The central metaphor of Gunn's Guardians films has been the mixtape. There's more to the film than Rocket's trauma narrative (in those flashbacks, Sean Gunn attempts to personify a younger Rocket by pitching Bradley Cooper's dese-and-dose Brooklyn accent up an octave or two, so we the audience get to experience some trauma ourselves). And by juxtaposing them with moments in which the experiments' animal subjects spout platitudes about the joy of friendship and their dreams of escape, Gunn's unbearable, ham-handed execution aims for pathos but achieves only bathos, its laughably inept evil twin. Using every cinematic tool at his disposal, he so feverishly attempts to crank up the horror of those scenes that he only succeeds in exposing their cynical, plot-driven artifice. But what makes those scenes profoundly unpleasant to sit through is not their violence itself, but Gunn's mawkish, maudlin, manipulative approach to it. It's the fact that writer/director James Gunn approaches those scenes without trusting his audience to naturally recoil at the idea of animal cruelty. 3 isn't the mere depiction of said animal experimentation, which created not only Rocket but a cadre of twee furry cyborg pals we get to (briefly) meet. The problem at the core of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. And if said eugenicist should also happen to go about their evil business by conducting unholy cybernetic experimentations on cute fuzzy animals like Rocket (in flashbacks) and innocent, adorable, wet-eyed toddlers (in the present day)? Sure. Look, if you're trying to come up with a villain for audiences to dutifully, even reflexively hiss, eugenicists are a pretty good place to start I get that. Which, alas, is where All! That! Vivisection! TM comes in. The High Evolutionary's nefarious plan? To engineer a perfect species to live in a perfect society of his creation. They're all up against a powerful being known as The High Evolutionary, played with gratifyingly over-the-top, scenery-devouring brio by Chukwudi Iwuji. There's dim but headstrong Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), dim but strong-strong Drax (Dave Bautista), gruff Nebula (Karen Gillan), empathic Mantis (Pom Klementieff), laconic space-Ent Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) and tough but fuzzy raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper).Īlso along for the ride: Kraglin (Sean Gunn) a space-pirate struggling with performance issues, Cosmo (Maria Bakalova) a telekinetic space-dog, and a brand new antagonist, Will Poulter's Adam Warlock, a genetically-engineered super-being with the mind of a petulant child in the body of an Instagram fitness influencer. (Zoe Saldana here plays an alternate-timeline version of her character Gamora, whom we met back in the first film long story.) They've added some new faces to their roster, one of which is technically an old face. As a team, they've always leaned more into mercenary violence and bro-ish banter than anything so hopelessly quaint as heroism, though they do tend to wind up saving the day, despite themselves. 3 is pitched as a sendoff to the rag-tag gang of misfits first introduced in James Gunn's 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy, who've since cropped up in several corners of the MCU. I can't help thinking it could have used.just you know a lot more vivisection," then rest assured your tastes have finally been catered to, you sicko freak.īut first: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. So I say this to a vanishingly small subset of you: If you've ever found yourself walking out of an Marvel movie and said to yourself, "I liked it. Looking for street-level angst? Cosmic sweep? Paranoid thrillers? Mystic mumbo-jumbo? Sitcom satires? Gods and monsters? Coming-of-age dramas? Subatomic shenanigans? Afro-futurist utopias? Whatever the hell Eternals was supposed to be? The MCU has something for you.īut maybe, after all these years, you find that your own very particular Marvel itch remains somehow unscratched. And while critics can and do bemoan the surface similarities these disparate properties tend to share, the strength of the MCU remains how much variation it manages to offer up in tone, scope, stakes and subject matter. We're neck-deep into Phase 5 now, after all we've had dozens of movies and streaming series and one-off specials. What, in your mind, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe still missing? L to R: Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Drax (Dave Bautista), Quill (Chris Pratt) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) go for a walk in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.
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