I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 quite a bit after it came out, but watching movies was one of the things I set aside during my sabbatical. I’m glad I didn’t forget to go back to it and get caught up, because as you’ll know if you’ve seen it, the movie is explicitly theological in its message in very interesting ways. That’s vague enough to not constitute a spoiler, but I’ll say at this point that in what follows I will comment on some moments later in the movie that you probably should come back and read after watching the movie, if you haven’t already seen it. I suspect that most people who enjoy Marvel movies will be way ahead of me and so can read on without worry.
At a general level, the notion of a creator who struggles to make a perfect world would in and of itself, without the plot points I discuss below, be theologically interesting. It would be easy to say that, contrary to the assumptions behind Genesis, there was no pre-existent matter that might resist the will of a Creator. We see, however, a world that has drug dealers and violence and all the things that the High Evolutionary struggles to eliminate in the film. The callous decision to then wipe out the world with such features, if it seems appalling to you, should be considered as just like what is depicted in the Bible’s flood story.
In a vision of the afterlife that Rocket has when he is close to dying, Rocket says that his life and all of theirs are purposeless since they were made by a creator as a stepping stone to something else, and were not intended to live, much less to inhabit a perfect world that the High Evolutionary is making. Lylla says that there is the hand of the creator, and then the hand that made the hand. This is a simply wonderful way of thinking about creation and about God as ultimate. Unless one wishes to posit an infinite succession of creators and causes, then ultimately the chain ends somewhere.
The High Evolutionary says “There is no God. That’s why I stepped in.” Although you’d think that this figure’s hubris was already familiar to all his henchmen, it seems that this blasphemous outburst was too much for those who work for him. At that moment they pull their guns.
Other aspects of the movie are more subtle in their religious and theological significance but should not be missed. Mantis’ insistence that Drax is indeed stupid but is also a wonderful person has profound implications. No society and no community should judge people by one metric. We need smart people. We also need people who, like Drax, can make us laugh. I also loved the fact that Drax happened to know a language they needed to communicate in, and no one thought to ask him if he knows it. A being may have a mental age that we would say is quite low, and be incapable of much analogical and metaphorical thinking (despite Drax’s wonderful demonstration in this regard at one point in the film…hee hee), yet be fluent in languages as the world’s children are capable of being, and contribute things other than clever solutions to complex problems. If you are in a church that can handle the language used, there is a sequence of scenes about or involving Drax that would make a delightful illustration of what Paul says about the body of Christ. 🙂
There is a panel from a Marvel comic that shows that this aspect of the story is not something unique to the movie.
See as well Leah Schnelbach’s discussion of the religious themes that connect Vol.2 with Vol.3.
In short, this movie is theologically rich and interesting in multiple ways. Perhaps most interesting is the question of whether the meaningfulness of one’s individual existence, or of existence in general, depends on the intensions of a creator. Many theological systems insist that the answer is yes. Given that the current state of our scientific knowledge shows that we are the result of natural processes, the framing in terms of the hand that made the hand that made us will likely be just as meaningful to human viewers of the movie as to Rocket Racoon.
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