We Are Groot

How James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Trilogy Broke Marvel Open and Rebuilt It From the Heart

On losers, love, grief, and the most unlikely trilogy in comic book film history

In 2014, Marvel Studios released a film about a raccoon, a sentient tree, a green woman, a grey tattooed maniac, and a man in a red coat who called himself Star-Lord — and nobody, absolutely nobody, had heard of any of them. The general public's familiarity with the Guardians of the Galaxy extended, at best, to a vague awareness that such a team existed in some corner of the comics that the cool kids didn't read. The marketing department was quietly terrified. The studio was cautiously optimistic, which in studio terms means they were quietly terrified as well.

What happened next is the kind of thing that happens maybe three or four times in a generation of filmmaking: the movie opened, and it was not just good, it was something new. It was something the superhero genre had never quite been before, and something that — in the decade since — it has never quite managed to replicate without Gunn at the helm. The Guardians trilogy is, taken as a complete work, the most emotionally honest, thematically coherent, and genuinely personal thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever produced. It is also, against all reasonable odds, one of the great trilogies in comic book film history.

This is the story of how James Gunn took a property that nobody wanted and turned it into the beating heart of the MCU — and why the third film, in particular, stands as one of the most gutting and beautiful things the superhero genre has ever attempted.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): The Bet Nobody Was Supposed to Win

The first Guardians film opens with a child in a hospital corridor, holding his mother's hand as she dies. The boy can't bring himself to take her hand. He stands at the threshold and can't cross it, and then she is gone, and then he runs out into the dark and is taken by a spaceship, and we don't see that boy again for twenty-six years. That boy is Peter Quill. He grows up to be Chris Pratt in a red coat, dancing to Redbone's Come and Get Your Love in a ruined alien landscape, kicking rat-lizards out of his way and using them as microphones, utterly delighted with himself and his own nonsense.

This tonal pivot — from genuine grief to joyful absurdism in under three minutes — is the whole Guardians project in miniature. James Gunn understood something that most superhero filmmakers are too nervous to commit to: that comedy and tragedy are not opposites. They are the same instrument played in different registers. The things that make us laugh and the things that make us cry come from the same place, which is the place where we are most painfully aware of the gap between what we want and what we have. Peter Quill is funny because he is broken. His bravado is a scar tissue. His nostalgia mixtape is a dead woman's last gift. The dancing is how you move through the world when you can't stop moving.

I’m distracting you, you big turd blossom.

The ensemble. Let's talk about the ensemble, because it is the film's greatest achievement and its most improbable one. Rocket Raccoon is angry — furiously, defensively angry — because he was built that way, experimented on and reconstructed and made into something that the universe finds funny, and the only response he has found to the horror of that is to be angrier than everything else in the room. Groot is love in the purest possible form: a being of enormous power whose entire vocabulary is three words, who arranges them into every possible emotional permutation and manages, every time, to say exactly the right thing. Gamora is competence and concealment, a woman who was made into a weapon and has to decide whether the weapon is all she is. Drax is a grief engine wearing the costume of a comic foil, a man whose entire personality is the armoring of a wound too deep to look at directly.

What Gunn did with these five characters in one film — establishing them fully, giving each of them a distinct voice and a distinct wound, and then knitting those wounds together into something that functions as a found family — is a feat of character economy that most trilogies can't manage across three films. By the time Peter Quill reaches for his mother's hand in the film's climax, in a moment that mirrors and reverses the film's opening with mathematical precision, you have been waiting for it without knowing you were waiting for it. The hand he couldn't hold in the hospital corridor becomes the hand he holds to save the universe. It is a small gesture carrying an enormous weight, and it lands because Gunn spent the entire film preparing the ground for it.

The soundtrack. It must be addressed. The use of a curated seventies pop mixtape — Hooked on a Feeling, Go All the Way, Cherry Bomb, Come and Get Your Love — as the film's primary musical spine was a gamble that paid off more richly than anyone had a right to expect. The Awesome Mix is not just a playlist. It is a characterization device. It is how Peter Quill hears the universe: through the ears of a child who stopped being updated in 1988, who hears every moment of his adult life scored by songs his mother loved. The joy of those songs is real joy. The melancholy underneath them is real melancholy. Every time the needle drops, you are hearing Peter Quill's interior life made audible.

The film was, against all probability, a phenomenon. It proved that the MCU could do things other than the Avengers formula. It proved that comedy and heart and deep character work could coexist in a two-hour blockbuster. It proved that Gunn, whose previous major work had been the gleefully transgressive low-budget horror-comedy Slither and the deeply weird superhero deconstruction Super, was a genuine filmmaker with a genuine voice, and that voice had something to say.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017): The One About the Fathers

The second Guardians film is the most misunderstood film in the MCU. It was released to good reviews and enormous box office, and was then quietly relegated to the second tier of MCU appreciation — enjoyed but not celebrated, remembered fondly but not loved with the intensity of the first film or the third. This is an error. Vol. 2 is, in several important respects, a more ambitious and more emotionally complex film than its predecessor, and the fact that it chose to pursue that complexity at the expense of conventional narrative propulsion is not a flaw. It is a commitment.

Vol. 2 is a film about fathers. It is specifically a film about the difference between the father who made you and the father who chose you, and about what it costs when those two things are not the same person. Ego the Living Planet, played by Kurt Russell as a performance of radiantly weaponized charm, is the biological father — ancient, powerful, literally a god, and revealed to be the author of Peter Quill's childhood grief in the most personal way possible. Yondu Udonta, blue-skinned and arrow-whistling and magnificently played by Michael Rooker as a being of pure contradictions, is the father who chose — the criminal who kidnapped a child and raised him badly and loved him in the only language he had, which was a rough and incomplete and never-spoken language.

He may have been your father, boy. But he weren’t your daddy.

Yondu's death. There is an argument to be made that Yondu's death in the vacuum of space, giving his suit to Peter so that Peter can breathe, is the single most emotionally effective moment in the entire MCU. Not because it is the biggest or the loudest or the most consequential in plot terms, but because it is the most earned. Rooker has been playing this character's love as a secret for two films, hiding it behind bluster and threat and the convenient mythology of the arrow that could kill Peter anytime it wanted to. The death strips all of that away. In the vacuum of space, with nothing left to hide behind, Yondu tells his son the truth. He says it with his eyes, because Guardians has always known that the most important things are said without words. The funeral sequence that follows — the fireworks in the dark, the faces of five broken people watching, Cat Stevens' Father and Son playing over the slow drift of the body through the stars — is the finest sequence in the MCU's history of funerals, which is saying something.

Nebula and Gamora. The subplot that critics sometimes regard as a distraction from the film's main emotional arc is in fact the film's thesis delivered from a different angle: two sisters, both broken by the same father, who learned different lessons from the breaking. Karen Gillan's Nebula is the film's secret heart, a woman who was rebuilt piece by piece every time she lost a fight, who was punished for being the lesser daughter by being made more mechanical, more distant from the human thing she might have been. Her confrontation with Gamora in the film's second half is a grief scene disguised as an action sequence, and it is devastating.

The film meanders, by design. It is more interested in its characters standing still and talking than in its plot moving forward, and the plot sometimes suffers for it. But the meandering is the point. These are people who have been moving so fast for so long that they have never had to sit with what they actually feel about each other, and Vol. 2 forces them to sit. The result is a film that functions less like a conventional blockbuster and more like a character study that occasionally features battles with tentacled gold people. This is a compliment.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023): The One That Breaks You

The third Guardians film is the best superhero film of the 2020s. This statement is less controversial than it might seem, because the 2020s have not been particularly strong for the genre, but it should not be understood as a qualified compliment. Vol. 3 is not the best by default. It is the best because it does something that almost no superhero film has ever managed: it takes its themes seriously enough to follow them all the way to their conclusion, and its conclusion is that love — broken, expensive, imperfect, freely given love — is the answer to the specific horror it has been examining.

That horror is Rocket's origin. Gunn had been seeding it for nine years, giving us glimpses: the scars, the rage, the offhand remarks about being created rather than born, the desperate over-assertion of his own identity in the face of a universe that treats him as a joke. Vol. 3 shows us the whole thing. Rocket Raccoon was a subject of the High Evolutionary, a genetically engineered being who was modified from birth, given intelligence and consciousness and emotion and then denied the right to be those things, treated as data in an experiment and discarded when the experiment moved on. The scenes of Rocket as a young creature in a cage, making friends with other broken animals — Lylla the otter, Teefs the walrus, Floor the rabbit — are as painful as anything in the superhero genre. Not because they are spectacular but because they are small and true. They are about the love that forms in captivity, which is the most stubborn and the most heartbreaking kind.

I’m not gonna stop being me just because it’s hard.

Bradley Cooper has been giving a great performance as Rocket since 2014, and Vol. 3 finally gives that performance room to be fully seen. The scenes of Rocket dying in the film's first act — the team's desperate attempt to find the override code that will allow his rebuilt biology to be healed — function as a structural device that opens into a meditation on what it means to have been made into what you are against your will, and whether survival is a kind of victory or just a continuation of the experiment. Rocket's answer, by the end of the film, is that survival becomes victory at the moment you choose what to do with it. He does not escape his origin. He refuses to be defined by it.

The High Evolutionary, played by Chukwudi Iwuji with an operatic malevolence that earns every frame of screen time it occupies, is the series' most personal villain: a being whose stated goal is perfection and whose actual goal is control, who cannot tolerate the thing he accidentally created — genuine love, genuine connection, genuine selfhood — because those things exist outside his ability to design them. He is the villain of the entire trilogy retroactively understood: Ego wanted to subsume, the High Evolutionary wants to refine, and both of them are unmade by the same thing, which is the stubborn, inconvenient, undesignable fact of love freely chosen.

The ensemble finale. Every member of the team gets a goodbye that is appropriate to who they are. Peter goes home — back to Earth, back to the grandfather who has been waiting for twenty-six years, back to the moment that was interrupted by the alien abduction that started everything. Nebula stays with the Ravagers. Drax, in the film's most quietly wonderful development, turns out to be extraordinarily good with children and stays on the world they've just saved to help raise them. Mantis goes to find out who she is when she isn't in service of someone else. Gamora returns to the Ravagers and the self she built without Peter Quill. And Rocket, who nearly died, who had his entire origin dragged into the light and had to look at it, becomes the new captain of the Milano, which is the only ending that was always the right one.

The film closes on a new team assembled around Rocket, heading out into the galaxy, and on Peter Quill sitting at a breakfast table in Missouri with his grandfather, eating cereal. Both images are earned. Both images are perfect. The galaxy-spanning adventure and the quiet kitchen morning are not in tension with each other. They are the same story: people finding their way back to where they belong.

What Gunn Got Right That the MCU Couldn't Replicate

Personal Vision in a Corporate Machine

The MCU is a machine for producing product, and it produces that product with extraordinary efficiency. What it cannot produce by default is a genuinely personal artistic vision — a filmmaker's specific way of seeing the world, embedded so deeply in the material that every frame of the film is recognizably theirs. Gunn had this. The Guardians films are unmistakably James Gunn's films: the specific register of the comedy, the comfort with genuine emotional ugliness, the insistence on sitting with the broken things rather than papering over them, the musical choices that function as an additional layer of character interiority. No other MCU filmmaker left this kind of fingerprint on their work, and the Guardians films are immeasurably richer for it.

The Found Family as Genuine Theology

Found family is a trope, and like all tropes it can be executed badly. The execution in the Guardians films is not bad. It is, in fact, so good that it transcends the trope and becomes something else: an actual argument about how love works. These are not people who find each other and immediately click. They are people who fight and betray and misunderstand and hurt, and who stay anyway, and whose staying is itself the definition of what family is. The trilogy traces that argument from the first film's uneasy alliance through the second film's confrontation with the wounds underneath the alliance to the third film's reckoning with whether the family survives the unbearable truths about what each member of it has been through. The answer is yes. The answer is always yes, but in Gunn's telling, yes is not easy. Yes costs something.

Grief as the Engine

Every major beat in all three films is powered by grief. Peter's grief for his mother. Yondu's grief for the son he never told he loved. Nebula's grief for the sister relationship that was stolen from her by a father who pitted them against each other. Rocket's grief for the little creatures in the cage who loved him before he knew he was worth loving. Gamora's grief for the childhood that was replaced by training. Drax's grief for his wife and daughter, which is so enormous that it has become his entire personality and the source of both his comedy and his deepest humanity. The MCU, as a general rule, does not dwell in grief. It acknowledges it and moves past it. Gunn's Guardians films dwell. They believe that the grief is the story, not the obstacle to the story.

The Comedy Is the Character

The funniest moments in the Guardians films are also the most emotionally precise. Rocket's bluster is funny because it is so transparently a defense mechanism. Drax's literalism is funny because it is the specific kind of literalism of a man who stopped being able to read subtext the day his family died. Groot's three-word vocabulary is funny and then heartbreaking and then transcendent, in that order, in the span of a single scene. The comedy does not undercut the emotion. It delivers it by indirection, the way the best comedy always does.

The Trilogy as a Complete Work

Taken as a whole, the three Guardians films form the most coherent and intentional trilogy in the MCU's history. This is not a franchise that grew its themes organically out of the demands of sequels. Gunn knew what he was making from the beginning: a story about broken people who find each other and collectively figure out how to survive having been broken, set against a galaxy of operatic weirdness and scored to music from a dead woman's cassette tape.

The structural symmetry of the trilogy is real and intentional. The first film begins with a boy who can't hold his mother's hand and ends with a man who reaches for something with the whole force of his grief and transforms it into salvation. The second film is the story of the father, which is the story of the first film told from the perspective of twenty more years of running away from it. The third film is the story of Rocket, which is the story of the first two films told from the perspective of the one team member who never had a hand to reach for, who was made in a lab and discarded, and who had to build his own capacity for love out of nothing and then watch it be taken away and then rebuild it again and then nearly have it taken away a final time. His survival is not just a plot resolution. It is the trilogy's thesis proven: love freely given is the thing that cannot be destroyed, even by the people who made you to be loveless.

You’re all a bunch of losers. People who have lost stuff. And we have, right?

Peter Quill said that in a spaceship in 2014, trying to talk five strangers into risking their lives for a world they had no particular reason to save. It was a sales pitch. It was also the trilogy's mission statement, delivered in the first act of the first film: the Guardians are defined by loss, and what they do with it is choose each other. Twelve years later, in a quiet kitchen in Missouri with a bowl of cereal getting soggy, the choice has been made and remade and tested to destruction and it has held. The losers won.

James Gunn made three films about losers winning by virtue of love, inside a studio system designed to make products, and the products he made were so clearly not just products — were so clearly the work of a person who had something to say about grief and found family and the specific kind of love that forms between broken things — that they permanently changed what people expected from the genre. That the MCU's subsequent attempts to replicate this success without Gunn at the helm have largely fallen short is not evidence that the lesson wasn't learned. It is evidence of how hard the thing Gunn did actually is.

It looks easy. The music and the jokes and the talking raccoon. It looks like fun. It is fun. It is also, underneath the fun, as serious and as true as the best comics this genre was built on. That combination — joy on the surface, grief in the engine room, love at the foundation — is what made the Guardians trilogy the beating heart of the MCU. It is also what will keep these three films alive long after the franchise that spawned them has been rebooted past recognition.

We are Groot. Three words. Every emotion. Always the right thing to say.

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I am Groot.