Baby Groot and the Problem with Saving the Universe

Superhero films bore me. Not because the genre is incomprehensible—it’s almost insultingly legible—but because it understands itself too well. Stakes escalate on schedule, the villain delivers the monologue, and the hero wins in a way that costs just enough to feel meaningful without actually costing anything. Batman saves Gotham. Spider-Man saves the city. The math is always solved by the credits.

Guardians of the Galaxy shouldn’t work. The plot is standard universe-in-peril machinery. The characters are assembled from type—the rogue, the warrior, the empath, the muscle, the raccoon—and the whole thing operates at a register that is openly, cheerfully absurd. It doesn’t linger. It doesn’t want to be thought about the next morning. And yet for two hours the film is alive in a way that most of its genre, at its most polished, never manages.

The first trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 opens on Baby Groot dancing to Mr. Blue Sky while the rest of the team fights something enormous in the background and ignores him completely. That’s the whole pitch. It works because the first film earned that register—the affection between these people (and raccoon, and tree) is genuine enough that watching a tiny sentient plant being delighted reads as actual payoff. James Gunn clearly loves these idiots, and that love is what saves the franchise from being just another entry in the machinery.

My standard for the sequel is the same one I applied to the original: not whether it matters, but whether it’s alive. The first one was. The trailer suggests the second one at least remembers why.