temper costs them the battle. I personally thought the outburst was in-character for him (even if I thought the Peter backlash after this was a little excessive) but I think it also speaks to the protectiveness Gunn feels for his characters--he's a little upset when you don't give his heroes their due.

         On a more Professor-specific note, I myself have always hated in “Endgame” how they play the moment when resurrected Peter sees alt-timeline Gamora for the first time. This is a tremendously vulnerable moment where he’s convinced he’s seeing the love of his life back from the dead, and it is played as one giant gag with Gamora throwing him on the ground on the sole premise that he looks gross. (It’s not even like the joke makes sense in-universe: Gamora is literally surrounded by all these Greek statues of human beings, and Chris Pratt is not the least attractive among them. There is no universe where it makes sense for her to be repulsed by him. I can buy into the spaceships and whatnot, but my suspension of disbelief doesn’t carry that far …)

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

       It sure doesn’t seem like they took James Gunn’s creative liberty to heart. In recent years, multiple directors have aired some frustration with the MCU machine and how their individual directorial sensibilities get washed away according to the needs of the studio, which has caused a small handful of directors to either part ways with their projects or to kind of grit their teeth and bear it.

    And this is the biggest reason why the MCU has kind of had a rough couple of years. While Gunn arguably played this game better than anyone else at Marvel, he was ultimately keying in on what makes these kinds of movies work. Movies—superhero or no, cinematic universe or no—work when artists get to do what artists do best and use the devices of film to explore the intricacies of the human condition, and what it’s like to share that condition with someone else. That may be difficult when you are coordinating with twenty other films, but as we found out with "Guardians," it aint impossible.

But that Gunn is now the supreme overlord of DC superheroes is something to be excited for. I’m publishing this a year out from the premiere of his long-hyped Superman film, but the early signs are promising. When I sat through Gunn’s initial survey of what to expect from his first round of DC films, what stood out to me most wasn’t just the roster of characters, but how their stories were pitched. He wasn’t just outlining superhero and villain mashups, but specific character tensions for each of his heroes.

    When I say that I hope that this new DC universe will have Gunn's touch, I don't really mean the same tone or brand of humor. I mostly just want to see all the pyrotechnics bending to the emotional needs of an audience that needs these reminders of what it means to be a hero. In Gunn's words,

“I really do think that Guardians came in and did things that spectacle movies just haven’t done … I also think people are completely more than ready for it. I think that people have been — I think that Hollywood has been treating people like they’re stupid for a long time. Not 100 percent of the time, but a good 70 percent of the time. I don’t think that’s the case. Guardians proves that.”

    Maybe bringing back the Russos will give Marvel what they want. Maybe bringing back Robert Downey Jr. will give them what they want. Maybe that will work better than copy+pasting the "Guardians" treatment over all of Marvel. I don't know. For a while, Marvel shared this eye for balancing the needs of the individual director with a collective universe, and that is how they pulled off being the defining force in entertainment for a decade. Maybe they can figure it out again.

--The Professor