I’m not a Marvel-basher. I loved the Marvel Cinematic Universe films right up to the end of Avengers: Endgame. I applauded the fact that they understood what fans of the comics have always known: that the appeal of Marvel is not in the fights and the super-powers, but in the human dilemmas, the self-referentiality, and – more than anything else – the sense of belonging to a community that brought fans and creators together. I’ve known this from my youth. One of my most treasured possessions is a personal letter to me from Stan Lee, in which he ended, ‘Many thanks for your interest and your enthusiasm, Pete. It’s true believers like you who keep the flame of Marveldom alive’.
Yes, Mr Scorsese, they’re not the greatest films ever made. But they were the greatest super-hero films ever made. And that was no mean feat.
But nothing lasts for ever. And I’ve watched the post-Endgame output with dwindling enthusiasm. The Spider-Man films continue to thrill, but by and large the juggernaut is running out of steam. Even on TV, Wandavision lost its way, and Loki turned into a snooze-fest after a great start.
Nevertheless the word on the street was that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was the one to stop the rot. If anything could, Peter Quill and his rag-tag crew of misfits were the ones to do it. The first Guardians movie was probably the pick of the MCU bunch, and their particular style of tongue-in-cheek humour was exactly what Marvel needed. So I settled down in the Curzon Westgate ready to cheer, laugh and cry. (In fact, I did cry, once, during the advert for Cadbury’s Chocolate. It got me, dammit.)
Sadly, the film itself is two-and-half hours of mayhem. It’s peppered with memories of what made the first two Guardians films so enjoyable. But for the most part there’s no subtlety, no lightness of touch, no sense of a real shape to this film. If Stan was entrusting me with keeping the flame of Marveldom alive back in the 70s, then someone needs to call the fire brigade, because it’s not a flame any more. It’s a conflagration.
There are certainly things to treasure in this film: Rocket Raccoon’s back-story forms a strong central thread, and his other animal friends, subjects of horrific futuristic vivisection experiments, actually have more humanity than most of the humanoids in the movie. But the comparative delicacy of that element is bulldozed aside by the constant action. I don’t mind a couple of climaxes in an action film. But GoG3 has loads of them, piling up thick and fast. And each one is constructed as if it’s ‘the big one’. As an audience, we can only invest in high stakes so many times during one performance, and this simply asks too much. It’s a mess. It’s like being served a tasting menu of twenty courses, each of them the size of an entire meal, and landing on your table before you’ve had a chance to finish eating the last one.
Just to keep the foodie metaphor going, many of the courses are overcooked and reheated. There are endless scenes of the characters slapping an 80s dance banger on the Walkman and leaping into action with the help of that funky soundtrack. Back in the first film this happened a couple of times. In GoG3, well, I stopped counting. But it happens repeatedly.
Even the famed Guardians wit drowns in excessive action. The characters constantly yell amusing personal criticisms about each other’s foibles, but they do it right in the middle of battles. That’s funny once, but again and again? Likewise, we are expected to become emotionally invested in plot devices that appear out of the blue. For example, towards the end of the film, it’s revealed that the villain is holding hundreds of cute children captive on his space-ship, and the emotional focus of the entire thing suddenly swings onto them like the boom of a sailing-boat in a storm. Fifteen minutes later Nebula, Mantis and Drax come face-to-face with some monsters called Abilisks – and they turn out to have hearts of gold, so we find ourselves pitying them as Mantis weeps on their fangs. Fifteen minutes later the hothead villain Warlock realises the error of his ways and saves Quill’s life before joining in a big group hug, so now we’re pitying him… You get the idea. Exhausting.
When you’re asked to invest in everything you end up spread pretty thin, and that’s the effect of this film. One’s sympathies are left strewn around like alien bodies after a battle in an air-lock. To be honest, by the end, when (spoiler alert) Peter Quill goes home to Earth to find his grampaw, I had nothing left to give. Writer/director James Gunn had scattered his emotional seed on waste ground, and he was spent.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has such a tin ear for what made Marvel great, it felt as if its director had already started his new job running DC Studios while making this film.