The Guardians of the Galaxies movies were a superhero genre revelation. They were fun, punchy romps with lots of heart. Centred on a gang of dysfunctional misfits, the characters were well realized, and the actors had great chemistry.
The Guardians trilogy are, and remain, my favourite Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
I’ve enjoyed some of the others (Lookin' at you, Ironman in a cave!), but none blended humour, action and heart so perfectly.
Gunn has since switched over to Marvel’s archrival, DC, and is revamping that entire universe, like some kind of quirky Creator Celestial.
I greatly enjoyed the first season of Peacemaker. Idiosyncratic fun with a likeable, earnest (yet homicidal) anti-hero.
Gunn’s Suicide Squad also landed solidly with yet another collection of dysfunctional, lovable yet homicidal goofballs out to (reluctantly) save the world.
I’ve never felt that Gunn was a good fit for the boy scout in blue tights.
Gunn is superb with quirky, flawed characters. He loves pushing boundaries with humour (Super). He likes to dip into the gross (Dawn of the Dead, Slither). But… he’s never, it seemed to me, to be the go-to-guy for mainstream DC heroes.
My take on DC heroes is admittedly dated. In my era, they were squeaky clean paragons of virtue, earnest fighters for justice, true heroes to their core.
They weren't people so much as ideals to live up to and emulate.
Having watched the first few episodes of Peacemaker Season 2, I’m not keen on what Gunn’s doing with them. The ‘Justice Gang’ makes an appearance, and… they’re awful. Repellant, obnoxious, arrogant, and misogynistic frankly. Green Lantern is an ass, Hawkgirl isn’t much better, and that third guy, the less said the better.
I gather this iteration of GL is well known as such, but it was still deeply off putting.
Not, mind you, because they weren’t funny.
Or that there aren’t people like that.
Or that it didn’t make sense.
It was, there are, and it did.
If it was a different universe, a satirical universe that subverts superhero expectations, like, say, where heroes are hollow shills for corporate powers, I’d love it, just as I love The Boys.
And that is the problem: Gunn’s DC Universe is almost indistinguishable from Amazon Prime’s The Boys: ribald, corrupt, cruel, hyper-violent, gross and self-absorbed.
If I want to see how power corrupts, and watch people trying to survive in an awful, horrible, corrupt world, well, that’s what I watch The Boys for.
It’s not what I’d like for Justice League characters.
It's not, in my view, the brand.
It takes the brand promise, rips out the heart, takes a dump on it, and then drops it on top of a sundae and calls it delicious.
True, the DC heroes of yore were totally unrealistic in their moral purity, but that doesn’t mean I want them deconstructed in their own brand.
Satire's great, I love satire, but I don't want LOTR to be a self-satirical parody. I don't want my Star Wars self-satirizing, I don't want Indiana Jones meta, and I don't want Star Trek to be a post-modern satirical critique scripted by Foucault.
That's what parodies and satires and Galaxy Quest are for. Different, if subordinate, brands where the meta can live without tarnishing the original.
I can name another real-world institution that’s lost a lot of its former majesty of late, and absolutely all of its moral authority; that damages the office, smears the brand, annihilates the ideals and leaves us ashamed.
Sometimes, it’s nice to have an aspirational moral paragon to look up to, who really is what they appear to be, rather than actually being a malignant narcissist presenting a hollow, idealized façade.
I may get back into Peacemaker, he’s a fringe anti-hero, after all. Superman? Maybe when it's on TV for 'free' (with cable or a base subscription).
Funny enough, I've tried watching the latest season of Gen V, and... it hasn't really caught me. I couldn't remember the characters or what happened in season one. It's funny, topical, and well crafted, but the gross out elements now feel less transgressive and shocking than tired and obligatory.
Shock value is inversely proportional to the amount you use it.
There are two kinds of realism in art. One grows from love — the kind that looks at ideals and says, “Let’s see what they cost, let’s see how they survive.” That kind of realism deepens myth; it doesn’t sneer at it. It accepts that goodness is hard but worth striving for.
The other kind grows from exhaustion, or pride, and rolls its eyes and says, “Only fools believe in heroes.” That doesn’t reveal truth; it corrodes it, mistaking cruelty for depth and mockery for insight.
The first kind makes us ache for the light; the second leaves us dimly proud of thinking there is none.
And that, perhaps, is where I find myself weary. I don’t mind seeing my heroes struggle, bleed, or even fail. I mind when the storyteller enjoys humiliating them, when sincerity becomes the only writer sin.
The longer a franchise goes on, and even more frequently after the original creative voice has long departed, the more extreme it becomes. People love novelty, and over time, the initial story engine starts to squeak and churn out stale material. So characters become more bad ass (actors are always pushing for memorable moments for their character, and these have to become more and more extreme), they become more inter-related, prequels expand on popular story arcs, undermining the original show and changing its meaning, making everything smaller and smaller and more and more interrelated until it becomes a black hole and sucks in all meaning. All that is left is the churn.
Steven Spielberg once said that the stunts in Indiana Jones movies had to get more and more extreme, with each movie out doing the last, until it practically became a bugs bunny cartoon.
George Lucas started out with a big galaxy: Luke wasn't related to Vader, Leia wasn't his sister, Anakin didn't build C3P0, and so on.
James Bond ultimately became the brother of Blofeld.
Over time, writers want to imbue everything with meaning. Han's last name is Solo? We can explain that! Yet this is a universe with names like Screed, Skywalker, Sidious, Grievous, etc. Did everyone have a silly, narratively appropriate moniker applied to them as a grown up? Do they know what the word Screed means? Because apparently Solo means solo. Do people titter and snicker at all these on-the-nose names?
Talk about sucking the fun and the mystery out of it.
Ambitious writers want to make their mark, to change the original franchise to suit their own sensibilities. Making changes to Franchise DNA is the ultimate victory, for them! And this makes sense, to a degree: a franchise must evolve with the times or lose viewership.
But it also erodes the dramatic integrity of the show(s).
The Rules for programs set in the real world are stable: physics don't change over time for police procedurals or daytime soaps (are any of those left?). But they do in sci-fi and fantasy, where magic and technology are toffee, warping and changing to fit the desires of the latest writer's room.
Why nix a great story just because the show's Rules Bible says it can't happen?
And that makes sense, to a degree, but if you do it often enough, you wind up with no rules to speak of at all, anything goes, and then it's just blatant fan service.
Which... is also fine, if that's what you want. Fan service can be fun, it's designed to be.
It's also the dramatic equivalent of a sugar rush junk food.
When Ned Stark got decapitated (oh, sorry, spoiler), it was truly shocking, even expectation subverting. The Red Wedding massacre (oh, whoops, another spoiler) was well executed, but not shocking. The destruction of the sept (oh, who cares) was staged in an epic fashion, well directed, well acted and scored, but... I found it hard to care. It was more 'here we go again' than 'holy crap'.
Is slaughtering characters all you've got?
Who's left to care about?
Perhaps, if you've seen forty superhero movies and TV shows (and many a reboot), you've seen them all.
Franchise fatigue is an inevitable sign of aging... Soone or later, you stop caring.
