Hey, you know what?
There's another name you might know me by.
Star-Lord.
Who?
Introducing a comic book character to a wide audience
takes a particular.
Set of skills for a portion of the audience,
there are years, often decades, of backstory and memories
with this character to contend with.
For the majority of the audience,
this character is a blank slate of potential.
One director has proven time and time
again to be able to not only celebrate and introduce
the character's legacy to new audiences,
but also subvert the expectations of longtime fans.
Welcome to the frickin' guardians of the galaxy.
Released in 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy,
was written and directed by genre creator James Gunn,
known for celebrating the weird and strange
and cult features like Tromeo and Juliet, Super,
and Slither, Gunn also had a history with pop culture icons
like Scooby Doo or George Romero's zombie films.
One penchant of Gunn's career was
the way he rejoiced in off-kilter kilter characters.
The first proper superhero movie he directed,
Super, we meet a short order cook
who goes on a violent and religious killing
spree by the end of the movie.
And in Gunn's deft hands, the trajectory made sense.
When it was announced that he would
be helming the lesser known superhero team,
it sounded perfect.
A group of misfit space pirates, led
by the earthling and demigod Peter Quill,
was exactly the dynamic Gunn was built for.
What a bunch of A-holes.
And this is Peter Quill.
Also known as Star-Lord.
In contrast to most of the Marvel heroes
we had met at this point, he's cast
in shadows, a silhouette where we only
see the trim of his dirty red coat and almost alien
red eyes that are revealed to be goggles.
The world he treks is as dark and ruinous
as his unkempt appearance and clothes.
The music is an orchestra of ominous notes
and crashing lightning.
It is, for all intents and purposes, heavy.
There's a feeling that this world, this man, is dangerous,
which makes sense given the cold open.
Moments before, we were on Earth in 1988.
We watched a young boy who retreated to his Walkman
to avoid the world around him.
We then see the entirety of that world, a hospital room,
with his ill mother at the center.
When the young Peter was brought to the dark hospital room,
we see all the light in the movie's world focused solely
on the sickly woman lying in the hospital bed,
surrounded by her family and loved ones.
She pleads to hold her son's hand
and there's a genuine fear in young Peter's face
as he refuses.
Before he can comfort his mother one last time,
she flatlines and dies.
After running from the hospital in pain and sorrow,
he's abducted by an ominous spaceship
that fires off a tractor beam over the crying child.
The movie's light turns to him, casting a spotlight
over the child like the light of the hospital room.
Having just watched that heart wrenching opening,
the serious silhouette of the masked man,
using a high tech gadget that casts a barren landscape
in holographic ghosts, fits with the established tone,
until here.
Star-Lord retracts his mask for the first time
and we see star Chris Pratt in full.
Pratt had risen to Fame playing the lovable goofball, Andy
Dwyer, in Parks and Recreation.
The character was what many would lovingly
refer to as a himbo.
They are often extremely handsome, often muscular,
charming, and above all, a little dim.
Leslie, say I typed your symptoms into the thing up here
and it says you could have network connectivity problems.
There.
Is a purity to the idea of a himbo
they are usually a character without malice or ill intent,
just good-hearted and kind.
The timing of revealing Pratt at exactly this moment
automatically slightly lightens.
The mood it's very much a flair from Gunn
signifying that despite the emotional roller coaster
we had already gone through, there
was still a comedic actor at the film's core.
It's not long before Star-Lord's hand
veers to his waist and hits play on his familiar Walkman.
The dramatic score has dropped off
and we're left with the strange, twangy sound of Red Bone's
intro to Come and Get Your Love.
If the reveal of Pratt's himbo persona was a flair,
Come and Get Your Love was a signal missile
with fireworks, a marching band, and a parade float.
This was a very intentional, kind of funky, kind of groovy,
slap on the back that said, don't worry.
It's not all that serious.
In what is both a follow through to that promise
and a clever bit of story setup, Star-Lord begins to dance.
And this isn't the big, grand, Kevin Bacon stunt double
dancing in a warehouse dance.
It's a genuinely goofy dance like nobody's watching, quasi
lip sync.
There's a sense of play here, akin to Tom Cruise's
iconic, pantless slide to Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll,
Star-Lord even has his own microphone,
grabbing a rat-like alien from a nearby rock.
Aside from shifting the tone from serious space adventure
drama to lighthearted, this is also
amazing character shorthand.
Character shorthand is like sketching a silhouette.
Think of Batman's bright yellow chest
logo in the alley of a shadow.
It's giving you information by showing versus telling.
instead of having characters remark on
how silly Star-Lord can be, why not show it instead?
It also sets up what would become a fight
with the film's main villain, Ronan the Accuser, played
by Lee Pace.
Towards the film's climax, as a means
to throw the villain off and show
the camaraderie between the newly found family
of the Guardians, Star-Lord instigates a dance-off.
Dance-off, bro.
This is a writing tic Gunn has carried
throughout his filmography.
In Gunn's 2021 The Suicide Squad,
we meet Savant, played by Gunn mainstay, Michael Rooker.
In this introduction, we see Savant
in a sort of solitary yard time.
He throws a rubber ball that ping pong quickly
around the room and returns to his hand.
When a small bird chirps in the corner of his room,
Savant flicks the ball before it crushes the bird and returns
to his hand.
This pays off a few moments later
when our decoy Suicide Squad lands on the beach
to raid a former soil.
After seeing how skilled Savant, is
we're then told by handlers of the Suicide Squad.
He's an expert in weapons in hand-to-hand combat.
In lesser hands, the expectation is
that this will be the sole survivor of the beach attack.
We've spent most of our running time to this point on him.
He's a recognizable actor and frequent collaborator
with Gunn.
I'm very popular.
As the squad is being overrun by the defending army,
Savant watches from the water.
We wait, knowing at any moment, he
will pull some sort of movie magic superhero miracle
and break free of the army.
Only moments before, we had seen him be the sole member to try
and rescue the anthropomorphic weasel from drowning.
Instead, Gunn has Savant run, or more accurately,
swim, away in fear, as Amanda Waller, played by Viola Davis,
demands he stop, lest he detonate the bomb implanted
in his skull.
We think then, maybe this is the moment.
Maybe Savant will reveal he has removed the device
or there's a chance he has a lesser-known known
invulnerability.
What we get is an exploded head and floating body.
As the title credits roll, Gunn's wonderful musical cues
kick in, and we have the very on the nose, very perfect,
People Who Die, by the Jim Caroll Band.
It's another subversion of our expectations, coupled
with a smaller scale setup and payoff,
akin to Star-Lord's dance.
What are you doing?
I'm distracting you, you big turd blossom.
We mentioned earlier, that Gunn had traditionally
worked in horror, and with this open,
he follows the tried and true Tales from the Crypt reversal
formula.
We meet a character who does a villainous thing.
In Savant's case, killing the bird, and then that character
gets their comeuppance.
For Savant, it was having an extremely
similar looking bird peck on the gruesome neck stump.
This hodgepodge of influences, backed by strong storytelling
fundamentals, continuously won over the superhero movie
fandom.
So much so, that Gunn and more business
minded partner Peter Safran, were
named co-chairs of DC Studios.
Together, they are planning on relaunching the DC Universe,
with plans to introduce more oddball and horror centric
characters like Swamp Thing, Creature
Commandos, and The Authority, there's
a lot of opportunity for Gunn to revel
in what he does best, offbeat weirdos with heart.
But what about the more traditional characters,
like his planned Superman legacy?
Gunn has tangentially worked around the Superman mythos
before.
In 2019, he was the producer of the film Brightburn.
The story was the broad strokes of Superman.
A young couple in Kansas adopts an alien baby whose ship
crashed near their farm.
Gunn and the other filmmakers never
shied away from the comparison, often pitching it
as Superman meets the omen.
What that movie lacked though was a sense of heart
in the main character.
Our Clark surrogate, Brandon, is an angry boy, an idea of what
happens when Superman goes wrong.
Maybe legacy will work as Brightburn's inverse,
a celebration of kindness and decency
in the face of villainy and evil.
Whatever the case may be, one thing we can know
is Gunn's aptitude for showing us strange and alien
misfits who celebrate their otherness,
will be a departure from previous creative
Helmers's Zack Snyder.
Snyder veered toward the celebration of DC's pantheon
as almost mythical.
They were statuesque and melodramatic, oftentimes
so far removed, it felt difficult to form
a human connection with.
Gunn seems to have the opposite intent.
Every time he introduces a character he wants
us to relate somehow, either through fear
or even just the simple idea of dancing like nobody's watching.
So what do you think?
Which of Gunn's announced DC slate excites you the most?
Let us down in the comments below.
And as always, thank you for watching.
[MUSIC]