There’s a moment in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3 where Adam Warlock is commenting on the pet of a person he just murdered, and he observes, “He looks sad. I don’t enjoy how it’s making me feel, actually.” That’s not the one thing I like about this movie, but it’s a very succinct summation of how I felt watching it.
I’ve been avoiding watching it for a long time, because I’d been warned that there are many scenes of cruelty to animals (and death, and genocide of an entire civilization). And the warning isn’t being over-sensitive, either. I had to stop watching about 20 minutes in, just so I could stop sobbing and go hug my cat.1In case anyone’s curious: the eye tracking on the Apple Vision Pro still seems to work even if you’re crying profusely. Even reminding myself repeatedly that I was watching entirely CGI-created talking animals in a sci-fi superhero movie, it was too much to tolerate in one sitting. I had to come back the next afternoon to finish it, and I cried a whole lot more.
I’d been tempted to abandon it, writing it off as a case of James Gunn letting off some (well-deserved, IMO) anger before leaving the series, crossing the line from “effective” to purely manipulative. But I’m glad I was able to finish it, because it’s actually an almost-shockingly sincere farewell to the series, and a rejection of cruelty in favor of selflessness and acceptance. It took what had been the most flippant-for-the-sake of fun entry in the MCU2At least until Taika Waititi got hold of Thor and closed the trilogy with heartfelt love for its characters and for the spirit behind them. I felt as if I’d been torn down emotionally so that the moments of sincerity ended up being so much stronger, ultimately feeling like a catharsis.
By the time the movie started wrapping things up, there was a barrage of wonderful moments one after the other, each of them landing with me, hard. The one that really got me was Mantis (with her power to plant ideas in people’s minds) hugging Cosmo and telling her, “You are so strong,” but I was even finding myself getting misty-eyed during a gun battle. The last act feels like a victory lap after all of the trauma the characters (and audience) had been subjected to up until now.
I think my feelings about the movie are all summed up in Karen Gillan’s performance as Nebula. The character is an emotionless antagonist-turned support member of the Guardians, who in this movie had been pushed into the center, holding everything together while everyone and everything else spins out of control. The actor has built a career out of seemingly selfless dedication to interesting projects and forming lasting connections with her collaborators along the way.
In the MCU, Gillan is bald and buried under multiple layers of makeup and/or prosthetics, CG and otherwise. She takes her voice down several registers3And does an American accent and plays an intensely-traumatized character who is almost never allowed to express any emotion other than anger or frustration. She’s been, until now, more of a functional character than a scene-stealing one. But Gillan has been back for every appearance of Nebula, and she voices the character in the animated series. And ever since she was first cast, my question has been… why did she take the part?
I’m not completely naive, so I know that any actor would be a fool to pass up the kind of money that the MCU offers. But taken in context with the rest of her work, there has to be more to it than that. I first became aware of her from Doctor Who, where it was established that Amy Pond was a model, but she treated it like any other job, choosing adventure over glamor. And everything I’ve seen Gillan in since then, the fact that she’s extraordinarily beautiful is either played for humor (like in Jumanji or Selfie), or quickly acknowledged before going off towards adventure, or ignored altogether.
Basically: she could be making just as much money (if not more) with a lot less effort, so it’s apparent that she chooses the parts she finds the most interesting. Which implies a level of genuine sincerity that you don’t find in the rest of the MCU’s cast.
And this also comes after seeing The Life of Chuck, where Gillan is crucial to the entire movie, but she has a part that isn’t show-stopping and has relatively little screen time overall. It felt to me like she was there because she believed in the project and, more importantly, that she wanted to work with Mike Flanagan again.
Carry that over to the Guardians trilogy, and it was impossible for me to watch the third movie without thinking about the story behind its production — James Gunn being unfairly removed from the series by Marvel, the cast making a public protest against that decision and pleading with the studio to reinstate him, and Gunn leaving Marvel after closing out this trilogy. That all suggests another whole level of sincerity; these people aren’t here just to cash another paycheck and turn in a contractual obligation. They’re invested in this story and this crew, and they want to work together again to deliver the conclusion.
Keeping that in mind was essential to my enjoying the movie — or frankly, even finishing it — since the brutal moments would read as sadistically manipulative if you weren’t 100% convinced of their sincerity. It’s the difference between “this movie is pulling cheap and cruel tricks with the suffering of adorable talking animals, in an attempt to make its moments pay off later,” and “this movie is a genuine expression of surviving trauma, accepting the entirety of each other despite our flaws, and finding joy and connection in a universe that can be indifferent and cruel.”
And I connected with the movie on a personal level, albeit on an almost infinitely smaller scale: it reminded me of how I felt writing the final scenes in the Sam & Max games for Telltale. I kept getting emotional during that process, because I knew that this was going to be the last time I’d get to write for characters that I didn’t create, but had loved for decades. And more than that, I knew that it’d be the last time I’d get to work with a team of exceptionally talented friends. With Guardians, it was nice to see that even in a system that is designed to crank out franchise pictures at a reliable pace to make a billion dollars in their opening week, the creative process is still about personal projects and making personal connections. Even for obscenely rich and famous people.
So back to Nebula: the restrained performance, and again the unnaturally lowered voice, makes it feel as if she’s been bottled up for multiple movies, not just this story. So when she hears from Rocket on a communicator, and she starts sobbing (in the background of a scene; the movie doesn’t shove the camera in her face to make it an Impactful Moment), it really feels like a well-earned release, from a character who hadn’t appreciated just how much she’d found her family. And at the bittersweet end, when everyone is dancing to “The Dog Days Are Over” and celebrating amidst tearful goodbyes, she smiles and dances with children, and it feels like an explosion of hard-won joy.
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