Begin Again: SUPERMAN andFANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

With Superman, writer-director James Gunn tries restarting the DC cinematic universe with the third attempt at this original hero in the last twenty years. To do so, he reimagines a colorful world with several superhero plot lines already in progress. He figures audiences can get up to speed without belaboring origin stories all over again. So here we are, three years into Superman’s career as a hero. David Corenswet brings the right golly-gee jawline to the upright iconography of the hero and aw-shucks humility of his bespectacled Clark Kent disguise. He’s already entangled in a romance with newspaper colleague Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and embroiled in a one-sided rivalry with billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). He has a friendly-but-frosty relationship with some other heroes knocking about his corner of the universe: Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). There are robots and giant monsters and portals to parallel universes and cameos form upcoming spinoffs an lots of glowing gadgets and opportunities for vivid, cartoony, splash-panel spectacle. There’s even lots for Krypto the super-dog to fetch. It’s all done in a coherent Gunn style, tonally more Suicide Squad than Guardians of the Galaxy, but recognizably in wide angles and blocky frames, overflowing with his smirking sincerity and hurly-burly earnest pop culture spirit. The result is a zippy, zany comic book eruption of excess. The movie’s chaotic and overstuffed, but with its heart in the right place. 

It really does care about the totally authentic goodness of its Superman, and lets the conflicts rise up organically out of a world that’s not built to take goodness seriously or even believe in it. There are puffed-up corporate interests and snarling foreign dictators and slimy pundits and rival do-gooders and they’re all jostling for the kind of authority and attention that Superman gets just by being himself. There’s something pure and lovely about that. Even as Gunn is less interested in the character as a symbol or an idea, he’s more interested him as a person who's a vision of how to do your best to be a force for good in a world falling apart at the seams. In doing so, he succeeds in making a big, bright movie full of likable characters, but as the scenes hustle by and supporting characters flit in and out and the movie hurtles through scenes of digital destruction, I found myself thinking it’s all a bit much. A little deadening digital destruction goes a long way. I’ll take a slow-mo shot where Superman swoops down and stops a little girl from being hit by debris over dozens of minutes of punching robots and super-beings every time. 

Coincidentally Marvel is also going back to one of its earliest comics for their latest superhero movie. It, too, is the third attempt in twenty years at getting these characters right, and eschews an origin story to just get down to business. Fantastic Four: First Steps starts four years into their heroism. They live in a retro-futurist alternate universe that looks like its just upstream from a Jetsons aesthetic. There the stretchy scientist Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), his sometimes-invisible wife (Vanessa Kirby), flammable brother-in-law (Joseph Quinn), and rock-monster best friend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) are celebrities for defending the planet from all manner of comic book threats. There’s a charming rapid-fire montage that opens the movie blitzing us with glimpses of enough villains and action sequences to fill a few movies. Instead, it settles into a weirdly low-key family drama intercut with apocalyptic stakes, but keeps up the rapid-fire CliffsNotes style, racing through exposition and slaloming through plot lines and complications other movies might spend a whole run time developing. The whole movie has a feeling that it’s trying to make up for lost time. 

The period-piece sci-fi aesthetic gives the movie a fine visual look, and gives the midcentury comic book its best outing on the big screen. (Though arriving so late puts it deep in the shadow of the far superior Incredibles movies, which got to the look, and a Michael Giacchino score, better and first. ) The actors are all likable enough, and inhabit the familiar dilemmas of their characters without given the chance to really stretch out and play to those dramas. We do get to some extremely comic book sequences, though, including an invisible woman giving birth in zero-gravity while her brother shoots lasers at a space woman surfing behind their spaceship as it slingshots around a black hole. It caused me to reflect on the days when comic book movies were afraid to even use the costumes from the illustrations on screen. Now they’re doing spectacular sci-fi looniness without batting an eye. This one paradoxically goes all in on these enormous fantastical ideas while keeping the movie incredibly small. 

The ginormous intergalactic villain Galactus (Ralph Ineson’s voice rumbling the subwoofers) wants to gobble up Earth, sending the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, cool with an eerie shimmery stillness and metallic intonation) to herald his impending arrival. We get a tossed-off reference to a Galactus cult forming, and crowds debating making a sacrifice to him, and the whole movie operates under this cloud of world-ending stakes. But the movie is content to leave that as the backdrop to the shot-reverse-shot predictability of its leads talking strategy and family dynamics. Solutions seem to arrive easily for our characters, side-characters are cut to glorified cameos, and, though the weight of the word hangs heavily on their shoulders, complications become backup plans in a blink. The movie’s in too big a hurry to get to the next thing, even by the end of the movie when it’s still just setting up promises that it’ll hopefully pay off next time. If there’s anything in the movie that most feels like typical Marvel Cinematic Universe routine, there it is. What’s here is just enough to count as a movie, and just charming enough to make these likable characters again, and just busy enough to feel like we’ve had the kind of blinking lights and flashy colors that make popcorn go down easy. But it is also relentlessly manipulative with an imperiled infant (and a shockingly shoddily composited one, at that) used as shorthand for us to care instead of investing in building depth for the plot’s complications and implications. Maybe the next movie can find a story instead of a collection of things that happen. 

Rocket Power: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOLUME 3

Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 pays off a near-decade of investment I didn’t know I had in these misfit sci-fi heroes and this particularly eccentric and isolated corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It does so by offering what no other subset of the MCU has managed: an ending, full and complete, exciting and moving, and honest both to its characters and its tone. This is a rollicking adventure with wacky side characters and rambunctious action sequences. But it also really cares about these cartoony weirdos and has, in the end, found a reason to communicate that love through a vision of self-sacrifice in the name of an open-minded community. There’s a real idea here—about the futility of forced homogeneity, the futility of perfection, and the rousing power of ragtag diverse cooperation. And there’s vision of splashy colors and apocalyptic rumblings that set the characters on edge with a palpable sense of danger and finality.

The likes of earnest goof Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and killer green Gamora (Zoe Saldana) with her blue robot sister (Karen Gillan), talking tree Groot (Vin Diesel), hyper-literal muscle man Drax (Dave Bautista), and simpatico alien empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff) are still a loose, funny ensemble. And here their problems are treated with a genuine frayed edge. The writing gives them a strong squabbling affection and heartfelt duty. They really care about saving their world and their friends and everyone they can. Funny how often comic book movies let that slip away these days. This one populates its widescreen invention with a menagerie of characters we’ve actually come to care about, and who actually care about each other and what they’re doing instead of merely posing in the chaos. How nice that this entry is somehow freed from the treadmill of franchise promises—which so often strand each Marvel movie as just an extended promise that the next one will have the really good stuff. That makes it the only MCU property to emerge from the Avengers cross-overs and Disney+ spinoffs not looking worse for wear. It helps that the Guardians are easily the best parts of the enjoyable Infinity War and hollow Endgame. And that makes one of the biggest laughs in this new one when Star-Lord deadpans a one-sentence summary of the latter.

In this Volume 3, writer-director James Gunn gets to really dig into who these characters are, what they’d need to be happy, and how to send them off with the most satisfying resolutions possible. He’s finishing his neat trilogy of brightly poppy space operas set to a classic rock mixtape backbeat knowing he has the audience goodwill to place the entire film’s emotional and narrative thrust on the tragic backstory of the talking, gun-toting CGI Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper). In the present tense he’s been wounded and his friends need to steal a couple MacGuffins to revive him. We also get flashbacks to the mad scientist who created him, which serves a double duty of exposition seeing as the experimenter in question is also our Big Bad. (Chukwudi Iwuji plays him as a howling, calculating evil, with an eerie calm face literally stapled on.) The two timelines work well to provide a fine undertow of tension and care. So there’s refreshingly a lot jostling and juggling for attention, pleasingly overstuffed and productively messy when so many of its franchise brethren are under-stuffed and tidily hollow. By the time we get to the Guardians hoping to save the villains’ experiments as they revive Rocket, it’s like the Island of Misfit Toys looting Sid’s toy box. I couldn’t resist that hook’s emotional appeal.

It’s a movie overflowing with side-characters and incident, animated by a contagious delight in invention and a specificity in its characters. The main cast are deployed well, and the choice supporting parts are efficiently and effectively drawn, too, like an antagonistic golden super-guy played by Will Poulter as a cross between a terminator on the hunt of our heroes and a sweetheart hoping to do his statuesque mother (Elizabeth Debicki) proud. We also get a few memorable moments with a scruffy space pirate gone good (Sean Gunn) and a telekinetic canine cosmonaut (speaking through a translation collar with the voice of Maria Bakalova) that build neat payoffs of their own. Even the henchmen and thugs and bystanders are given vivid shorthand characterization, fun punchlines, and fleeting touching moments of humanity. Here’s a movie powered on the belief that we should see the characters as characters, and not just action figures or Easter eggs.

This is a bustling picture, a large-scale, all-engines-go sci-fi jaunt powered with enjoyable emotional manipulation. It all comes to a head in a successive series of slam-bang set-pieces in which spaceships careen and laser-guns go kaplow as mutants and aliens and freakazoids of every shape and size ooze and splatter and smash. There are clever, concussive action sequences booming with sound and invention in a living space station, on an exploding planet, and as a space fortress collides with a giant skull. That’s all neat Jack Kirby-style fireworks and design peppered with punchlines. But because it’s driven by this surprising well of affection for the characters, and a commitment to bring them to some kind of conclusion, it works as a crowd-pleasing entertainment, an outsized comic book spectacle with the heart and soul others of its ilk so often miss. In retrospect, it’s a trilogy that put in the work to make us love its characters as much as its creators do, and it’s great to see them fly off on one more grand adventure together.

Bad Blood: THE SUICIDE SQUAD

James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is better than David Ayer’s 2016 adaptation of DC’s Dirty Dozen riff to which the new movie is a combo sequel, retread, and reboot. But what a low bar to set. Ayer’s version was severely compromised by studio meddling, as he’s more than willing to tell anyone who’ll listen. But even so, though his movie looked and moved like it barely got out of the editing room — choppy, ungainly, atonal, nonsensical — and had an off-putting ooze of nastiness in characterization and tone, it matched his filmmaking personality. Ayer, of End of Watch and Fury, is darkly preoccupied with antihero ugliness, cops and gangs, men of violence, inscrutable poisoned macho codes, and leering pleasure in bloodletting. One felt that, among the film’s many issues, his go-around in the comic book movie world was an oozing R barely, uncomfortably, trimmed back to a chaotic blockbuster PG-13. Somehow Gunn got to go all the way in this new version, clearly positioned as a corrective, a make-good acknowledgement the studio shouldn’t have held back last time. It just took a string of pleasantly eccentric and uneven DC movies — Aquaman, Shazam, Snyder’s Justice League — to get Warner Brothers to let creatives swing away, cinematic universe be damned. Why out do Marvel with connectivity when they could differentiate by going wilder and woolier?

So Gunn, hopping over from the rival house style after a stint with the Guardians of the Galaxy, is happy to meld the joshing Marvel sentimentality with his brand of affection for assembling a band of misfit toys and a bracing exploitation cynicism from his Troma days where gooey body horror and geysers of blood and guts are meant to give the audience a sick kick. The idea of assembling a team of C-list supervillains for a suicide mission remains an irresistible one, and this film is eager to turn it into a playground for character actors and effects artists. And the abandon of the storytelling makes any character fair game to receive a headshot as a punchline. It carries over leaders Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), as well as wild card Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), and surrounds them with a new cast of expendables. Idris Elba makes the best impression as a reluctant leader, while the likes of John Cena, David Dastmalchian, and Daniela Melchior play a motley crew of combination comic relief and oddball energy. Each with their own powers — marksmanship, deadly polka dots, rats, and did I mention the talking shark (Sylvester Stallone)? — they’re dropped onto a fictional South American island where they trudge through the jungle and slip into a dictator’s compound with the mission of getting rid of a shady science experiment. The movie at least has the sense to set that simple objective and head straight there, while finding a few moderately engaging twists along the way. It’s enjoyable, if all a bit too much.

The project matches Gunn’s filmmaking personality, a quipping, vulgar, tightly scripted and shaggily developed mean-streak with a mix-tape heart of gold. He can’t help himself. His films play like the work of the most talented dirty-minded dork from your junior high all grown up. Here it comes out as prankish and coarse and high on its own self-amused supply. There’s some token nods towards serious ideas, like a recognition of compromised US foreign policy and a fig leaf of social commentary about prisons and militarism. (An all-American anti-hero named Peacekeeper says he loves peace so much he’s willing to kill every man, woman, and child who gets in its way. Ha.) But the movie is far more interested in sending its colorful characters into outrageously gory action and concussive, episodic spectacles. (Each new sequence is even separated with a new splashy title, like the next issue of a comic.) In practice, each little bit is a fine spin of studio filmmaking, loud and entertaining, bright and legible, smirking and savage, clever for clever’s sake. But as a total experience is gets awfully tedious and repetitive. I felt hollowed out by the end. Part of that draining sense comes from the slippery sliding scale between deaths played for laughs and deaths played for poignancy which feels all out of whack, from a massacre of freedom fighters shrugged off to one of our more sympathetic bad guys given a backstory of a hated mother that turns into a mean sight gag. It’d be more entertaining if it was less exhausting. And yet I found myself thinking despite myself that maybe the third time would be the charm?

Spaced: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

A moderate blast of novelty was what Guardians of the Galaxy brought to the Marvel formula with a soundtrack of needle drops and a tone as breezily goofy as the characters it introduced (a cornball lead, a stoic green lady, a hyper-literal lug, a talking racoon, and an ambulatory tree man). This allowed the movie to build considerable affection, despite succumbing to all the worst tendencies of hectic, anonymous destruction in its protracted climax. So it was surely too much to hope Vol. 2 could have the same sense of unexpected. (The only thing that beats the sudden blast of “Come and Get Your Love” in that film’s opening is probably the trailer’s memorable use of “Hooked on a Feeling,” fitting for a multi-tentacled franchise whose films are always also advertisements for itself.) But what Guardians Vol. 2 has going for it is being the rare Marvel Cinematic Universe production that mostly consists of what works best about these pictures. Going light on overlong CGI slugfests and interlocking self-importance, this one is all about the likable characters, eccentric performances, pseudo-psychedelic visual atmosphere, off-kilter semi-Shakespearian sci-fantasy pulp family drama, earnest sentiment, a dusting of sarcasm, comic book splash pages and punchlines, topped off with screwball fizz.

In fact, for those of us who prefer these behemoths at their lightest, most frivolous and goofy, this one starts with payoffs and just keeps returning on that investment. Sure, it gets dragged down at its most static with long sequences of characters marveling at each other’s squabbles and petty exposition – worst is a living planet who walks us through tableaus of his life that are hollow visualizations where an evocative monologue would do. But when it works it works, a buzzy blast, a popcorn entertainment happy to be a good hang. Who cares if Chris Pratt (Star-lord) isn’t much of a dramatic performer and Zoe Saldana (Gamora) has the thankless task of scowling and posing while slathered in dull green makeup? The rest of the ensemble is crackling, from the good-natured single-minded Drax (Dave Bautista) to the chattering racoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) to a dancing sapling (cooing voice-modulated Vin Diesel) to the bit parts made into meals by the appealing likes of Michael Rooker and Elizabeth Debicki. Best is Kurt Russell playing pure swaggering charm as what we soon learn is a literal manifestation of ego run amok. They’re all having fun goofing around in special effects, knowing they can go big and silly without upstaging the multicolored save-the-universe lightshow splattering around and behind them. 

There’s hardly anything to it, but writer-director James Gunn stages it with some visual panache, more confidently maneuvering the Marvel house style into interesting curlicues of delight and surprise. There’s an opening action sequence set almost entirely in the background of a shot focused on an oblivious adorable little guy dancing to ELO. (Predictably, but still successfully, the movie is set to greatest hits from any AM oldies station.) There’s a whistle powered arrow zipping around a ship, its trailing red laser beam allowing us to see its progress Family Circus style in the back of slow-mo frames and, later, through a massive, askew bank of security monitors. The whole movie is nothing but goofball details – a race of golden humanoids who pilot a hive of drone attack ships from a command center that looks like the palace of Versailles had an 80’s arcade; an antennae-wiggling empathic bug lady (Pom Klementieff) who tries her best but smiles in an unhinged grimace; a god whose self-justification for abandoning his family hinges on a close reading of the lyrics to “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” 

It adds up to a good time at the movies, with lower lows that a great many of its franchise compatriots. (Its highs are also lower, but what are you going to do about it?) There’s still not much of a story going on here, and for all its zipping around and moments of dramatic import the impact is gentle and borderline forgettable. But the fizz and fun are good in the moment. Perhaps that’s the MCU’s biggest success. Barely any of these feel quite enough because they’re perfectly calibrated to leave you happy but wanting more.

Galaxy Quest: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Though hardly finished with earthbound heroes like Captain America and Iron Man (and Thor, whose realm is Earth-adjacent), Marvel has opened up a new wing of worldbuilding far removed, in distance anyway, from the cinematic Avengers space we’ve come to know. Trading in superhero tropes for standard space opera stuff (you’ve seen bits and pieces in Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape), Guardians of the Galaxy finds a ragtag group of intergalactic misfits who spend the runtime gradually learning to work together and earn the moniker of the title. It’s often fun, but it also proves Marvel Studios is happy making good movies, but has little interest in making great ones. They’re too homogenous for that. This one goes to the other end of the universe and finds on its variety of alien worlds a plot that moves and sounds much like any other movie in their roster. It has brightly proficient images, appealing goofiness, and personality that disappears once the obligatory CGI chaos takes over.

In typical Marvel Studios fashion, the characters are intriguing and well cast, then swallowed up once routine effects explode and collide around them for far too long. Before then, though, it’s charming to meet a dopey space pirate (Chris Pratt), a likable underdog as the rare human in these distant parts, having been abducted by aliens as a child. He’s after an orb that’ll get him big bucks. Too bad that a rogue green warrior princess (Zoe Saldana) wants the orb as well, and a pair of bounty hunters – a talking raccoon (Bradley Cooper) with anger issues and a sentient tree (Vin Diesel) with only three words to his vocabulary – are after him. They all get thrown in a maximum-security space jail where they meet a hilariously literal red-and-grey brute (Dave Bautista) who joins them when they soon escape in order to keep the movie moving.

They are a likable ensemble working sarcastic asides and zippy punchlines for all they are worth. The group gets drawn into the cosmic MacGuffin chase for the orb, a haphazardly formed team of mercenaries caught between the galactic government and blue-skinned baddies bent on smashing solar systems or something. I don’t know what the villains are up to, other than growling at each other and trying to blow up anyone who gets near them. Good thing the heroes set about making things right through the usual clamor. If you think the strife and conflict won’t make reluctant allies fast friends, you’ve never seen a Marvel movie. At least director and co-writer James Gunn and screenwriter Nicole Perlman seem aware of the best aspects of these things: the odd asides and strange half-campiness in the margins. For a while, Guardians is built almost entirely out of them.

This is a movie that contains humanlike aliens in every primary color, robot prison guards, a deadly glowing purple stone, a whistle-powered arrow, and a deep space mining colony built in the enormous skull of a long-dead cosmic being. It also has a collection of character actors (from Benicio Del Toro to Michael Rooker, Glenn Close to John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou to Lee Pace) putting on funny wigs and funnier accents. Aliens tend to speak in British accents – years of genre fare taught us that – but this movie adds backwoods roughneck drawls, airy Euro lilts, and one that sounds exactly like a pleasant, amiable John C. Reilly. Wigs, on the other hand, come in pompadours, elaborate braids, and beautiful baldness. It’s a treat for fans of scenes dense with sci-fi bric-a-brac and actors swanning around having a fun time being there.

And so, with a solid cast and decent goofy sci-fi appeal, the movie gets by on charm and mood, with a relaxed approach to escalating tension by contrasting it with the ensemble’s prickly group dynamics, snappy banter, and appealing personalities. Smart aleck dorkiness sits next to obliviousness of an alien kind. It’s cute. The raccoon gets a little annoying – mostly for the pinched voice Cooper’s attempting – but the Guardians of the Galaxy are charmers. If all the film is intended to do is put out good vibes – an oldies soundtrack played off a literal mixtape doesn’t hurt – and introduce characters for a new franchise, it gets the job done in the standard slick, bland Marvel house style. It’s new sights and fresh faces shot, edited, and mixed like what we’ve seen before. Gunn brings to it his typical queasy mix of tone as displayed in his horror movie Slither and awful dark vigilante comedy Super. He wants us to think Guardians is both serious and silly, with chaste plotting dusted with out-of-place vulgarity, with bloodless bloodshed both joke and hurt. A rough fit, but it’s got a good beat, a bright look, and is still of a tonal piece with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The brain trust couldn’t cook up a fresh storytelling approach to go with its new locales, feeling the need to hit the standard plot beats. It’s a weird concept told in a totally conventional way. You could set your watch by the time the false climaxes, periods of doubt, determined scheming, and tearful emotional conclusions will appear. Then it all culminates in the same old endless rounds of weightless carnage and staggering body count that’s sadly expected and hard to take. The charm and knowingly goofy demeanor disappears as the movie glazes over and goes through the motions with a sense of “this is how we end these” instead of “here’s a natural conclusion to this story.” So here are hordes of anonymous figures slaughtered. Here's a one-on-one fight with the villain that goes on and on and on. Now here’s a ginormous spaceship leveling a metropolitan area. Again. Like last summer. And the summer before that. Marvel is consistent, churning out product with fun diverting detail that disappears once the fireworks start firing. It gets the job done, and I liked it more than not, but it wore me out.