history of the marvel universe mark waid

So off the team goes to save everyone, including themselves. Guardians leader Peter (Chris Pratt) is a drunken mess, strong guy Drax (Dave Bautista) seems without purpose, cyborg assassin Nebula (Karen Gillan) looks ready to murder anyone who crosses her way, Rocket (that would be the talking raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper) is so bummed that he’s listening to Radiohead’s Creep on repeat, and monosyllabic tree-man Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) is, well, you know … he’s still Groot.īut then a mysterious figure from Rocket’s tortuous past blasts back into his life, threatening to upend not only the Guardians’ lives but the existence of the entire universe. It is a few years after the events of Avengers: Endgame, and our ragtag group of heroes is trying to recover from the events of that film, in which they lost one of their own, the green-skinned warrior Gamora (Zoe Saldana), to the mad titan Thanos. In the beginning, Gunn creates his own weirdo space heaven. The result is a beautifully frustrating mess of a capstone to Gunn’s Marvel career, a love letter mistakenly employed as a scrap of toilet paper. It is as if the MCU higher-ups got wind of what was going down and quickly engineered a black hole of studio notes to suck the Guardians into a tesseract of meaningless set pieces and prolonged B-plot detours. Marvel Studios/Courtesy of Marvel Studiosīecause at around the hundred-minute mark, everything in Gunn’s perfect little cinematic galaxy falls apart in a magnificently depressing fashion.

Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. Conceived and executed like it’s a real-deal movie and not an algorithmically programmed piece of intellectual property, Gunn’s film features a story whose narrative beats dovetail with its characters’ development, a visual sensibility that is singular in its disparate and estimable influences, a killer soundtrack, and an overall commitment to wringing the best elements of comic-book craziness into a cinematic ride that is transfixing, transporting.

3 arrives as a breath of fresh cosmic air from writer-director James Gunn, inarguably the most talented filmmaker working in the superhero business today.īig-hearted in its emotions, imaginative in its world-building, sly in its comedic beats and almost completely untethered to the grinding gears of the larger MCU continuity machine, this new entry in the GOTG series single-handedly rescues the reputation of a mega-franchise whose wear and tear is increasingly hard to ignore. After a string of high-profile disappointments for the Marvel Cinematic Universe – including the underwhelming Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the ugly and interminable Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

Oh, thank Groot: We finally have a Marvel movie that is worth the many hundreds of millions of dollars that have been thrown at it.

History of the marvel universe mark waid