KWIF: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (+2)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts. KWIF is not a fart from the front butt.

This Week:
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (2023, d. James Gunn - in theatre)
Sisu (2022, d. Jalmari Helander - in theatre)
Bros (2022, d. Nicholas Stoller - rental)

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I tend to ramble a lot when talking about the movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I am, as they say, invested, and I find that the past half dozen years of scapegoating of all of cinema's ills put upon the MCU has been lazy, to put it kindly. 

But if one were to say there has been a knock off in quality in the post-Endgame MCU, I can't wholly disagree. I could say the introduction of the "Volume" and other "rendered backdrop" technologies has made visuals spectacles somehow less than spectacular, failing to wow viewers in the same way matte paintings did decades ago.  I could say that the pandemic productions feel more hemmed in, more limited in scale, and even maybe a little sloppy and rushed.  I could say that Marvel and Kevin Feige have over-extended themselves with a mass of additional content on Disney+ that maybe dilutes the brand as much as it expands the universe contributing to "superhero fatigue".

I could say all this, but really, I think the reality is the MCU built itself up so well in reaching Infinity War and Endgame, that it provided itself a natural stopping point, and that the idea of rebuilding to a new universe/multiverse-spanning epic seems as exhausting to the more average filmgoer than it is exciting.  Plus the constant politicized flame wars within nerd circles that seeps into public discourse just kinda wants to make you leave it all behind.

But Guardians of the Galaxy has something no other Phase 4 or Phase 5 movie has had: a singular creative vision.  James Gunn, somehow over and above Kevin Feige, has sole ownership of this franchise-within-the-franchise. Even when the Guardians came to play in Infinity War and Endgame, Gunn was consulted.  The Guardians are his children.  And with Volume 3, Gunn gets to see his children off his way.

Gunn really had carte blanche to do what he wanted on the cosmic side of the MCU, the vastness of space allowing him to intersect or avoid events elsewhere as much or as little as he liked. In bringing Volume 3 to life, he's given an epic two and a half hours to tell whatever story he wants, and he's earned the right to avoid MCU mandates.  There's a larger, multiversal story that the MCU is currently building towards, and Gunn, instead, has a very specific story of family, friendship, happiness and letting go that has nothing to do with Kang the Conqueror.

Volume 3 is a very sober movie, not lacking the humour the series has had to this point, but there's an emotional weight and urgency underpinning it that signals most of the core team's traumas.  When Rocket is gravely injured in an attack from a young Adam Warlock, it hits the team hard. Peter Quill is still mourning the loss of Gamora, and Yondu, and his mom, despite having found a sister and a new family, and Rocket's impending doom is not something he can cope with.  Nebula has only ever known pain, so she's utterly guarded all the time, except that during the Blip, her and Rocket (the sole Guardians survivors) had bonded over their shared traumas. Mantis has been treated as something inferior her whole life, and she had maybe hoped that her new family would lift her up, but, as an empathic being, finds she has to do most of the heavy lifting. Drax is just lost, the death of his family at Thanos' hands has led him on a decade-long, miserable quest for vengeance that was left thoroughly unsatisfied, and now he labels himself "the destroyer" because he only feels like tearing things down, not building things up.  Groot, now a swole and on the precipice of adulthood, has lost his angst, embraced his family, but doesn't seem to understand their traumas. Kraglin, left his identity as a Reaver behind, but is failing to live up to Yondu's legacy. And Gamora is all too aware that she is a deviant in the galaxy, that a version of her died, but lived years of a life that she never did, and cannot seem to reconcile the person that people knew her as, and how she knows herself.  

All of this shows us the ties that bind the Guardians together, but it's a loose fragile weave that threatens to come apart at any moment.

Gunn sets the Guardians off on a quest through Rocket's tortured backstory, searching for a code to remove a kill switch hardwired to his heart. We learn of the High Evolutionary, a powerful, intelligent, cruel, vile being who experiments on animals in an effort to rapidly evolve them into "perfect beings". He is a believer in eugenics and is easily the most abhorrent villain the MCU has seen yet.  In flashbacks, we witness, sometimes directly, sometimes the aftereffects of the torture he puts poor Rocket, and other creatures, through in the egocentric quest for "perfection".

Gunn is an animal lover, and the harsh, gut-wrenching scenes of animals in distress is very pointed. But it's not proselytizing, he's not hitting you over the head with a specific spelled out message, but what he is trying to say is not difficult to infer. There's a level of distance humanity likes to maintain from the animal kingdom, an heir of superiority, as well as a veil of ignorance. Is our own advancement worth the suffering of these innocent creatures?

This is as James Gunn a movie as you can get at a PG-13 rating. The themes are very mature, the images are wild, and the language would make Captain America blush.  Gunn has a fascination with the beauty in the grotesque, and there's a lot of horror-derived imagery here but presented as something other than horrific.  For example, there's a kind of inhabited satellite grown out of living tissue serves as headquarters for a research institute that the Guardians need to infiltrate. It's a pink spiral of flesh, with giant hairs protruding from the "skin" of it.  The Guardians need to cut into its hull, unleashing its gooey yellow "blood". It's all so delightfully gross, and you can practically hear Gunn's cackling behind the scenes just knowing what he's getting away with.

Rocket's flashbacks are kind of the reverse, as the sweet and innocent young Rocket shares his pen with Floor (a sweet little bunny with robotic spider legs and a giant metal mouth), Teefs (a gentle walrus grafted onto motorized wheels) and Lylla, an otter with robotic arms.  Amidst the pain and torture that these creatures are suffering through at the hands of the High Evolutionary and his minions, they find friendship. Here Gunn's using the same tactics of knowing what he's getting away with, but doing so to really get at our hearts.  Rocket's story, one which Gunn has been teeing up from the beginning, is of both tragedy and triumph.

This is a long movie, and with few exceptions, every scene is earned, especially given where it needs to end, which is in saying goodbye.  Our main crew each come to an appropriate-for-them endpoint, that also serves as a starting point.  It's a long held tradition in comics that after a good run on a series, when the creative team departs, they both provide an ending for the character or team, but also the hope of further adventures down the road. The objective is to leave the characters in a place that is different from where they started, but not close them off with any finality. Gunn nails it here in brilliant ways that I won't spoil, except to say that a lot of the expected notes (like romances or deaths) don't quite happen like you'd think.

Everyone is fabulous in this film. Any reservation that Dave Bautista would be phoning it in can be quashed. As much as he wants to get away from playing roles like Drax, he's still a damn hard working actor and he continues to find depth in this role that many other performers would not. Chris Pratt's Quill has matured a lot since we first met him, and this film he's become very self-aware. He knows his faults but he also knows his strengths. This may be Pratt's best performance ever.  It's great seeing Karen Gillen over her past few appearances, really crushing her role as Nebula. There are some real awkward moments for the character in the first film, but she came to life in the second, and now is ably leading and holding the team together. Pom Klementieff's Mantis has not had much in the way of character development in her various appearances but she really comes to life here, showing not only what she can bring to battle, but bring to the team, and forging her own independence.  Chukwudi Iwuji's High Evolutionary is drunk with power and riddled with insecurity, and how he weaves through those two sensibilities is balletic. Will Poulter's Adam Warlock is probably going to upset fans of Adam Warlock, but here' the character is basically a child in an adult body, bestowed with the knowledge that he's meant to be something important and magnificent, and not understanding that. There's really no spotlight put on the character, yet, there are layers (and we get Elizabeth Debicki back as Ayesha, Adam's "mother", which is great, even if the film doesn't really have too much time for her).

The visuals here are as vibrant and colourful as ever. If anything helps temper the heavier themes it is the eye-popping colour palette. Gunn pays homage to legends throughout the film, not just giving his old boss Roger Corman a cameo, but a not to John Carpenter here, David Lynch there, and Stanley Kubrick in between. Rather than playing easter egg hockey with Marvel Comics lore, he instead gives his cinematic sci-fi forebears loving thank-yous. 

The warning is to keep younger kids away, and I would agree with that, although there were three very young kids behind us in the theatre and I didn't hear much of a peep out of them (not a lot of talking, the usual indicator of boredom, and surprisingly no crying, though I did a lot of that myself).  I don't think people should be so concerned about exposing their kids to the darker themes of this movie. They're smarter than we think, and if it upsets them, then maybe that's okay to be upset. Because animal cruelty is upsetting. And saying goodbye is sad. These are emotions we should be fostering and allowing to exist in compassionate human beings, not try and shelter away.

Volume 3 is a great finale to a truly special, unexpected blockbuster. I can't wait to see it again. Marvel's loss is definitely DC's gain (can't wait to see what Gunn does with Superman). I think the success of Gunn's trilogy proves that Marvel sometimes should to step back and instead of trying to guide a universe into a singular linear narrative, instead let a creator, or creative team come in with a distinct goal and an investment in the characters just run with it.

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Despite having Finns in my life since childhood, I know very little about Finland itself.  It's not a populous country (around 5.5 million), and its global cultural impact is quietly reserved. I hadn't ever considered what sharing a border with Russia is like, but the film Rare Exports - a Christmas-set alt-horror about murderous Santas (plural) - surprisingly slapped this reality in my face. With Sisu, the director of Rare Exports once again slapped me in the face not just with Finland's constant need for vigilance about its Eastern neighbour, but also the previously unconsidered impact of World War II upon the country.

Sisu doesn't get too deep into the history, except to say that the Germans were forced to withdraw from Lapland, and in doing so they adopted a "scorched Earth" policy, razing cities to the ground, burning the flora, stealing what they could and burying mines.  This is the setting for an over-the-top, hyperviolent, legend-building spectacle that marries Tarantino's neo-westerns with the one-man-army subgenre, and is simultaneously as glorious as it is ridiculous.

Sisu, we're told, is an untranslatable term that defines the national character of Finland, one of stoic determination, resiliance, grittiness, bravery and the like.  Which is to say that Finns are tough, survivors, able to stick it out where others would crumble. Here we follow an old war hero, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) a grizzled war veteran with the nickname "The Immortal"... it's not that you can't kill him, it's just that he refuses to die.

Korpi has been set free from the military since the armistice with the Russians, and he's ventured off into the northern reaches of Lapland with his horse and dog in search of gold. Which after an exhaustive search he finds a small vein, which is more than enough for him. Heading back to civilization, he comes past the retreating Germans, and uneasy crossing that eventually leads to an altercation and the revelation that he's discovered gold. Korpi must then use incredible cunning and fortitude to survive in the open tundra of Lapland.  It's certainly not easy.

Within the first 15 minutes Korpi has survived the impossible, and will continue to do so time after time after time, but we're more than ready to go along with it, because, man, we really can't help but crave for him to take them Nazis out.  As the film goes on, the legend of Korpi is built, and the Finns have their own Rambo. I don't know where they can take the character from here, or if they even need to.  We're perhaps overconcerned with the concept of franchising, of wanting more of a good thing, rather than just appreciating the good thing we've got. Fun!

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Hallmark and their ilk have, in recent years, discovered that much of their viewership for their utterly cheese-filled, holiday-fuelled tripe is not the midwestern housefraus that they thought they were catering to, and that there's actually an honest-to-gosh market for non-heterosexual romances.  

Unfortunately, much of the cheese-filled, holiday-fuelled, non-heterosexual romances play by the same heteronormative storybook just with genders swapped, and title shifts like gay uncles instead of single dads.

Bros is a romcom co-written (with director Nicholas Stoller) and starring Billy Eichner (Billy on the Street, Parks and Recreation) that follows the well-trod romcom formulae of meet-cute - romance - complication - resolution but approached with an honesty about gay relationships that the mainstream production houses generally fear, certain that it will alienate one or more of the "quandrants", whatever that means.  

Eichner plays Bobby, a successful New York-based podcaster who is on the board of the first national LGBTQ+ museum, still in pre-launch mode.  He's never been in a serious relationship but say he's never desired one either. He views his lifestyle as kind of perfect for him, though admits the random hookups become increasingly awkward or more challenging as he hits forty. At a club, he's approached by Aaron ("the meet-cute"), a seriously buff, seriously handsome Luke Macfarlane (a legendary Hallmark stud) and they hit it off, but things are both great and weird as their like-minded sensibility on gay romances sits in the way of them even contemplating a relationship.

But it's kind of inevitable and they find a groove that lasts for months ("the romance"), until a Christmas visit from Aaron's upstate, reserved parents brings out the insecurities in both of them ("the complication"). It's months before they see each other again, each having time to contemplate what was so triggering and how they can possibly get past it, which they resolve to do in a big LGBTQ+ Museum grand opening gala.

Now, there are obvious things that differentiate Bros from typical romcoms (and the cheese-filled, holiday-fuelled, non-heterosexual Hallmarkies), being a lot of sexual acts being performed just off camera (or cleverly disguised on camera), a lot of sex talk and swearing, and of course a lot of gay and LBTQ+ content (including earnest, educational, and comedic sorts). But what I appreciated the most about Eichner and Stoller's script is the maturity of the characters to have real conversations with each other. There are no stupid misunderstandings in this film. What keeps them apart, and what breaks them up are real genuine emotions based on issues that a real person would have (and that are very well conveyed in building the characters in the film), and not plot contrivances. 

It's sweet and romantic and even a little sexy. But mostly (and most importantly), it's  pretty damn funny.