Film reviews: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 | Peter Pan & Wendy | The Artifice Girl
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (12A) ****
Peter Pan & Wendy (6+) ***
The Artifice Girl (15) ****
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 has been a long time coming, even if it feels like Chris Pratt and co have never really been away. In the six years since the self-indulgent second instalment, this band of wise-cracking intergalactic defenders have appeared in multiple Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and had their own Star Wars parodying Holiday Special on Disney+. Franchise director James Gunn, meanwhile, was controversially fired then rehired by Marvel, went through a whole cancellation cycle on social media, made a movie for rivals DC (2021’s The Suicide Squad) and, more recently, signed on to oversee DC’s entire comic book movie slate, including directing a new Superman film. Even with one foot out the door, though, Gunn has found a way to bring the Guardians of the Galaxy series – at least this iteration of it – to a satisfying close, with a movie that feels properly cinematic in an old-school summer blockbuster way.
Where the previous two films centred around Pratt’s roguish Star-Lord, aka Peter Quill, the new film makes a somewhat bolder choice by framing itself as the origins story of Rocket, the permanently grouchy talking racoon, voiced in all three films by Bradley Cooper. The film even kicks off in unusually melancholic fashion with Rocket ruminating on his outsider status while listening to an acoustic version of Radiohead’s breakthrough alienation anthem Creep, a song Gunn lets play out in its entirety before disrupting the calm with a golden skinned intergalactic warlock (played by a beefed up Will Poulter) swooping in to kidnap Rocket.
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Hide AdThis opening attack, a catastrophically ill-planned assault on the Guardians’ spaceport "Knowhere”, leaves Rocket in critical condition and forces Quill, Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Mantis (Pom Klementief) Groot (Vin Diesel) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to embark on a dangerous mission to save his life, one that will bring them into contact with the High Evolutionary, a deranged eugenicist with a god complex and an obsessive plan to produce the perfect society (he’s played with theatrical flair by Royal Shakespeare Company alumni Chukwudi Iwuji).
That the imperfect, misfit Rocket is revealed – via flashbacks – to be a valuable piece of IP discarded by a villain ruthlessly intent on creating a blemish-free society, feels like a sly way for Gunn to poke fun at his own complicated relationship with Marvel. But to his credit, he also expands this idea into a fascinating parable about the reality-distorting effect of trying to force everyone to live in a perfectly curated world.
When the Guardians arrive on a socially engineered planet called Counter-Earth, for instance, it looks like the Island of Dr Moreau run amuck. It’s wild stuff, but much like the film’s more psychedelic sci-fi elements, it works because of the effort that’s gone into creating rounded characters and a richly textured universe. Nostalgic soundtrack cuts from the likes of the Beastie Boys and Faith No More buoy the action whenever the convoluted plot threatens to overwhelm proceedings, but in keeping with the nostalgia-juicing rock music that’s been a constant element of Guardians of the Galaxy from the get-go, Vol 3 plays like an epic farewell gig where everyone gets their moment to shine, butt-numbing running time be damned.
Peter Pan and Wendy, Disney’s latest live-action remake, revisits both the 1953 animated film and JM Barrie’s 1911 source novel in search of ways to make the story of the boy who never grew up take flight for audiences already inundated with non-Disney-affiliated adaptations. Like a lot of those other Peter Pan and Peter Pan-adjacent films – Pan, Wendy, Finding Neverland, even Hook – writer/director David Lowery has widened the story’s focus, reinstating Wendy Darling’s shared title billing and telling it largely from her point of view.
Played by Ever Anderson as a change-fearing young woman about to depart for boarding school, Wendy’s stated reluctance to grow up is all it takes to summon Tinker Bell (Yara Shahidi) and Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) to spirit her and her brothers off to Neverland, where Peter’s eternal battle with Captain Hook (Jude Law) rages on.
Lowery, who previously remade Pete’s Dragon for Disney, brings a more inclusive approach to this fantasy that makes it more reflective of the world around us. But Lowery is also the filmmaker behind the sublime indie horror movie A Ghost Story and he finds a parallel for that film’s meditation on the cruelty of time’s passage in a new backstory for Hook, one that not only helps explain his enmity towards Peter, but also gives Hook’s terror of a ticking clock some additional existential dread. Of course there’s swashbuckling derring-do and a giant crocodile too, but Law gets to infuse the panto appeal of Hook with genuine pathos. Too bad the other characters feel dull in comparison.
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Hide AdThe ethics of using AI are explored in provocative fashion in The Artifice Girl, a nifty, low-budget, Black Mirror-esque sci-fi drama about a special-effects maverick who designs an AI child to entrap predators online. Split into three chapters that take place decades apart, writer/director/star Franklin Ritch has fashioned a brilliantly creepy and thoughtful piece of speculative fiction that smartly uses the confined space of its budget-saving interrogation room setting to amplify the intrusive nature of AI in our daily lives. The casting of Lance Henriksen in a crucial role late on also offers a neat psychic link to his earlier role as a synthetic human in Aliens.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 is in cinemas from 3 May; Peter Pan & Wendy is streaming on Disney+; The Artifice Girl is available on digital demand.