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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Rocket’s backstory forms the emotional core for one last adventure with James Gunn’s Guardians.

The first installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy foreshadowed the wacky space antics to come by opening with Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), grooving to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” on a deserted planet. Volume 2 followed Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) as he boogies to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” blissfully unaware that his fellow Guardians are locked in combat with a giant octopus monster.

But Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 offers no such playful dance number intro from a joyful audience surrogate. Director James Gunn’s Marvel swan song (he’s now creative director for rival DC Studios) opens in darkness. A group of baby raccoons in a dirty cage hears footsteps echo from a hallway, and a silhouette emerges. All the raccoons flee from the cage door except one, his eyes wide in terror as a hand extends slowly into the cage.

That frightened face morphs into the present-day Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the anthropomorphic gunslinging raccoon (but don’t call him that) and Gunn’s preferred “secret hero” of the franchise. When the bristles on Rocket’s face come into sharp focus — the most accomplished CGI that we’ve seen in a Marvel film for quite a while — it’s clear Gunn is not interested in repeating himself.

The rage and frustration of Radiohead’s “Creep” follow Rocket in an early scene as he walks through Knowhere, the Guardians’ new HQ. His found family of oddballs are in a bad place following the events of Avengers: Endgame. A permanently drunk Quill is despondent that former teammate and love interest Gamora (Zoë Saldaña) doesn’t remember her time as a Guardian, while Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) do their best to pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, comic relief Kraglin (Sean Gunn) is joined by newcomer Cosmo the Space Dog (voiced by Maria Bakalova), cracking wise, playing cards, and trying to keep the mood up.

The early sidelining of Quill establishes that this is Rocket’s story, with frequent flashbacks to his time as a genetic experiment under the eye of the maniacal High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a man that harbors a twisted obsession to create the perfect being. Rocket is critically injured during an early skirmish with newcomer Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), but the crew needs the High Evolutionary’s tech to save him. From there, the story gets dark and even depressing, at one point delivering the franchise’s first “Fuck.”

Previous Guardians films have explored the core crew’s backstories, but Rocket’s tragic past has only been hinted at. Guardians has always been about fatherly trauma, whether it’s Gamora and Nebula’s years of torture under Thanos, Drax’s failure to protect his late daughter, or the revelation that Quill’s father was Ego the Living Planet. Rocket’s grueling backstory gives the movie something that’s been missing from recent Marvel films: an emotional core.

Young Rocket dreams big with his fellow experimental subjects; they’re excited to be a part of the High Evolutionary’s new world, even as they undergo grotesque, body-horror alterations. Pet lovers beware: There are some pretty brutal depictions of violence enacted upon animals in this movie.

Star-Lord’s attempts to win back Gamora provide the series’ usual semi-comic tone, and we get the requisite space shoot-outs, and even a Nathan Fillion cameo. But pathos is never far from the surface; Rocket’s journey through his trauma is always front and center. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the sanitized corporate slop that has given moviegoers superhero fatigue during the MCU’s latest phase. Gunn even manages to introduce Warlock, who is set to be a big player in future MCU films, as an organic part of this story, rather than a distraction.

Guardians Vol. 3 is the most creative Marvel film in years, a fitting end to Gunn’s time with Disney. It should serve as the template going forward, but will it? It seems unlikely super-producer Kevin Feige will afford this much creative leeway to directors with lesser reputations, and with Gunn off to DC, the MCU will probably return to the assembly line approach that’s left Phases 4 and 5 feeling stale. At least Gunn, Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Nebula, Mantis, Groot, and especially Rocket can all go out with a bang.

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Thor: Love and Thunder

Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth are both Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder.

There are two schools of thought on how to make a movie about comic book superheroes. The first is to try and make it realistic and grounded in the real world. That’s what Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy did for Batman and The Joker. Those films are grim and violent, long on visceral thrills, short on humor.  

The second school of thought is to make comic book superhero movies more comic book-y. Outlandish plots, self-aware asides, and jaunty humor are the order of the day. The best example of this school of thought is the wacky Batman TV series from 1966. Richard Donner’s earnest 1978 Superman is a less extreme version. 

Students of the gritty school accuse the other side of not taking the source material seriously, while the comic book-y school believes that the grittys fundamentally misunderstand the source material. Since films about superpowered people wearing tights punching each other in space are ubiquitous to the point of being mandatory, the question “Is Batman a good-natured altruist like Adam West or a glowering neo-fascist like Robert Pattison?“ has outsized impact on the culture. 

The two philosophies collide violently in Thor: Love and Thunder. Chris Hemsworth has now appeared in nine films as Thor, but he didn’t find his footing until 2017’s Thor: Raganork, when director Taika Waititi empowered him to go for laughs. Since then, the himbo from Asgard has been a breath of fresh air when things get a little too self-serious  in the MCU. 

The gritty side is represented by Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher. As Nolan’s gravelly voiced Batman, he wrenched the gravitas out of a rich boy who dresses like a bat to play cops and robbers. Making the DC hero into a Marvel antagonist is a admittedly stunt casting, but Bale is a phenomenally talented actor who played one of the greatest villains in cinematic history in American Psycho. 

Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Gorr is the first person we see in Love and Thunder, wandering through the desert of his home planet on a pilgrimage to the shrine of his god Rapu (Jonny Brugh) in an effort to save his daughter, Love (India Rose Hemsworth, who is actually Chris Hemsworth’s daughter) from the blight that has consumed their world. But Love dies anyway, and when Gorr meets the real Rapu, he makes it clear that he doesn’t care about the sufferings of the little people who worship him. So Gorr grabs the nearest weapon, which happens to be the god-killing Necrosword, and vows to wage a campaign of deicide, beginning with Rapu.  

Meanwhile, Thor is hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, saving planets and — having sculpted his Avengers: Endgame dad bod into a chiseled god bod — looking good doing it. Thor’s intro sequence epitomizes why I prefer the comic-booky approach to comic-book movies. I can get detectives chasing serial killers and corrupt cops anywhere, but only Waititi can give me a space Viking fighting an army of owl bears on hover bikes. 

Thor gets wind of Gorr’s anti-god crusade, and returns to Earth to check on New Asgard, where the refugees from his destroyed home planet are now running a tourist trap. Sure enough, Gorr and his shadow monsters have come calling. But the Asgardians are putting up a fight, led by Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and The Mighty Thor (Natalie Portman). 

Hold up — there’s another Thor? And he’s a she? And she’s Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Jane Foster, who, for budgetary reasons was unceremoniously written out of the story after Thor: The Dark World? Yes, yes, and yes. Since the breakup, Jane’s had her ups and downs, first becoming a famous physicist and then contracting terminal cancer. She heeded a psychic call to New Asgard, where the reassembled pieces of Thor’s broken hammer Mjolnir prolonged her life and granted her the powers of the thunder god. As we’ll see, facing an ex who also has his old job is just the beginning of Thor’s problems. 

Love and Thunder is a deeply divided movie. On the one hand, you’ve got a hero dying of cancer and a villain whose motivation is literally the Greek philosopher Epicurius’ Problem of Evil. On the other hand, you’ve got Hemsworth mugging for the camera and the director himself (as Thor’s sidekick Korg) narrating as a “once upon a time” story.  Bale tries valiantly to fit in, but he’s got one gear: “intense.” Portman is professional who understands the assignment, and is able to at least fake having fun. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Love and Thunder can’t decide if it wants to laugh at itself or soar into Valhalla, and ends up doing neither well. 

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Black Widow: Super-Sisters Doing It for Themselves

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov in Black Widow.

First of all, Black Widow should have happened five years ago. It took eleven years — from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in 2019 — for Disney super-producer Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a solo super-movie starring a female superhero. In the interim, Warner Brothers filled the void with 2017’s Wonder Woman, the only good movie made from a DC property in a decade. 

Considering how aggressively mediocre Captain Marvel was, it’s especially galling that it took so long for Scarlett Johansson to get her own starring vehicle as Natasha Romanoff From a character standpoint, Natasha is the most interesting of the Marvel A-team. Trauma has always inflected the best superhero origin stories. (Did you know Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him? Someone should put that in a movie.) She was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin and intelligence operative by the Red Room, a secret Soviet super-soldier program notorious for its brutal methods. Somehow, the stone cold killer’s conscience survived the ordeal, and she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became Nick Fury’s most trusted confidant. Alone among the Avengers as a non-super-powered (albeit surgically enhanced and relentlessly conditioned) human, she feels pain when she gets hit. Thor the space god is cool, but he’s one-note. Natasha’s adamantium-tough exterior hides a broken person, deprived of human connection, riven with guilt for all the “red on my ledger,” trying to balance the books with world-saving good deeds. But she’s always gotten short shrift. During The Avengers iconic Battle of New York, the prototype for all the Marvel Third Acts to come, Black Widow was fighting flying, laser-firing aliens while armed only with a pair of pistols. Couldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. at least get her an assault rifle? 

Natasha’s emotional potential is realized in Black Widow’s unexpectedly moving cold open. It’s 1995, and she’s living in suburban Ohio with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and sister Yelena (played as a 6-year-old by Violet McGraw). Just as they’re about to sit down for an ordinary, wholesome family dinner, father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home with bad news. Turns out, the family are deep-cover spies, and their cover’s been blown. As the fake family rushes to get to the escape plane to take them to Cuba, Natasha stares longingly out the window, saying a silent goodbye to the closest thing to a normal life and human connection she will ever have. Her family may be fake, but it felt real to her.

Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh as super-sisters Natasha and Yelena in Black Widow.

Fast forward to 2016. (The film itself recognizes that it’s late. Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame, so Black Widow’s story takes place while she was on the lam after the events of Captain America: Civil War.) Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh) is hunting a target who turns out to be another member of the Black Widow program. After Yelena strikes a mortal blow, the dying Widow exposes her to a red gas that undoes the chemical mind control regime the Red Room has imposed on her. Yelena goes rogue, stealing the remaining doses of Widow antidote, and sending them to her estranged, faux-sister Natasha for safekeeping. Instead of spending her downtime watching Moonraker — naturally, Natasha’s an obsessive James Bond fan — she decides to track down Yelena, and the pair team up to kill the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and dismantle the Widow program once and for all. 

With director Cate Shortland at the helm, Black Widow is the best superhero picture since Black Panther. It’s not just an acceptably entertaining Marvel product, but an actual good film in its own right. The second-act action set piece, when Natasha and Yelena break their pretend-father Alexei out of a Siberian prison, stands with the airport brawl from Civil War as an all-time, kinetic highlight of comic book cinema. 

David Harbour as Red Guardian

It’s Johansson’s movie (she’s executive producer), but she leads an ensemble cast. Natasha’s been making life-or-death decisions since she was a teenager, so Johansson plays her with a deep world-weariness. She has zero time for petty bullshit; in 2021, I find Natasha’s emotional exhaustion extremely relatable. Pugh is her kid-sister foil, knowing exactly where to needle to get a rise out of the ice queen. The comic relief is left up to Harbour as the Red Guardian, Captain America’s Soviet counterpart gone to seed, still bitter about losing the ideological struggle with the West. 

Black Widow’s ideology is overtly feminist. It’s a quintessential female gaze movie. The women are sexy, but not subject to a leering camera; the men are either buffoons or sniveling abusers. The stakes and scale are remarkably restrained by Marvel standards. Natasha, a subject of unthinkable patriarchal abuse, is fighting to give other victims the kind of agency she was denied. Left to her own devices, Black Widow doesn’t choose to save the world from xenocidal aliens. Her heroism serves a more practical, down-to-earth purpose. 

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Loki Enters The Marvel Multiverse

Tom Hiddleston as Loki

Every culture needs a god of mischief. For many Native Americans, it was Coyote. In West Africa, it was Anansi. For the Norse, it was Loki. 

Most trickster gods have no motivation beyond spreading chaos. They are, as they say on the internet, in it for the lulz. Loki was a little different. He had an agenda. To prevent him from seizing power, the gods of Valhalla imprisoned him — order symbolically controlling chaos. But one day, he will escape his bounds, and bring about ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and the destruction of creation. Chaos, in other words, will ultimately win. 

When Stan Lee introduced a superhero based on the Norse god Thor, making a version of Loki to be his arch-enemy was a no-brainer. Played by Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the version most people know. And now, to feed the gaping maw of streaming content of Disney+, Loki the villain has his own series. 

Loki begins, as all things must, with Avengers: Endgame. During the hopelessly convoluted time travel plot/MCU clip show the Avengers concocted to reverse Thanos’ snap heard ‘round the universe, they traveled back to the events of the first Avengers film, where a chaotic mix-up briefly left Loki in possession of the MacGuffin de jour, the cosmically powerful Tesseract. But when he tries to teleport away from the fracas to use his new magical artifact to take over Asgard, he finds himself instead in the clutches of a mysteriously powerful organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Instead of producing plentiful, cheap, low-carbon power from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar, like the TVA we all know and tolerate should be doing, this TVA is tasked with keeping the multiverse simple and understandable by stamping out variations from the One Sacred Timeline. Putting a powerful magic item in the hands of a trickster god certainly qualifies as a disruptive event. 

Loki is used to throwing his magical weight around, but the TVA’s privileged place in the multiverse means it makes its own rules. Magic doesn’t work, but time travel sure does, and they weaponize it to neutralize Loki. Existing outside of time, they’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again. 

In the pilot, much is made of the TVA’s ’70s retro aesthetic. Instead of charismatic gods and heroes, they’re a bunch of bureaucrats doing a job. When Loki appears before Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she is on the road to sentencing him to whatever the multiverse equivalent of the death penalty is until Special Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He’s hunting a powerful variant force threatening to tear the multiverse a new charged vacuum emboitment, and it takes a trickster to catch a trickster. 

Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the best actors in the MCU, providing a little lightness to Thor’s ponderous proceedings, until Taika Waititi let Chris Hemsworth’s comic hair down in Raganarok. Under the direction of Kate Heron, he is predictably charismatic. Wilson unexpectedly turns out to be a great deadpan foil to Hiddleston, and the pair’s chemistry promises to propel Loki to series length. 

Written by Rick and Morty alum Michael Waldron, Loki looks to take the MCU squarely into Doctor Who territory of multidimensional madness. If the team can sustain the energy of the pilot, it might be a time trip worth taking.