Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a strange sequel, both better and worse than the first. Better: It centers characters who in other movies would be marginalized; there’s a large dose of wit and tenderness (sometimes at the same time: such as a wonderful Mary Poppins joke that brings a huge laugh of endearment); a fluid visual imagination; and an actual idea: What happens when Ego rules the universe?
Worse: While in the original, violence was meted out sparingly, in this second Guardians outing, killing solves everything. One of the most brilliantly designed special-effects scenes in the post- Jurassic Park era is also one of the most nihilistic: A lovable rogue liberates a prison by means of a magic arrow that can kill dozens without needing to be re-aimed. He does it whistling a happy tune, accompanied by a wisecracking raccoon and a pop song. It’s cartoonish, of course, but I don’t recall Tom or Jerry ever killing anyone; this scene, in a film that elsewhere exhibits imagination and delight, merely invites us to revel in carnage.
Couldn’t we see the guardians dance their way into something other than annihilating their opponents? Couldn’t the character who can transform suffering by touch have been employed in the service of healing the bad guy’s megalomania? Guardians Vol. 2 gets a lot right, especially in allowing unconventional characters to take the stage. But it also carries on the tradition of family first and last, even if it means destroying everyone else.
David Foster Wallace once wrote, “If ... fiction can allow us ... to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own ... We become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.” It might.
There’s no reason why this can’t be true of blockbuster action movies—indeed, I think Marvel is trying to get there. One of the many things to grieve about the recent death of the great filmmaker Jonathan Demme is that he never got to make a Marvel movie. His works always invited empathy: for a young woman investigator targeted by misogyny in The Silence of the Lambs, for the father of the bride at a messy wedding in Rachel Getting Married, for gay characters previously ignored or pathologized in mainstream cinema in Philadelphia. Demme lived as if the purpose of art was to lead us to understand each other, or at least to recognize when we don’t. He knew violence was a part of life and so should be a part of movies. He also had the kind of moral imagination that goes beyond merely playing killing for laughs.
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