Guardians of the Galaxy Is Great Because It’s About Jerks Learning to Be Better People

Over the weekend, writer and director James Gunn was fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after right-wing trolls resurfaced old offensive tweets in a successful bid by disingenuous assholes to punish someone they didn't like. As news of Gunn's firing and the circumstances surrounding it became public, the Guardians cast voiced their support for Gunn—Michael Rooker, who plays Yondu, left Twitter in the fallout, and his castmates have all expressed equal amounts of disappointment at Disney for the decision.

This hits particularly hard, because if you put aside the bad-faith outrage that got Gunn fired for something that was already public, and publicly apologized for, Gunn's career following his apology was a sincere one that outwardly sought to make up for the edgy shock-jockeying he was known for at the start of his career. It's right there in the text of both Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and it's not even subtle. They're movies about caustic, abrasive people who mock and swindle others because being genuine and vulnerable scares them—and Gunn made no secret that he was often writing about himself.

In an Instagram post made on Sunday, his brother Sean Gunn stated as much. "I saw firsthand as he went from worrying about 'softening his edge' for a larger audience to realizing that this 'edge' wasn’t as useful of a tool as he thought it was," he wrote. "My hope is that fans continue to watch and appreciate the Guardians movies, not despite the fact that the filmmaker used to be kind of a jackass, but because of it. They are, after all, movies about discovering your best self."

This is what's at the heart of why the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are among the best in the sprawling Marvel canon. Sure, we appreciate that they're pretty self-contained, very funny, and full of great tunes, but they're also intensely personal works. "Rocket is me, feeling outcast and forgotten," Gunn said at one event. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a movie where people literally just talk about how fucked-up they are for two hours, and it's brilliant because of it.

Superhero movies are largely about flawed people learning to be better. A lot of times the polished sheen of blockbuster cinema gets in the way of this, smoothing things over to the point where one CGI spectacle is indistinguishable from the next, but sometimes something remarkably human manages to break through. Something from someone who has learned and grown as much as the characters they've written, and who manages to make a movie with their humanity very much present in the final product. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is after a situation like this one—the damage is largely done, and the well is perhaps already too poisoned for Gunn to be rehired—but committing to people who are genuine in their work and not lousy is a good start, because nothing makes you a target for disingenuous assholes in 2018 quite like sincerely believing in doing something good.