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This Is The Right Way To Introduce A Hero
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Jul 9, 2025
Superhero movies have been a stable at the box office for over 20 years. But introducing a comic book character to a wider audience takes a certain set of skills. Skill that James Gunn has proved time and time again, starting with the Guardians of the Galaxy. The way Guardians of the Galaxy introduced Star-Lord is not only perfect, but subverts the expectations of many viewers. James Gunn was born to direct the Guardians of the Galaxy, and his entire filmography proves that.
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Hey, you know what
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There's another name you might know me by. Star-Lord. Who? Introducing a comic book character to a wide audience
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takes a particular set of skills. For a portion of the audience, there
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are years, often decades, of backstory and memories with this character to contend with
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For the majority of the audience, this character is a blank slate of potential
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One director has proven time and time again to be able to not only celebrate and introduce
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the character's legacy to new audiences, but also subvert the expectations of longtime fans
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Welcome to the frickin' Guardians of the Galaxy. Released in 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy was written and directed by genre creator James Gunn
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Known for celebrating the weird and strange in cult features like Tromeo and Juliet, Super, and Slither
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Gunn also had a history with pop culture icons like Scooby-Doo or George Romero's zombie films
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One penchant of Gunn's career was the way he rejoiced in off-kilter characters
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The first proper superhero movie he directed, Super, we meet a short-order cook who goes on a
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violent and religious killing spree by the end of the movie. And in Gunn's deft hands
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the trajectory made sense. When it was announced that he would be helming the lesser-known
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superhero team, it sounded perfect. A group of misfit space pirates led by the Earthling
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and demigod Peter Quill was exactly the dynamic Gunn was built for
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What a bunch of a-holes. And this is Peter Quill, also known as Star-Lord
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In contrast to most of the Marvel heroes we had met at this point, he's cast in shadows
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a silhouette where we only see the trim of his dirty red coat and almost alien red eyes
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that are revealed to be goggles. The world he treks is as dark and ruinous as his unkempt appearance and clothes
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The music is an orchestra of ominous notes and crashing lightning. It is, for all intents and purposes, heavy
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There's a feeling that this world, this man, is dangerous, which makes sense given the cold open. Moments before, we were on Earth in 1988. We watched a
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young boy who retreated to his Walkman to avoid the world around him. We then see the entirety
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of that world, a hospital room with his ill mother at the center. When the young Peter was brought to
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the dark hospital room we see all the light in the movie world focused solely on the sickly woman lying in the hospital bed surrounded by her family and loved ones She pleads to hold her son hand and there a genuine fear in young Peter face as he refuses
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Before he can comfort his mother one last time, she flatlines and dies
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After running from the hospital in pain and sorrow, he's abducted by an ominous spaceship that fires off a tractor beam over the crying child
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The movie's light turns to him, casting a spotlight over the child like the light of the hospital room
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Having just watched that heart-wrenching opening, the serious silhouette of the masked man
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using a high-tech gadget that casts a barren landscape in holographic ghosts fits with the established tone
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Until here. Star-Lord retracts his mask for the first time, and we see star Chris Pratt in full
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Pratt had risen to fame playing the lovable goofball Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation
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The character was what many would lovingly refer to as a himbo. They are often extremely handsome, often muscular, charming, and above all, a little dim
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Leslie, I typed your symptoms into the thing up here, and it says you could have network
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connectivity problems. There is a purity to the idea of a himbo
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They are usually a character without malice or ill intent, just good-hearted and kind
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The timing of revealing Pratt at exactly this moment automatically slightly lightens the mood
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It's very much a flare from Gunn, signifying that despite the emotional rollercoaster we
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had already gone through, there was still a comedic actor at the film's core. It's not long
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before Star-Lord's hand veers to his waist and hits play on his familiar Walkman. The dramatic
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score has dropped off and we're left with the strange, twangy sound of Redbone's intro to
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Come and Get Your Love. If the reveal of Pratt's himbo persona was a flare
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Come and Get Your Love was a signal missile with fireworks, a marching band, and a parade float
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This was a very intentional, kind of funky, kind of groovy, slap on the back that said
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but don't worry, it's not all that serious. In what is both a follow through to that promise
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and a clever bit of story setup, Star-Lord begins to dance. And this isn't the big grand Kevin Bacon stunt double
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dancing in a warehouse dance, it's a genuinely goofy dance like nobody's watching quasi-lip sync
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There's a sense of play here. Akin to Tom Cruise iconic pantless slide to Bob Seger old time rock and roll Star even has his own microphone grabbing a rat alien from a nearby rock Aside from shifting the tone from serious space adventure drama to light this is also amazing character shorthand Character shorthand
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is like sketching a silhouette. Think of Batman's bright yellow chess logo in the alley of a shadow
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It's giving you information by showing versus telling. Instead of having characters remark on
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how silly Star-Lord can be, why not show it instead? It also sets up what would become a
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fight with the film's main villain, Ronan the Accuser, played by Lee Pace. Towards the film's
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climax as a means to throw the villain off and show the camaraderie between the newly found
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family of the Guardians, Star-Lord instigates a dance-off. What are you doing
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Dance-off, bro! This is a writing tick Gunn has carried throughout his filmography. In Gunn's 2021 The Suicide Squad
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we meet Savant, played by Gunn mainstay Michael Rooker. In this introduction
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we see Savant in a sort of solitary yard time. He throws a rubber ball that ping-pongs quickly
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around the room and returns to his hand. When a small bird chirps in the corner of his room
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Savant flicks the ball before it crushes the bird and returns to his hand
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This pays off a few moments later when our decoy suicide squad lands on the beach
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to raid a foreign soil. After seeing how skilled Savant is, we're then told by handlers of the suicide squad
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he's an expert in weapons and hand-to-hand combat. In lesser hands, the expectation is that
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this will be the sole survivor of the beach attack. We've spent most of our running time to this point on him
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He's a recognizable actor and frequent collaborator with Gunn. As the squad is being overrun by the defending army, Savant watches from the water
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We wait, knowing at any moment he will pull some sort of movie magic
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superhero miracle, and break free of the army. Only moments before, we had seen him be the sole member to try and rescue the anthropomorphic weasel from drowning
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Instead, Gunn has Savant run, or more accurately, swim, away in fear
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as Amanda Waller, played by Viola Davis, demands he stop lest he detonate the bomb implanted in his skull
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We think then, maybe this is the moment. Maybe Savant will reveal he has removed the device
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or there's a chance he is a lesser known invulnerability. What we get is an exploded head and floating body
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As the title credits roll Gunn wonderful musical cues kick in and we have the very on very perfect People Who Die by the Jim Carrel Band It another subversion of our expectations coupled with a smaller scale
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setup and payoff akin to Star-Lord's dance. What are you doing? I'm distracting you
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you big turd blossom. We mentioned earlier that Gunn had traditionally worked in horror
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and with this open, he follows the tried-and-true Tales from the Crypt reversal formula
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We meet a character who does a villainous thing, in Savant's case, killing the bird
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and then that character gets their comeuppance. For Savant, it was having an extremely similar-looking bird peck on the gruesome neck stump
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This hodgepodge of influences backed by strong storytelling fundamentals continuously won over the superhero movie fandom
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So much so that Gunn and more business-minded partner Peter Safran were named co-chairs of DC Studios
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Together, they are planning on relaunching the DC universe, With plans to introduce more oddball and horror-centric characters like Swamp Thing
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Creature Commandos, and The Authority, there's a lot of opportunity for Gunn to revel in what he
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does best, offbeat weirdos with heart. But what about the more traditional characters
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like his planned Superman legacy? Gunn has tangentially worked around the Superman mythos
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before. In 2019, he was the producer of the film Brightburn. The story was the broad strokes of
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Superman. A young couple in Kansas adopts an alien baby whose ship crashed near their farm
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Gunn and the other filmmakers never shied away from the comparison, often pitching it as Superman meets The Omen
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What that movie lacked, though, was a sense of heart in the main character. Our Clark surrogate, Brandon, is an angry boy
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an idea of what happens when Superman goes wrong. Maybe Legacy will work as Brightburn's inverse
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a celebration of kindness and decency in the face of villainy and evil
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Whatever the case may be, one thing we can know is Gunn's aptitude
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for showing us strange and alien misfits who celebrate their otherness will be a departure from previous creative helmer Zack Snyder
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Snyder veered toward the celebration of DC's pantheon as almost mythical. They were statuesque and melodramatic
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oftentimes so far removed it felt difficult to form a human connection with
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Gunn seems to have the opposite intent. Every time he introduces a character, he wants us to relate somehow
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either through fear or even just the simple idea of dancing like nobody's watching
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