From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the Superhero Movie Rewatch. He’s periodically revisited the feature to look back at new releases, as well as a few he missed the first time through.
The third Guardians of the Galaxy film was, like so many films planned for 2020 and beyond, delayed, but in this case, it wasn’t due to the recent apocalypse, but rather because writer/director James Gunn had been fired, due to offensive old tweets coming to light. Eventually, Marvel Studios rehired Gunn, partly due to outcry from the cast of the Guardians films, but he was committed to The Suicide Squad at that point, so the film was not released until 2023, six years after Volume 2.
The conclusion to Gunn’s always-imagined trilogy of Guardians films, Volume 3 not only concludes the storyline that ran through Volumes 1 and 2, but also Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, as well as Thor: Love and Thunder and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
The primary focus of the film was finally providing Rocket’s backstory, which also involves two major characters from Marvel’s comics history: the High Evolutionary and Adam Warlock.
In the comics, the High Evolutionary was created by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby in 1966’s Thor #134. He was a British scientist from the 1930s named Herbert Wyndham who engaged in experiments on animals and humans—including on himself, making himself functionally immortal and powerful. He created a remote den of science on Wundagore Mountain, full of his “New Men,” who are evolved animals. (One such was an evolved cow named Bova, who helped raise Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.)
Adam Warlock was created as an artificial perfect human, known only as “Him,” in Fantastic Four #66-67 by Lee & Kirby in 1967, though he was developed as Adam Warlock by Roy Thomas & Gil Kane in the first several issues of Marvel Premiere in 1972. He was given that name by the High Evolutionary, who conscripted Warlock to protect the Counter-Earth he created. Warlock later would be involved in the conflicts with Thanos, and he also wears one of the infinity gems, the Soul Gem, which is one of the sources of his power. He has been part of the Guardians of the Galaxy in the comics, and also fought alongside the four-color versions of Gamora, Drax, Pip the Troll, Captain Marvel, Moondragon, the Silver Surfer, and others.
In the movie, both characters are established as aliens. This High Evolutionary, played by Chukwudi Iwuji, has also created a Counter-Earth, but only after he observed Earth as part of his ongoing attempt to create the perfect society. He also experiments on Earth animals (among them raccoons) and evolves them, much like his comics counterpart, though his experiments are somewhat more grotesque.
Warlock was seeded in the post-credits scene of Volume 2, created by the Sovereign, who are in this movie established as one of the species created by the High Evolutionary. Played by Will Poulter, Warlock still has a gem in his forehead like his comics counterpart, though it isn’t an infinity stone, obviously, since they were all destroyed in Endgame.
In addition, we get another comics mainstay, the Recorders. In the comics, they’re androids that are created by the Rigellians to observe and record the goings-on of the universe; here, they’re minions of the High Evolutionary (and they wear white instead of green).
Back from the Holiday Special are Chris Pratt as Peter Quill, Dave Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Vin Diesel as the voice of Groot, Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket, Sean Gunn as Kraglin (and also the motion capture for Rocket; Gunn also provides the voice for the young Rocket in flashback), Maria Bakalova as the voice and motion capture of Cosmo the Spacedog, and (in a very brief hallucinatory cameo) Michael Rooker as Yondu. Back from Endgame is Zoe Saldaña as the alternate version of Gamora who came forward in time in that movie. Back from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 are Sylvester Stallone as Stakar Ogord, Elizabeth Debicki as the Sovereign leader Ayesha, Seth Green as the voice of Howard the Duck, Michael Rosenbaum as Martinex, and Gregg Henry as Jason Quill. Back from Guardians of the Galaxy is Christopher Fairbank as the Broker.
Debuting in this film, besides Iwuji and Poulter, are Linda Cardelini as the voice and motion capture of Lylla, Asim Chaudhry as the voice of Teefs, Mikaela Hoover as the voice of Floor, Kai Zen as Phyla, Judy Greer as the voice of the War Pig, Dee Bradley Baker as the voice of Blurp, and Daniela Melchior, Nathan Fillion, Pete Davidson, and Jennifer Holland as various employees of Orgocorp.
While the main storyline has concluded, the Guardians of the Galaxy are still a thing as of the end of the film, plus a card at the end says that Star Lord will return, though nothing specific has been announced quite yet…
“There is no God, that’s why I stepped in!”
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3
Written and directed by James Gunn
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: May 5, 2023
We open with a flashback showing the High Evolutionary taking one of several raccoons taken from Earth and experimenting on him. In the present, Rocket is playing Radiohead’s “Creep” on Quill’s Zune and wandering around Knowhere, which—as established in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special—is now Guardians HQ and which has quite the community. Quill is drunk, and gets cranky at Rocket using his Zune right up until he passes out, muttering about how much he loves Gamora. We also see Kraglin and Cosmo having a contest, which mostly shows that Kraglin still is having trouble controlling Yondu’s arrow. Kraglin calls Cosmo a bad dog, and she is devastated, demanding that he take it back. Kraglin refuses to do so.
Then Adam Warlock—a powerful being created by the Sovereign specifically to take revenge on the Guardians—shows up to try to kidnap Rocket. He is driven away by the Guardians, though he does considerable physical damage to Knowhere, breaks Mantis’ arm, beats the living crap out of Drax and Nebula, and badly hurts Rocket.
Most everyone can be fixed by a medpack (or, in Nebula’s case, self-repair), but Rocket’s body refuses the medpack’s treatment for some reason. Nebula examines him and discovers that his body is trademarked and can only be treated by an authorized person with the passcode. They track the trademark to Orgocorp. With Rocket unconscious and on life-support in the medbay, the team takes off, leaving Kraglin and Cosmo to guard Knowhere. (Kraglin still refuses to recant his comment that Cosmo is a bad dog, to Cosmo’s great chagrin.)
They get through Orgorcorp’s shields, then rendezvous with the Ravagers, to Quill’s surprise. Nebula hired them to help break in. Gamora is now running with Stakar’s Ravager pack, to Quill’s further surprise. (Nebula didn’t tell him because she thought he’d freak out, which he proceeds to do, proving her right.) The Ravagers provide space suits and Orgocorp uniforms, and they then break into the biologically grown corporate HQ. They bluff their way past Orgocorp security (mostly by Quill and the chief of security bonding over the idiots they have to deal with on their team, in Quill’s case referring to Drax), and then get their hands on the data they need for Rocket by taking one of the clerks hostage. (Quill tries to charm her, which doesn’t even remotely work, so Gamora uses the threat of violence, which does.)
Throughout all this, Quill is being creepy and stupid toward Gamora, who is not the one he had a relationship with (though she’s pretty close to the Gamora he first met, who introduced herself to Quill by assaulting him). She keeps reminding him of this, to little avail.
They obtain the information, have a running firefight with security, and finally they make their getaway, with Groot flying the ship in to grab them.
The data they obtain has details on how Rocket came to be: he was one of many animals the High Evolutionary experimented on in his attempt to create the perfect species. Four of them—Batch 89—are placed in cages together. Besides Rocket, there’s Lylla, an otter with robotic arms, Floor, a rabbit with a weird mouthpiece, and Teefs, a walrus. (They have given themselves those names.) Rocket is also proving to be a prodigy, and is the only one of HE’s creations who has the capability for creative and inspirational thought. With Rocket’s breakthrough, HE thinks he can now create his perfect society. However, HE is ripshit over the fact that Rocket saw what the others didn’t, and at the fact that only he seems to have succeeded. He also breaks it to Rocket that he and his friends are not going to the new world he’s creating, as they had hoped.
Rocket, however, has been stealing bits and bobs every time he’s out of the cage, and now has constructed an electronic key for the cages. He frees Lylla—but before he can free the others, HE shoots Lylla, having predicted that Rocket might try something. Rocket completely loses it and attacks HE, tearing his face to ribbons. His security tires to stop him, and Teefs and Floor are caught in the crossfire. Rocket makes his way to a spaceship and escapes.
The Guardians are aghast at what was done to Rocket, as he never told them any of this. However, the passcode they need has been removed by a Recorder. Quill recognizes the Recorder who signed it out from passing him in the hall.
Quill decides to confront HE head on. Gamora thinks he’s insane, especially since it’s obviously a trap. Quill rationalizes that it’s not a trap if you know it’s coming, it’s a face-off. (He insists on that several times throughout the film. Nobody ever really buys it.) Gamora demands that they bring her back to the Ravagers, but they refuse, as time is of the essence.
Orgocorp security captures a Ravager who was keeping an eye on things. Ayesha tells Warlock to show him that they mean business while interrogating him, and Warlock incinerates him. Ayesha angrily points out that they can’t question a corpse. However, Gamora then contacts the Ravager for an exfil, and she blithely sends the coordinates, not realizing that it isn’t one of her fellow Ravagers on the line.
The Guardians arrive at Counter-Earth, a re-created Earth with evolved animals living like people in an American 1950s suburb. They manage to ingratiate themselves to the locals, despite a rather nasty language barrier, and they eventually determine that there’s a tower they have to go to. They also see a great deal of crime and yuckiness, belying the notion that this is a “perfect society.”
Quill leaves Mantis and Drax with the ship to keep an eye on Rocket and takes Groot and Nebula to HE’s tower. HE’s guards refuse to let Nebula enter, as no weapons are allowed, and Nebula’s arm is a weapon. Once they get inside, HE mostly ignores and dismisses them. He also sends a minion to kidnap Rocket from the ship. That attempted kidnapping is foiled by Gamora and Warlock, though the latter is there to kidnap Rocket for himself and Ayesha in order to ingratiate themselves with HE. Drax and Mantis are not present to protect Rocket because Drax decided he wanted to be in on the action, and stole a motorcycle and rides it to HE’s tower.
However, the tower isn’t a tower, it’s a ship, and HE is taking off and destroying Counter-Earth, as it’s a failed experiment. Once the destruction starts, Warlock abandons his quest to kidnap Rocket to try (and fail) to save Ayesha, who is disintegrated, as is the entire planet. Gamora manages to take off, at least.
Groot has a mess of weapons inside himself, and he and Quill get into a firefight with HE’s thugs, eventually diving off the ship as it’s taking off with the Recorder. Meanwhile, not knowing this has happened, Nebula, Drax, and Mantis board the ship as it’s taking off to rescue Quill and Groot. Instead, they encounter a whole mess of kids, HE’s latest attempt at creating a perfect species.
Quill gets the passcode from the Recorder and is able to finally heal Rocket. For his part, Rocket is ready to give up and sees Lylla, Teefs, and Floor in the midst of a white light. Lylla convinces him that it isn’t his time yet and Rocket comes back to life, after Quill performs CPR when the medpack proves inadequate.
Nebula is rather shocked to learn that Drax knows the local language, which would’ve been useful information to have earlier, but nobody actually asked him. She’s also shocked to find out that Quill isn’t on the ship to be rescued. HE then finds and captures Nebula, Drax, and Mantis, putting them in a dungeon with three Abilisks. However, Mantis is able to get through to the big scary monsters and the three literally ride the Abilisks to freedom.
Quill contacts Kraglin, who flies Knowhere to Counter-Earth to open up a second front on HE. Several of HE’s thugs attack Knowhere, but Kraglin finally is able to get good control of Yondu’s arrow, and takes out most of the bad guys—at least until the arrow gets stuck in a wall. However, Cosmo takes care of the last thug, and Kraglin finally admits that she is a good dog.
Quill, Gamora, Rocket, and Groot board HE’s ship, and eventually come across their teammates and their new mounts. The other Recorder tries to mutiny against HE, as his desire to acquire Rocket has become untenable, but he kills her and the rest of his bridge crew.
Our heroes free all the kids and also—at Rocket’s insistence—all the animals HE has taken, including a mess of baby raccoons. They even rescue Warlock, which surprises him, given all the damage he’s caused.
Rocket goes after HE, which might have been a mistake, but for the fact that his teammates—and Gamora—come after him. They make short work of HE, and then escape his ship. Everyone makes it except Quill, who goes back for his Zune and winds up trapped in space. However, Warlock rescues him.
Knowhere now has a massive community of children and animals. Nebula and Drax plan to stay on Knowhere to lead the community. Both Quill and Mantis leave as well, the former to go back to Earth for more than just a fight against Thanos or to kidnap Kevin Bacon, and to really reconnect with his grandfather; the latter to find herself after spending her whole life doing either what Ego wanted or what the Guardians wanted. Gamora returns to the Ravagers, leaving Rocket and Groot the only original Guardians left, with Quill ceding leadership to the evolved raccoon.
Rocket then plays “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine on Quill’s Zune, casting it to Knowhere’s PA system, and soon everyone is dancing to it. Meanwhile, Mantis rides off with the three Abilisks, and Quill returns to Earth and has a tearfully joyous reunion with his elderly grandfather.
We later see the new team in action: Rocket, Groot, Kraglin, Warlock, Cosmo, and one of the rescued children, Phyla.
“Quite a novel escape plan, jumping head-first into an exploding planet…”
The post-Endgame MCU films have very much been hit-or-miss, but this one definitely qualifies as one of the hits. Like the first film (and unlike the second), there’s a perfect balance of humor, action-adventure, and pathos.
What I especially love is that James Gunn understands how writing in a larger universe works. Indeed, it’s instructive to look at the different approach that Gunn took to that of Taika Waititi. Both were building off of the events of Endgame, but where Waititi disposed of every connection to that in about five minutes (writing out the Guardians as fast as he possibly could and having Thor back in perfect physical shape via a lame-ass training montage flashback), Gunn embraced the status quo he was given. (To be fair, Gunn was a consultant and producer on Infinity War and Endgame, so he had more skin in the game than Waititi, but still…) It bodes well for Gunn’s future as the guru of the DC Extended Universe (or whatever the hell they’re calling it).
It also helps that Gunn is a really good writer and director. And he understands that the heart of this team has always been Rocket and Groot, and that holds true here. This despite the fact that those two don’t have that much screen time, and most of Rocket’s is either in flashback to his time as part of the High Evolutionary’s Batch 89 or comatose in the present.
But the movie is very much about him, finally firing the Chekhov’s gun that was on the mantelpiece (Chekhov’s Gunn?) in the first movie when Rocket first was bare-chested and we saw all the implants in his back. And his story is both glorious (from a writing perspective) and awful (from a character one), bringing into focus his inability to trust people but also his desire to be part of a found family unit. His partnership with Groot, his teaming up with the rest of the gang in the first two movies, his allying with the Avengers during the blip in Endgame, all of it is him trying to re-create the dynamic he had with Lylla, Floor, and Teefs.
And yes, it’s predictable as hell, and you know it’s coming, and dammit if Gunn still didn’t make me tear up when HE shot Lylla. (On the other hand, I rolled my eyes at the white-light near-death experience Rocket had, which was just nonsense.)
Having said that, this is a team movie, not a Rocket Raccoon movie. (And I do love that Rocket finally calls himself that at the end. The character was originally created in 1976 by Bill Mantlo & the late great Keith Giffen as a tribute to the Beatles song “Rocky Raccoon.” He was even teamed up with Wal Rus, a tribute to the Fab Four’s “I Am the Walrus.”) Everyone gets a character arc here, from Quill finally getting over losing Gamora and accepting that this isn’t his Gamora with the Ravagers now and also finally going home; Drax getting to be a Dad again, after Ronan and Thanos took that from him, which set him instead on the course to becoming Drax the Destroyer; Nebula finding purpose as a hero that she never had as Thanos’ daughter; Kraglin finally getting the hang of the arrow; and Mantis coming into her own instead of just being the woo-woo chick. (Mantis also has one of the best lines in the movie when she berates Nebula for verbally abusing Drax, because he’s the only person in the group who doesn’t hate himself.)
Best of all, though, is Gamora. Gunn doesn’t sledgehammer everything back to the status quo like certain other directors I mentioned in the second paragraph of this review section. Recognizing that this really is a different Gamora, she never fully rejoins the team. Yes, she’s there, and eventually is even willing to work with them. But in the group hug at the end, she stays back away from it, and it isn’t until she returns to Stakar and the rest of the Ravagers that she celebrates. She’s found a family, it’s just not the titular family of this movie series.
As ever, the performances are fabulous. Even the small roles stand out beautifully: Maria Bakalova’s hurt pleading with Kraglin to take back that Cosmo is a bad dog; Nathan Fillion’s cynical civil servant; Elizabeth Debicki as an Ayesha who is desperately trying to regain the glory she had before the Guardians showed up in the last movie; and, of course, Chukwudi Iwuji, giving us a grandly operatic villain in the High Evolutionary.
It’s not perfect, of course. While the pacing is much better than it was last time, it—like many of Gunn’s movies, truth be told—goes on just a hair too long. Counter-Earth being a 1950s American suburb is a spectacular failure of imagination and triumph of lazy storytelling. And while I admit to a certain bias as someone who has never liked the character of Adam Warlock, turning him into a whiny teenager borders on character assassination of a long-standing Marvel hero (though he does, at least, get a redemption arc).
Still, this is at once a great ending to the story, a perfect setup for more stories in the future, and—most important—a very good movie on its own. As with the others, music plays a huge role, from Rocket’s depression-listen to “Creep” at the start to the perfect use of Heart’s “Crazy on You” when Warlock attacks to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” as the soundtrack to a fight scene to the glorious catharsis of all of Knowhere dancing to “The Dog Days are Over.”
Next week, we go back to the DC universe with Blue Beetle.
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s next big novel project is Supernatural Crimes Unit, about a division of NYPD that handles crimes involves magic and monsters, which will be published in either late 2024 or early 2025 by the Weird Tales Presents imprint of Blackstone Publishing.
We did not care for this movie — it was too reliant on stupidity for comic use. eg., Adam Warlock. And Peter Quill. It reminded me, tbh, of Thor: Ragnarok, which I hated.
After watching this movie, I feel negative desire to see the further adventures of Peter Quill.
Given what I do for a living, I have to cut in here:
Nebula examines him and discovers that his body is trademarked and can only be treated by an authorized person with the passcode…
That’s more than trademarked. Trademarked would be slapping a logo on Rocket’s body. This is more like DRM’d or hardware-locked.
On a less legal-pedantic note: Quill tries to charm her, which doesn’t even remotely work, so Gamora uses the threat of violence, which does.
As I recall, Quill’s attempts at charm, mixed with his mopey asides about the Gamora situation, do soften the clerk enough so that she helps out–at which point he does something other than what he’d told her he wanted to do, suggesting that part (though obviously not all) of his mopeyness, at least to her, was an act. (It doesn’t entirely eliminate the creepy nature of his pining after the other Gamora, though.)
scifantasy: The initial approach to the clerk was not an act, I don’t think, because it didn’t need to be. The later one was, yes, because he needed to get into the security system.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I haven’t been that fond of the Guardians movies, finding them harmlessly entertaining but rather shallow, jammed with promising worldbuilding ideas that they didn’t really do much with. But this was probably the most effective one of the three, which I guess is because it’s the most heartfelt and poignant, with the wrenching origin story for Rocket.
The Counter-Earth scenes are a triumph of prosthetic makeup effects and animatronics; IIRC, it was the largest prosthetic-makeup shoot in film history. It’s sad that most audience members are probably going to assume it’s all computer graphics. But it’s odd that they had the Counter-Earthlings speak a language the characters didn’t understand, given that the first GotG film established (in briefly glimpsed text in the lineup scene) that Quill used a universal translator to understand alien languages. They even went to the trouble to make it a real, consistent language with grammar and everything, which is impressive, but incongruous in context.
My pet peeve was the climax’s reliance on the myth that people instantly freeze in vacuum, which gets it completely backward. Vacuum is an insulator — you lose heat far more slowly in vacuum than in air, for the exact same reason you lose heat far more quickly in water than in air (i.e. the relative density of material to conduct and convect heat away). That’s how thermos bottles keep your coffee hot. That’s why spacesuits need built-in cooling systems and spaceships need heat radiators. Why does fiction always get that wrong? (With some exceptions, like For All Mankind and, surprisingly, Doctor Who in “Oxygen.”)
Keith, abbreviating “High Evolutionary” as “HE” is kind of confusing, because it looks like you’re saying the third-person male pronoun with shouty emphasis. It would’ve been clearer as “H.E.” Doesn’t the Evolutionary have a Marvel-style corny nickname like “Evvy” or something?
Is Nathan Fillion marked as debuting in this movie because he plays a new character here? For was he not also the blue Monstrous Inmate in GotG vol. 1?
I liked this movie very much. It exceeded my expectations considerably, and I count it as one of the best MCU movies after “Endgame”. I was bothered by a few things (like a whole planetfull of families being just killed off merely minutes after we meet them), but as a whole, it worked for me brilliantly, even if watching some of it hurt (looking at Batch 89).
The article has laid out so much of what I like about this movie better than I ever could (finished arcs, respecting what has been previously established, asking some difficult questions). I would just add that I laughed out loud when I saw what truly hid behind the scene I had been worrying over for months after seeing it in the trailer, and I really liked the little nod to the holiday special in the end.
The High Evolutionary did something in one movie that Thanos never did for me. I despised his casual cruelty and narcissism as well as his tantrums. I wanted him dead in a very ugly way. Thanos was just your standard lunatic.
I had a hard time with Adam Warlock because I’m not a comics nerd, and his role as “The Martha” on the HISHE YouTube channel was my idea of what he is. In the movie, he’s so powerful that turning him into a naive kid kept him from becoming a total monster with no time for a character arc from evil to good.
What impressed me most about the movie was the storytelling and the careful seeding of backstory and world building information. As someone who doesn’t keep the comic and movie trivia at the forefront of my viewing, it was easy to follow. I watched the movie with two people who didn’t have a clue about GUARDIANS, and they had very few questions later.
And Cosmo is a good dog, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Celebrinnen: Yes, that was a new character Fillion was playing. He was in each of the other two films, too, as Gunn is, I believe, contractually obligated to have both Fillion and Michael Rooker appear in every single one of his movies. *laughs*
Christopher: the HE (or H.E.) has no such cutesy abbreviations, amusingly enough, and I was just too damn lazy to type his full name all the time, and also too lazy to include the periods.
MByerley: Cosmo is a very good dog.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
After finding the previous MCU movies a little meh (not bad, just meh) and hearing how good this one was, had high expectations for this one that…were not met.
I think the best summation of my frustration with this movie is that there is a great movie in here buried in a mediocre one. It’s just TOO LONG – I found myself checking the time a few times to see when it was over. I could probably do without the entirety of the Adam Warlock plot, it just felt like something that was shoved in because they remembered that after credits scene. I’m not sure if – aside from the initial attack on Rocket – it really impacted that much. (Although I did love Debicki so maybe there would still have been a way to keep her on, perhaps as a disgraced minion of the High Evolutionary).
The other thing is I just felt like every time I started getting invested in the character beats or an emotional moment, there was another big battle scene that just felt like it went on too long, and kind of suspended my disbelief. Maybe Peter can take it due to being part Celestial but some of these characters were taking hits that just seemed like nothing and it just lacked stakes to me.
That said, there are a lot of great things – Rocket’s story with the High Evolutionary, Nebula’s continued prickliness and attempting to fit into her found family, Drax getting to be a dad again (I’m embarrassed to say I forgot part of his character was that he’d lost a family before GotG), and the way they handled Peter and Gamora. I also am so glad they didn’t go the easy ‘feel good’ route of new Gamora just slotting back into old Gamora’s place, and letting the situation actually progress and that Quill really did just have to move past his assumptions/desires.
I liked that this movie wasn’t the laugh riot that the previous two were. Rocket’s origin was never going to be something funny and I’m glad the movie doesn’t try to force humor where it doesn’t belong. I was also glad to see Quill still struggling with his loss.
I will say, however, that essentially building an entire movie out of cruelty toward animals made it a hard watch for some folks in my household. My 16-year-old, who loved the first two films, walked out after realizing that the animals Rocket was caged with were likely to die. My 11-year-old was also hit hard by their passing, but made it to the bittersweet end of the film – announcing that while she liked the film, she likely wouldn’t ever want to watch it again
The whole thing about Adam Warlock is that he’s had MULTIPLE stories about him, from Lee/Kirby’s naive child to Thomas’ literal Christ figure to Starlins, jaded cynical, world weary hero. And each succeeding incarnation absolutely depends on the previous iteration to work.
The GOTG version of Warlock is squarely centered on his child state, and I’m fine with that. Jumping directly to his world weary phase would just seem to be unearned fan service, in my opinion.
@7/krad: “…I was just too damn lazy to type his full name all the time, and also too lazy to include the periods.”
That’s what “Replace All” is for. ;)
Back when I used WordPerfect, I created macros for frequently typed words — for instance, I’d type “en” followed by a space and it would automatically become “Enterprise.” But I never figured out how to do it when I switched to Word, and I fell out of the habit.
As for Cosmo, what’s weird for me is that, according to the behind-the-scenes special, they had the voice actress crawling around on set miming being a dog, then digitally replaced her with a lifelike CGI dog. Wouldn’t it have been more realistic, or at least cheaper, to use an actual dog and just use CGI to move its mouth or whatever? I mean, CGI should be for things you can’t do without it. If you want a lifelike dog in a movie, nothing can do that better than just getting a dog (or, more likely, two or more lookalike dogs trained with different specialties). Maybe having a real dog wear the spacesuit would’ve been uncomfortable, but if the whole dog plus spacesuit was CGI anyway, it would’ve probably been easier to animate a CGI spacesuit around an actual dog.
@8 – Oh, Adam Warlock is completely superfluous to this movie. I’m with you on that.
@11 said: Wouldn’t it have been more realistic, or at least cheaper, to use an actual dog and just use CGI to move its mouth or whatever?
With the way they did it in the film, you’re only paying an actress and how ever many animators. With a real dog, you’re paying for the dog and a trainer in addition to how ever many extra takes it would take for the dog to get his/her performance “right” – in addition to the animators. I’m imagining that you could even get the initial model for the dog from a catalog of CGI creatures created for things like pet food commercials at a pretty low cost rather than creating it from scratch.
I read an article a couple years ago (around the time that Harrison Ford did a whole movie with a CGI dog) stating that the “uncanny valley” isn’t as notable with animal features and that commercials had been using 100% CGI animals for a long time without people noticing
@11. I’ve seen dog winter suit ads that look pretty dang close to the body of Cosmo’s suit.
On the “HE” problem, use High Evolutionary once, then use “HE (High Evolutionary)” once. That helps the clueless figure out what you are doing.
#13
I never bothered with that Harrison Ford movie precisely because they used a phony looking CG dog. Maybe if the animators had made the dog act like an actual dog, it might have been bearable, but they had him emoting like a human. I saw someone argue that it was needed so Ford had someone to act with, that it would enhance his performance. Which is ridiculous. We see the emotions we want to see in a dog’s face. The “enhancement” is filled in by audience in that situation, not the animal.
In short, get a real dog, Hollywood. I know it might cost more for a struggling little mom and pop shop like Disney, but you have to make sacrifices for your art.
I know a lot of people that couldn’t take the portrayal of animal cruelty in the film. I guess you can’t win “em all.
I know that you usually put December releases in the next run of the re-watch, but it might be best to do Aquaman 2 at the end of this one and put the abysmal year 2023 behind us.
@13/twels: “With the way they did it in the film, you’re only paying an actress and how ever many animators. With a real dog, you’re paying for the dog and a trainer in addition to how ever many extra takes it would take for the dog to get his/her performance “right” – in addition to the animators. I’m imagining that you could even get the initial model for the dog from a catalog of CGI creatures created for things like pet food commercials at a pretty low cost rather than creating it from scratch.”
Yeah, but my point is that animating an entire CGI dog is enormously more work-intensive than just animating mouth movements or expressions onto a real dog. The former might take, at a guess, ten to twenty times more animator-hours and rendering hours on the computer. Even if you’re using a pre-existing model, you still have to animate it frame by frame, and that’s the hard part, the part that takes months of meticulous work.
So your comparison doesn’t hold, because you’d be paying for far less CGI labor and rendering time overall, and the cost of a dog and trainer is probably trivial in comparison. I mean, it should be immediately obvious that it takes vastly more time and effort to create something from scratch than to take a picture of something that’s already there.
@14/MByerly: “On the “HE” problem, use High Evolutionary once, then use “HE (High Evolutionary)” once. That helps the clueless figure out what you are doing.”
No, it doesn’t, because the problem is the context. I mean, of course I knew intellectually what “HE” stood for, but when I read a sentence like “With Rocket’s breakthrough, HE thinks he can now create his perfect society,” my kneejerk reaction was to read the “HE” there as an emphatic reference to Rocket, and I had to stop and take a moment to remember that “HE” meant High Evolutionary. It’s not about “cluelessness,” simply clarity and ease of reading. The ambiguous acronym is a textual speed bump that could be smoothed out.
@16/EP: I find it odd that we’re so much more troubled by depictions of cruelty to animals than cruelty to humans. I mean, of course cruelty to animals is bad, but shouldn’t cruelty to humans upset us at least as much?
Also, while animal cruelty is depicted here, it should be noted that this movie was praised by animal rights groups for the overall message.
#17: FWIW, I did not have the problem you did with the “HE” abbreviation ‐ it took a second or two at the first instance to register that that was what Keith was doing, but my reading-brain filled in the context thereafter and did not have pronoun issues.
That said, I’d agree that it’s a slightly awkward construction…but in the specific context, there’s absolutely no construction that isn’t at least slightly awkward. Spelling out the full name every time is excessive, including periods in the acronym without a “the” is technically wrong, and including both (“the H. E.”) imposes a tonal component – at least to my ear – that seems inappropriate. In the end, I think Keith’s solution is the least awkward of a bunch of awkward choices, and the most consistent with the tone of his overall writing style.
Nope, not the Guardians Of The Galaxy at all.
The Guardians were introduced in Marvel Super-Heroes #18 (1969), then made sporadic appearances until they had a solid run in Marvel Presents (1976). Each team member came from a different planet of our solar system and was genetically altered to be able to survive his or her planet’s conditions. They found themselves united as resistance fighters against the reptilian Badoon, who conquer our system in the 30th century. Peter Quill/Starlord is not a member and his stories are not even part of Marvel continuity. Groot was a one-off monster from the pre-superhero Tales To Astonish. Rocket Raccoon was a funny animal character who had a handful of appearances and a miniseries in the 80s.
The film characters bear little or no resemblance to my Guardians and the failure of the first film to entertain means that, like most of the Marvel movies, I will not be watching numbers two and three.
These movies are not Marvel Comics distilled, they are Marvel Comics diluted.
Quoth Christopher: “…and the cost of a dog and trainer is probably trivial in comparison.”
You are seriously underestimating the cost of using animals, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time, as animals don’t always do what they’re supposed to do even trained ones. CGI actually follows instructions without fail or needing to be bribed with treats.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Charlie: you are not entirely correct. These Guardians were based on the 2008 GotG comic written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, which included these characters rather than the original team from 1969.
They may not be your Guardians, but they are entirely based on one of the comic book versions.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@21 krad:
Not yet…*ominous music*
@17 said: Even if you’re using a pre-existing model, you still have to animate it frame by frame, and that’s the hard part, the part that takes months of meticulous work.
But that’s where the motion capture comes in. The actress in the suit is providing all the “animating,” which a preexisting model can essentially be pasted over. Cosmo (if memory serves) doesn’t move a lot throughout most of the shots she’s in, which would also cut costs considerably.
As Keith pointed out, there are also time savings as often, a real dog or cat is not going to do what you want the first time – and if you change up what you want, they have to relearn just about everything. Plus, I imagine having real animals on set comes with insurance costs in the event that a nervous dog bites someone or gets hurt on set. I recently read an oral history of “Frasier” and all of the actors talked about how friendly “Eddie,” the cute little Jack Russell terrier was actually quite unfriendly. The cost of motion-capture has definitely gone down over the years. I’ve no way of knowing for sure, but I can’t imagine that Disney would really have chosen to fully animate the dog if there weren’t cost savings involved
This wasn’t my movie, but hey, more for everyone else.
One thing that stood out for me was the casual annihilation of a whole planet of sentient animal-faced lifeforms. The movie didn’t seem to care that this was happening, but worse still, the heroes didn’t seem to care. Sure they were focussed on saving their own sorry hides, and their friends, but I recall exactly nobody on the screen pausing to ask, hey, can we maybe STOP this planet from being destroyed? Hello? Bueller?
I did like the snappy character interactions, though. The sequence where they were all arguing about the colored buttons on their space suits was almost in itself enough to justify the movie’s existence. Not quite but almost.
KRAD wrote:
Four of the MCU movies/shows have established that an afterlife of some kind exists (possibly as a phenomenon distinct from the Multiverse, Quantum Realm and Doctor Strange’s Mirror Dimension). This might be a replacement for the function of the Soul Stone–at least, how it was depicted in the animated Marvel Super Hero Squad, I can’t speak to the relevant Thanos run of the comics—and maybe explains how everybody was restored after the Blip.
* In the two Black Panther movies, the “ancestral plane” is visited during the Heart-Shaped Herb ceremony.
* In Thor #4, Jane Foster is met by Heimdall in Valhalla.
* This time, with Rocket in the traditional squinty-white place.
* In Moon Knight, in the Asylum/Boat of a Million Years sequence, the goddess Tawaret breezily tells Oscar Isaac’s two characters “oh, you’d be surprised how many intersectional planes there are” and namechecks the ancestral plane.
@21/krad: “You are seriously underestimating the cost of using animals”
Not at all. I’m simply not underestimating the sheer number of person-hours it takes to create a lifelike, furred CGI animal from scratch. Lifelike CGI is very hard, much harder than most laypeople realize. You don’t just push a few buttons and wait for the machine to spit something out, not if you want it to be good enough to pass muster on the big screen (and not plagiarized from a hundred earlier things by so-called “AI”). You have to animate and revise every single frame in a hundred different ways, which takes months of work by probably an entire team of people. That’s got to be damned expensive, and if it isn’t, then the VFX artists aren’t getting paid nearly enough and should unionize. (And I think they are, aren’t they?)
“CGI actually follows instructions without fail”
I think CGI animators would probably beg to differ. From what I’ve heard, computers resist creating realistic characters, because the images are made of math, and math wants things to be perfect and smooth. Computers want to make things that look like TRON, and you have to fight their natural tendencies to force them to give you something that looks like Gollum or a dinosaur or a talking ape or dog.
And when it comes to something like a simulation of hair or cloth or water or fire movement, you never quite know what you’re going to get until you run the numbers and see the results, so it often looks wildly different from what you thought you were telling it to do. (I remember seeing some hair simulation tests for Violet from The Incredibles, where her hair ended up sticking up and flying around all over the place in crazy ways.) Even if the physics of the simulation are accurate, the effect may not be aesthetically satisfying, so you have to tweak the physical parameters until it looks right to the eye.
@24/twels: “But that’s where the motion capture comes in. The actress in the suit is providing all the “animating,” which a preexisting model can essentially be pasted over.”
That is not at all how motion capture works. It’s a complete myth that it happens automatically. The performance capture is just the starting framework, the gross beginning of the process. As I said, the animators have to manipulate every single frame, every single move of every facial and bodily feature and skin texture, to create the actual performance on a level of fine detail that’s both expressive and convincing to the eye.
Also, a human and a dog have very different anatomies. It should be obvious that if you superimposed a dog skin over human movement data without any modification of that data, it would look freakish and monstrous, because dogs are supposed to move like dogs, not like humans crawling around on all fours. So the animators would’ve only used the human’s performance as a rough guide and would’ve had to create the dog’s performance pretty much from scratch, using doglike movements that were analogous to the human’s movements.
” there are also time savings”
I’ve explained why, no, that’s not the case. Haven’t you heard the reports about how the reason CGI in MCU shows and movies has gotten so sketchy is because the animators aren’t being given enough time to do it well? And they had months to do it, if not years. CGI takes a lot of time if you want it to be any good. The CGI post-production process is likely to be longer than the actual filming process.
Not happy with the changes to Groot. Other than that, it was the best since Endgame.
Christopher: it isn’t just about the amount of time, but when that time takes place. If the dog isn’t behaving on the set, the entire filming process grinds to a halt. If the CGI is an issue, it only affects the post-production crew.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
So this film had at least two actors playing different roles than they had in previous Marvel films: Fillion, and Linda Cardellini. Any others?
Oh, and I give a golf clap for “Chekhov’s Gunn,” because someone should.
If productions are really that concerned about saving time and budget, here’s a thought: keep the real dogs and make the movies shorter. Aside from the absurdity of these things with people in tights and talking animals being around the length of a David Lean historical epic, they’ll also save big by simply cutting back.
@27 said: As I said, the animators have to manipulate every single frame, every single move of every facial and bodily feature and skin texture, to create the actual performance on a level of fine detail that’s both expressive and convincing to the eye.
And here’s where I think having the dog be mo-capped CGI makes more sense than using a real dog. Live dogs can be made to look like they’re talking (see any of those “Air Buds” movies – or better yet, don’t) but I’ve never seen them appear to be conversing in a convincing manner. With an actress, you get an actual performance to animate, as compared with a dog who has no understanding of the context of what’s being said.
@17/ChristopherLBennett If the movie had the H.E. experimenting on human children, I am quite sure there would be as much rumbling. As for adults, unless the movie is a horror flick, you probably don’t want to see it either.
The reason to have an actor walking around is to give the other actors something to respond to; the actor can also say lines so the rest of the actors can keep pace.
Using a dog complicates for a lot of reasons: dogs will generally look at their trainer, or something that makes a noise or movement; they have their own internal schedule for food and rest breaks; putting them in any sort of costumes can be complicated or cruel; getting a particular facial expression is difficult or impossible; you can’t get a dog to pretend it’s on a spaceship when it’s on an green set; it may take multiple dogs to do the set of actions required; nobody wants a dog in any sort of risk, and humans are better at hearing “oh crap!” and looking around; people may have allergies. For GotG V3, the space suit and the environments made it less feasible to use an actual dog.
When you are doing CGI in every single scene anyway, using an actual dog that is going to be replaced by a CGI one means it may not make any sense at all to do.
@29/krad: “If the dog isn’t behaving on the set, the entire filming process grinds to a halt. If the CGI is an issue, it only affects the post-production crew.”
But post-production and CG animation usually take longer than the entire on-set filming process. So I don’t think “only” is the right word there.
Besides, productions have been successfully using real live dogs for as long as film has existed. Back in the ’40s and ’50s they had entire film series about Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, and then there were the Benji movies when you and I were kids, and a bunch of live-action Disney movies featuring animals like The Shaggy Dog and That Darn Cat! So it’s not like it’s some prohibitively difficult problem that’s impossible to solve without expensive CGI.
@32/twels: “With an actress, you get an actual performance to animate, as compared with a dog who has no understanding of the context of what’s being said.”
But as people said about that Harrison Ford movie, a dog showing expression and body language like a human’s just looks wrong. And Cosmo was written here with the psychology of a dog, even if she communicated in words. Her performance should have been a convincingly canine performance, not an anthropomorphized one. (And as far as I could tell, it was. I didn’t know it wasn’t a real dog until I saw the behind-the-scenes special afterward. So there wasn’t anything distinctly non-canine about her body language that I noticed, which is why it seemed strange to me that they didn’t just use a dog.)
@34/sef: “you can’t get a dog to pretend it’s on a spaceship when it’s on an green set; it may take multiple dogs to do the set of actions required; nobody wants a dog in any sort of risk, and humans are better at hearing “oh crap!” and looking around… For GotG V3, the space suit and the environments made it less feasible to use an actual dog.”
Okay, those are more reasonable explanations. Maybe there were so many shots on greenscreens or involving wirework or pyro or whatever that they couldn’t get a dog to reliably hit its marks and hold still in the way that might be required for a meticulously choreographed or strenuous FX shot.
Still, there were a number of simpler scenes of just standing around and talking where it wouldn’t have been as hard to use a real dog.
“using an actual dog that is going to be replaced by a CGI one means it may not make any sense at all to do.”
But I was suggesting that if they’d used an actual dog, they wouldn’t have had to replace the whole thing, just replace the eyes and mouth for the performance, at most the head and neck, which seems like it would’ve been less work.
Then again, I’ve seen a number of behind-the-scenes videos for various productions where they do replace entire characters or objects with CGI because it’s apparently easier in some ways than trying to superimpose a CGI element onto a live-action element in a way that tracks perfectly with its movements, lighting, etc.
Having just watched ‘Zoom: Academy of Superheroes’ for the first time on Netflix I’m wondering when it’ll make the rewatch. With Tim Allen, Courtney Cox, Chevy Chase, and Rip Torn it’s like the terrible Galaxy Quest of superhero movies. Maybe a double feature with Sky High?
@36/CyclopsRuss: Keith’s rewatch only covers live-action superhero movies based on comic books. Sky High and Zoom were original concepts, not adaptations. (Edit: Oops, I was wrong about Zoom. Never mind.)
CyclopsRuss: neither Sky High nor Zoom fit the rubric of this rewatch, as it’s specifically for live-action adaptations of comic books. Sky High is an original story to the movies (also why I didn’t do Hancock) and Zoom is based on a work of prose (also why I didn’t do Buck Rogers in the 25th Century).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The first time I ever saw the High Evolutionary was watching the classic X-Men Animated Series in the mid 1990s. The Savage Land two parter that had Garokk feeding off of Storm’s weather powers. I was in awe of the stone being’s immense powers, and ability to freeze the land, using its thermal powers to free himself from his prison. And then the episode throws in a flashback sequence set millennias before that shows him being stunned and sealed by that mysterious purple being. My comics-adept cousin explained to me that was the H.E.
And then the show followed up on that character the following season in the episode where Magneto meets Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. An episode that not only features the Bova character, but also has one of Beast’s best lines (the Dr. Moreau allusion) and also puts Wolverine through the indignity of being mutated into a wild beast for a couple of minutes.
I went into Guardians 3 completely blind and unaware of where the story was going to go (I skipped the trailers). While I expected it to address Rocket’s backstory, I had no idea the H.E. was going to be the big villain. I was not disappointed. One of the better live-action adaptations of a Marvel villain.
Right from the start, Guardians 3 does one major thing right: it kneecaps the main characters with that terrifying opening act. Warlock’s assault on the city is brutal, relentless and it leaves major casualties in its wake. Right from the first 10 minutes, the stakes are sky-high*.
That’s one thing the MCU has had trouble with over the past few years post-Endgame: making the stakes that high. Gunn understands the need to hurt the main characters, creating a major driving force for their quest in this entry. Coming off of the Holiday Special, where it really reinforced the family bonds that bind the Guardians and introduced us to the sprawling community that is Guardians HQ, it makes Warlock’s attack all the more devastating. In retrospect, that was a problem with Guardians 2. The characters spent a lot of time idle doing nothing while Quill bonded with Ego – the heroic fall down from grace and rebirth path was given to Yondu on that one.
*And off-topic, this is why I hate when people arrive at theatres late. Not only they disrupt the people who arrived on time and are trying to pay attention, they also start the movie themselves not knowing just how bad Warlock’s assault was. How are they going to rate the movie without knowing the stakes? (rant over)
And to me, I feel if more of the MCU had the guts to threaten, hurt or at least provide some sense of danger, the movies wouldn’t feel as perfunctory and inconsequential as Quantumania or Love and Thunder felt like much of the time. Guardians 3 really gets that right.
Rocket’s flashbacks are even more tragic, even when we know what beats are coming such as H.E.’s casual murder of Lylla. It brings context and color to his attempts at driving people away in the first two films. Everything makes perfect sense.
I’m curious as to how and when we’ll see these characters again. With the Guardians split and otherwise reformed, and Gunn off building the new DCEU, there’s no way to know. It also begs the question if this is the last time we’ll be seeing some of these characters. We’ll obviously still get Quill in some shape and form. But I wonder if Marvel (and Disney by proxy) is comfortable retiring characters we’ve grown attached to. Tony had to die, and Steve had to go back through time to age out of his role. We have yet to see characters ride off into the sunset, where we have no need to revisit them again, their story completed. I wonder if that’s what happened with Drax and Nebula. I don’t see a need for them to reappear in future MCU outings (despite Nebula being the most competent hero/leader of them all).
@35 said: Besides, productions have been successfully using real live dogs for as long as film has existed. Back in the ’40s and ’50s they had entire film series about Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, and then there were the Benji movies when you and I were kids, and a bunch of live-action Disney movies featuring animals like The Shaggy Dog and That Darn Cat! So it’s not like it’s some prohibitively difficult problem that’s impossible to solve without expensive CGI.
That is true – but I will say that times (and rules) have definitely changed as regards to what it is ok to expose animals to on a film set in the wake of films where animals died (“Milo and Otis” comes to mind).
Really, the modern film and TV set is much different than even 10 years ago when it comes to the use of CGI. For example, the use of CGI to simulate muzzle flash rather than firing off blank rounds. I believe it was ABC TV’s “The Rookie” that replaced all of the working firearms on their set with rubber replica guns in the wake of the “Rust” shooting incident. Westerns even are using CGI horses to simulate injuries rather than the usual “have-the-stunt person-yank-the-reins” fall that we are used to seeing. Most of the CGI we see is almost totally undetectable, which honestly was the case with Cosmo – so it’s not surprising that someone would want to know why you wouldn’t just use a real dog.
@40/twels: “Westerns even are using CGI horses to simulate injuries rather than the usual “have-the-stunt person-yank-the-reins” fall that we are used to seeing.”
Well, sure, obviously I see the value of using CGI for stunts and dangerous things, but that doesn’t require using exclusively CGI animals even for ordinary shots where a horse is just standing there or being ridden normally. It’s always been a basic part of visual effects to use a mix of techniques, different ones for different shots according to what was best for each shot. For instance, just because Back to the Future Part II used a miniature DeLorean for the flying shots didn’t mean it gave up using a real DeLorean for the shots of the car being driven normally or just sitting there.
By the same token, productions using animals often use more than one — for instance, IIRC, on The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., Comet the Wonder Horse was represented by several different horses, one that was good at standing still, one that was good at riding and chase scenes, and I think there was one they used specifically for shots of the horse rearing up because that was its specialty. Or maybe that was the one where there was a horse that was good at the regular stuff but got easily spooked by gunfire so they had to use a different horse in fight scenes.
So I can absolutely see the value of doubling a dog with CGI for those shots that would be impractical or unsafe for a real dog. What I’m saying is that it seems odd not to use a real dog for shots where the dog character is just standing there on a regular set like Knowhere while the actors around it are having a conversation.
At the risk of introducing actual real-life data into the discussion….
[TL,DR: Multiple closed courses & professional drivers in use. Do not attempt without appropriate safety gear. Viewers’ mileage and experience may vary. Management is not responsible for lost or damaged personal items.]
The extended discussion on the matter of CGI canines in the present film prompted me to go and look up coverage of The Marvels, in which one of the most entertaining characters is a cat-like alien named Goose, and in which Goose reproduces to the tune of twenty-nine (count them, twenty-nine) offspring, whose presence allows for the successful if highly improbable evacuation of SABER’s space station. [It’s not entirely clear in the film quite how flerken reproduction works, considering that we never see or hear of Goose having had a romantic encounter in what you’d expect to be the necessary time frame. But that’s a digression….]
It turns out that in The Marvels, Goose is played by two cats (bearing the names Nemo and Tango), while Goose’s offspring are played by some twenty (count them, twenty) kittens.
The Marvels‘ director is on record as praising Nemo’s and Tango’s work, and also as being pleased and amused at the scenes in which the horde of kittens conducts its rescue operation – this despite the fact that she’s mildly allergic to cats, and that Brie “Captain Marvel” Larson is quite severely allergic to cats such that she needed stand-ins for scenes involving her character and Goose.
Now, on one hand, it’s blindingly obvious that quite a lot of the flerken footage involves quite a lot of CGI – real cats not being equipped with impossibly huge tentacles with which they grab and “eat” things (or store them in their internal pocket dimensions, which evidently share certain characteristics of the inside of a TARDIS).
At the same time, it’s also clear that quite a lot of the flerken footage involves the filming of actual kittens being actual kittens (which is, as one might expect, seriously amusing, involving as it does the herding of cats in the literal sense).
Aside: I am on record as being very impressed with The Marvels, and that extends to the portrayal of Goose and their offspring (whom I assumed – correctly, as it turns out – to be at least mostly portrayed by actual cats).
The lesson that I therefore take from the combined data as reported herein and above, regarding animals and CGI from both movies, is therefore that:
(1) these are decisions being made at the director’s level, not the studio’s,
(2) different directors are making different decisions about when and when not to use live animals,
(3) their choices appear to differ depending on the animals’ role(s) in the relevant movie(s),
(4) whether any particular directorial choice is “right” depends on who you ask and what movie you’re asking about, and there’s no clear consensus as yet, either between professionals or viewers, allowing for the formulation of a general rule about what works and what doesn’t where CGI rendering of animals is concerned.
@42/John: Yeah, that’s basically what I figured. It’s not that Gunn couldn’t have used a real dog, it’s that he chose to use a human stand-in, presumably because he’s used to making movies that way, with stand-ins for Rocket and Groot and other inhuman characters. (Although IIRC they had a Groot performer in a costume in this one.) It just seems weird to do it with a character who’s visually indistinguishable from a real dog. And ironic to use CGI to create something so everyday-looking while using practical prosthetic makeup effects to create the exotic Humanimals of Counter-Earth.
@43 Directors are weird. (One of the Laws of the Universe).
The extended conversation about CGI versus real dog actors was mystifying to me at first. But, I suppose, it does relate to one of the themes of the movie, namely, the exploitation of animals for questionable goals.
Nevertheless, as much as I LOVE krad’s articles (and I do), I found that you rather missed some of the nuances of the movie that make it both great and sad. My daughter said it best: “It’s a really sad movie, actually, because these are characters I love and I’ve grown up with, and they spend the entire movie fighting with each other. And then by the end, they split. It’s just very hard to watch.” In other words, the movie sometimes takes a rather adult approach to how everyday life can cause strains and fissures within families, sometimes causing lasting damage.
For this reason, this one is not a particularly “fun” Guardians movie. The signature out-of-nowhere silliness (e.g., planet-saving dance-offs, discussions on whether people physically get smaller when they get farther away) feels more abrasive than whimsical, almost always couched within an argument between two main characters.
And, the requisite killing off of a significant population of NPC mostly involve entirely innocent bystanders. The first movie killed off a prison with corrupt security officers; the second killed off a good portion of ravagers who were amoral at best. This movie killed off an arbitrarily created planet and experiment animals. Sure, the stakes are higher as stated in the review, but in a rather unpleasant way.
Somewhat coincidentally, we watched Nope recently, and that also has some things to say (without spoiling) about the use/exploitation of animals, including on set. ;)
They spend every appearance they’ve made — not just in the three GotG movies, but also two Avengers movies and one Thor movie — fighting with each other. It’s what they do. *wry grin*
And they don’t split up, exactly. Nebula and Drax are becoming leaders of the larger community of Knowhere. Quill is finally going home. Mantis is finding herself. That’s not the team splitting up, that’s the family maturing and moving on.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I know I’m not the only one. If anyone should ever want a Farscape movie series, it’s right here. Guardians is more or less the same story, with the same characters, and the same silly-turns-to-heartbreak-and-back-again whiplash tone. At least they acknowledge it openly.
While this film doesn’t copy quite as blatantly as some of the others have, it still has shades of every big Farscape season finale story (which were at bottom all the same anyway – infiltrate the bad guy’s base to undertake an unlikely rescue and generally fuck shit up). And the scene with Quill and Nebula driving the human car is indeed copy-and-pasted from the s4 ep “Kansas”, in which the hero and his space-friends inadvertently end up in a typical American suburb.
@48/DS9Continuing: It’s an annoying tendency of laypeople to assume that any similarity can only be the result of “copying.” There are only so many coherent ways to put a story together, and stories are assembled from a finite set of recurring tropes, character types, situations, and other ideas, so stories often resemble each other by chance or parallel evolution. Indeed, that happens so routinely that it’s difficult to avoid, no matter how hard we try — and we do try. Few creators want to be seen as imitative or unoriginal, so a strong similarity is usually evidence that the later creator was completely unaware of the earlier work, or else they would’ve changed it to be more distinct.
I mean, you could just as easily argue (and some people have) that Farscape was a riff on Buck Rogers, a contemporary Earthman getting thrust into a world of spaceships and aliens. And there are countless movies and shows about bands of mismatched people getting thrust together and bickering with each other, like The Dirty Dozen or Blake’s 7. Similarity does not prove imitation; it merely proves that stories have syntax and that tropes recur throughout culture.
While Christopher is correct in his post, James Gunn is on the record as saying that Farscape was a big influence on GotG. That’s why he cast Ben Browder in a small role in Volume 2.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Doesn’t work. I’ve known too many humans. Seriously though, animals have an innocence that is almost impossible for a human to match outside of a young child, and we practically never see toddlers being cruelly tortured on screen. A person being torturedcan understand what is happening to them, while a dog or horse or whatever really can’t in the same way, and for me at least, it makes the cruelty to the latter more tragic than the former.
@51/northman: Yeah, I thought after my post that it might have something to do with the way we think of animals similarly to how we think of children. Still, speaking for myself, I would be delighted to see a lot fewer scenes in entertainment of anyone, adult human beings included, getting tortured or brutally hurt. Modern TV and film seem to relish depictions of cruelty and graphic violence as a hallmark of “sophisticated drama,” and to me it just seems gratuitous. Just because something is inappropriate to show to children doesn’t automatically make it intelligent, sophisticated, or meaningful. I mean, in some contexts it can be meaningful — like how the depictions here of the High Evolutionary’s cruelty and the plight of Rocket and his friends made for a poignant story — but it’s more meaningful when used judiciously, not merely as a way to signal that a show is “adult.”