I read everything Matt Zoller Seitz writes, but I didn’t love this worshipful James Gunn profile. It’s too uncritical, it subordinates art (including popular entertainment) to progressive politics, and it fails to explore, even from a progressive perspective, what might remain unsatisfying about Gunn’s endless recycling of violent trauma, irreverent gutter humor, and top-down abuses of power.

If the story is always, without exception, broken and lashing-out underdogs healing from trauma in order to topple bad fathers and authoritarians, what’s to appreciate? Why see the next movie if we’ve seen it already? And if Gunn has a politics beyond “big guys lose, small guys win”—which I don’t need him to have, but Seitz suggests he does—what is his actual substantive take on power sought, maintained, and exercised with non-abusive authority, wisdom, and justice? It might as well be Abrams in Episode VII all over again, needing to destroy the Republic to have the good guys be powerless again. But then it’s just Eric Ryrie’s theory about the eternal return of the Allies versus Hitler, which is simple enough as a narrative arc but not particularly interesting in artistic or aesthetic terms.