Intergalactic, Planetary: Arley Sorg and Josh Pearce Discuss Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
The usual suspects assemble for another adventure: Drax (Dave Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Nebula (Karen Gillan), and Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) are hanging out in their space pirate cove within the hollowed-out skull of a dead celestial being. Everything’s been going great lately. They’ve redecorated, they’re enjoying music, and they’ve made a bunch of new friends including a telekinetic Soviet cosmonaut dog named Cosmo (voiced by Maria Bakalova). Rocket is a raccoon, Groot is a tree, Peter is human, and everyone else is some kind of alien. Yup, everything is pretty great, except Peter is still moping about his dead girlfriend, and Rocket is filled with existential angst about being an uplifted lower lifeform.
The relative peace is shattered when super-powered golden boy Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) tries to kidnap Rocket at the behest of main bad guy The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who’s been running a Build-A-Bear Workshop of horrors and secretly creating an exact copy of Earth populated with suburbanite pig people and drug-dealing octopi. The kidnapping attempt leaves Rocket in a coma, so the rest of the Guardians suit up and fly off in search of a cure. Along the way, they run into Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) who is back to life again because of time-travel shenanigans. She helps them infiltrate a space station made of living flesh. These are all sentences that make sense once you watch the movie.
Josh: I enjoyed almost every minute of this. It’s not perfect, but I think it was the best of the trilogy, and the thing I liked most about it was that it was so fucking weird. I really like weird scifi, if it’s weird for a reason, which I think is a Jeff VanderMeer line. You look at any still image from this movie or you watch the preview and you think, what am I looking at? Why does this walrus have wheels? What is this giant sphincter in space? Why is Nathan Fillion dressed like that? Every shot is visually interesting. But then they provide context for everything.
Arley: A lot of fun scifi ideas.
Josh: A lot of worldbuilding and neat settings. They really cranked up the visual absurdity, which was fun. That’s something they could really only do because it was set in space, so there’s infinite room for whatever. If it was set on Earth, like most of the other Marvel movies, they couldn’t have done half the stuff that was in this movie without having to deal with the consequences of a worldwide disaster every other day.
Arley: Not only is everyone on Earth superpowered and blowing things up, but everyone’s also a supervillain constantly trying to take over the world.
Josh: Being a normal person in the Marvel universe must be exhausting.
Guardians of the Galaxy is separate enough from the rest of the MCU that you can watch this entire trilogy without seeing any other Marvel movie or TV show and still fully enjoy it as a self-contained series. It’s been six years since the last installment, so Guardians 3 takes a little bit of time refreshing the audience’s memory and even fills in the gaps for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with every Avengers movie.
(We couldn’t remember the details without looking it up: Gamora dies in Avengers: Infinity War, and a version of her comes back during Avengers: Endgame. There’s also mention of Peter Quill and Mantis being half-siblings, which was revealed during The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, but that information is irrelevant to the plot in any case.)
There are flaws: some of the gags went on a little too long and could have been trimmed down (it’s a long enough movie that there’s room for editing); several music selections are over the top; and you can tell when you’re being manipulated. This is partially the Disney influence. A couple of sequences look like footage from a Disneyland ride, and Knowhere seems custom made to be slotted in as an immersive theme park section. Any money machine as carefully calculated as a Marvel movie is going to aim at a lower denominator audience, hence the easy jokes and the sense that Guardians 3 is trafficking in nostalgia for itself, or for its two predecessors.
Josh: In a PG-13 movie, you only get to say “fuck” one time, and they deployed it perfectly in this. It got a genuine laugh.
Arley: Especially with some of the one liners, I was like, “Okay, we get it.” Repeating the, “Did that look cool?” and even the use of, “I am Groot,” it was all kind of heavy handed or even desperate. I really enjoyed how they used his lines at the end, though, and I found it emotionally effective, but I felt like they were front-loading it too much. Almost like they’re saying, “Remember Groot? This is what Groot does! Look at Groot!” rather than just making him a part of the movie. How did you feel about Peter Quill?
Josh: I think Chris Pratt is a pretty generic guy playing a pretty generic protagonist. I’m not super opposed to him, and I’m also not a huge fan. Why?
Arley: He was really annoying for me. His whole storyline was toxic masculinity. He’s pestering Gamora the entire movie, and I’m just like, this is going uncomfortably far. Yes, she rejects him in the end, but that’s after the really gross scene where he lands on top of her, and of course, she smiles up at him, despite that up to that point she has continually been telling him “no, leave me alone.” Outdated and sexist. It’s actually really fucked up, creating this underlying message that hey guys, if she says no, just keep at it, because you really like her so it’s fine. I’m glad that they didn’t end up together, but I’m not glad that they left it kind of open, so there is still this possibility that they could eventually end up together.
Josh: That’s another good example of audience manipulation, too, because you see that scene and you’re supposed to go, “Ooo la la, romance.” My least favorite is still Nebula. Maybe it’s not fair to compare her with Gamora, because Zoe Saldaña is a better actor, but these two characters are supposed to have similar backstories and attitudes, and it doesn’t come across as well from her —
Arley: It felt a little forced.
Josh: That’s what it is. It feels like she’s trying too hard to be that kind of tough. Special shout-out to Chukwudi Iwuji’s performance, though. I love that he was chewing the scenery. There’s a part where he’s raving at Rocket, but he’s staring up at the camera, and at that moment, I thought, “Wait a minute. This dude is just staring at a green screen, like frothing at the mouth, and I believe that he’s ranting at this imaginary CGI raccoon.” That’s really good acting — you can act off of this blank screen and still be utterly convincing.
Arley: Some touches were nice, like the subtext around assumptions and communication carried through the Mantis and Drax story arcs. I did really like the Cosmo gag arc. It was a good running bit with a payoff that was pretty well done, but it also had a touch of emotionality.
The theme of Guardians 3 is “animals” — not just Rocket but also The High Evolutionary’s other test subjects. It raises questions of, “What animals (or people) are worth saving?” and “What constitutes a ‘perfect’ lifeform?” This kind of examination of the material rescues the animal scenes from being merely cynical audience manipulation (though you can still tell you’re being set up for an emotional hit).
This is an expensive-looking movie, and they clearly got their money’s worth from the effects teams. Every shot is filled with impressive CGI visuals, and even the fur and hair on mammals looks realistic, which is notoriously hard to do. That level of realism allows us to latch on to Borgified otters and rabbits (and raccoons) as sympathetic characters, because their cute little faces are just so full of personality and emotion.
Arley: I had interesting, rollercoaster feelings about the opening song, because Rocket is singing, “I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul.”* It kind of powerfully embodies that sense of otherness, and you can see it in the animation, because they did a really good job with body language in that scene. But at the same time, a lot of the elements of that song are really not appropriate to the moment in the film – Rocket isn’t being kinda borderline stalker with anyone, and the disconnect of the lyrics threw me, right after being effective.
Josh: Some of the music choices were kind of questionable. I think there could have been slightly less music.
Arley: I did like the one when they first show Adam flying through space.
Josh: There were some good ones. It’s just that every five seconds it was like, “Here’s another song!” and I’m all, “Okay, well, you have a lot of songs.”
Arley: In a way it does make sense because they have this emotional connection with the music player as a subplot. Peter Quill goes back for the music player at the end so that he can give it to Rocket, symbolizing multiple things at once.
Josh: At the beginning of this trilogy, the only person who cared about music was Peter and he had the cassette player and no one else gave a shit. By the time they get to this movie, the whole team knows all the words, they all have their favorite songs. It becomes this through thread for the entire community and it’s not just one dude’s weird, hipster moment. Everyone has an emotional connection to it. It’s a character arc, but for the entire team.
Arley: The bones of the plot of this movie were predictable, but that’s fine. As soon as you get a sense of what the story is, in both timelines, you know where it’s going, but they did add some funny touches. Like Peter Quill throws a monkey off the ship and it’s clawing that one woman’s face. That’s what happens when you deal with wild animals! They’re not all gonna be cute and nice.
Josh: I was kind of hoping that they were going to kill off one of the main characters, because it’s the conclusion of the trilogy. I guess because it’s a Marvel property, Disney is probably not gonna let you kill off a character. As a filmmaker you’re probably not allowed to just make giant changes like that to their canon, because you’re fucking with future profits. But there were a few fights where I was convinced it was going to happen, because the action was so good. Some directors are really good at action, framing a sequence of events that still compels you, even if you know the outcome or even if you know that it’s just CGI hitting things or cartoons. It can still be visually interesting. And so that fight through Knowhere where Adam Warlock is blasting through shit, they were establishing right from the beginning that everyone’s getting hurt and they’re willing to fuck someone up permanently.
Arley: We’ve talked about this in other superhero movies, such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, but that scene also serves to establish tone and limitations. People got hurt, and even the guy who flies in like he’s Superman gets hurt. It establishes that these characters are not completely invulnerable and can actually be harmed. It creates tension, sets up for later action scenes so that you don’t just feel like there are no consequences to physical conflict.
Josh: And I thought the hallway fight scene was pretty cool.
Arley: It was almost like martial arts movie choreography. I really liked some of the attacks that worked together. It shows the synergy between the Guardians when they do that, you get a sense, kind of like you’re talking about with the music, of having spent a lot of time together. Even though you only have three movies, we got a sense of them having gone through a lot of different adventures.
Star-Lord is promised to return in some future iteration, but it’s hard to imagine him carrying the plot of anything without the other Guardians. There isn’t one single character who carries the franchise on their backs (and if there were, it wouldn’t be Star-Lord) — the audience appeal is an emergent property from their interpersonal drama. A band of thieves and mercenaries are thrown together, and from their flaws and weirdness emerges heroism, loyalty, and friendship. The movies themselves work the same way — three oddball scifi movies are thrown into a massive corporate juggernaut, and from their weirdness emerges something special.
*”Creep” by Radiohead
Written & directed by: James Gunn
Starring: Chukwudi Iwuji, Bradley Cooper, Pom Klementieff, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Vin Diesel, Maria Bakalova, Sean Gunn, Chris Pratt, Will Poulter, Elizabeth Debicki & Zoe Saldaña
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Short Take
Josh: It’s actually kind of impressive how bad this movie is. Talk about weird for no reason, this is the perfect example. The film seems like it was put together by generative AI: the dialogue is word salad, the visuals are a surreal muddle with no tension and no other purpose than to place moving images across a screen. It’s like a movie for five-year-olds. Easily the worst Marvel movie I’ve seen, and probably one of the worst movies I’ve ever watched, in general.
Arley: I didn’t hate it as much as you did, but for me, it’s definitely one of those, “sure, watch it if there’s absolutely nothing else on” kind of movies, with a side of “but watch it for free.” Like Shazam! Fury of the Gods – about which I feel the same – one of the problems is just the monotony of the film. Unlike Guardians above, the flood of CGI in Quantumania doesn’t allow room for tonal shifts in narrative or visual experience, and the writing is too predictable to be engaging. Unlike the aforementioned scene with Adam Warlock, in Quantumania (and Fury of the Gods) you never really worry about anyone, so both films hang entirely on “cool” images and one-liners.
Arley, again: Okay, time to rant. Taken together, they highlight a problem with Marvel, which is more egregious in Guardians: not enough diversity.
A lot of Marvel properties have painted themselves into a corner by not casting regular characters who are people of color. This means that here you end up with two movies where the bad guys are Black, without any Black heroes, or even other notable characters who are Black. In Quantumania, all the other important roles are white folks; in Guardians, anyone who isn’t white has to be rendered “alien” – only white folks get to be “human” looking. Worse, in Guardians, both the queer Asian actor and the Black actor get up close, personal violence acted upon them, to a degree of savagery which really feels like a hate crime – at least, to me; especially when they didn’t have to be played out that way. Nico Santos gets literally bashed along the ground and then drowned by Star-Lord, while the straight white protag glares right at his face. I spoke about this in our review of The Old Guard: it’s not that everyone will have the discomfort I had in these scenes, but it is that there is a context of violence in this country which I think many (white, cis-male, het) film makers don’t think about when creating these scenes. When the only Black or openly queer person in the flick is getting beaten, it replicates realities we still live with. Filmmakers should utilize actors more thoughtfully, especially when there is a paucity of leading roles and important characters in these franchises. Things are better than ever in some senses, with folks from marginalized communities getting their own TV shows or films. But even these characters get sidelined when put next to the white folks/white dudes – remembering the Avengers scene where all the characters of color (plus Captain Marvel if I’m not mistaken) were conveniently “away on missions” so the film could just feature the white dudes; or the scene during the big Avengers battle where all the major women are working together for, like, a heartbeat, just long enough for a screencap, and then the action shifts back to focusing on the dudes. Even Fury of the Gods makes it clear that the people with important narratives are white folks, and yes, we have all these other folks, but the story is mainly about the white folks. Look, y’all. There are very few major Asian characters across a ton of Marvel movies (except when they make one focusing specifically on Asian folks), and the one time they have a person who is both Asian and publicly queer, he gets violently murdered….
Non-Marvel genre movies are making hesitant steps here and there, such as films like Renfield, where Awkwafina is, arguably, almost-maybe-ish the lead character in a dual-lead-character sense. But it shouldn’t take Jordan Peele to cast people of color in leading genre roles.
In my short take of The Black Guy Dies First I noted a quote where Manton Moreland, a Black actor asks, “Why shouldn’t the role be written so that I can solve the murder sometime?” In the year 2023, we should be asking the same question: why not cast more major characters with actors of color, including super heroes, and especially folks in lead roles? Most of these characters were created decades ago, and we don’t need to adhere to the identity monotony of the originators.
Directed by: Peyton Reed
Written by: Jeff Loveness, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber
Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Bill Murray, Corey Stoll, Katy M. O’Brian, William Jackson Harper
JOSH PEARCE has stories and poetry in Analog, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cast of Wonders, Clarkesworld, IGMS, Nature, and more. Find him on Twitter: @fictionaljosh, or at fictionaljosh.com. One time, Ken Jennings signed his chest.
ARLEY SORG, Senior Editor and associate literary agent at kt literary, has been part of the Locus crew since 2014. Arley is a 2023 Space Cowboy Award recipient and a 2022 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient. He is also a 2021 and 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist as well as a 2023 and 2022 Locus Award finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. He is a 2022 Ignyte Award finalist in two categories: for his work as a critic, and for his essay “What You Might Have Missed” in Uncanny Magazine. Arley is Associate Editor and reviewer at Lightspeed & Nightmare magazines, columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and interviewer at Clarkesworld Magazine. He grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and lives in the SF Bay Area. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he can be found at arleysorg.com – where he has started his own “casual interview” series with authors and editors – as well as Twitter (@arleysorg) or Facebook.
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