The new Marvel episode, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, heads so far down the cosmic rabbit hole that you wonder if the saga will ever be able to find its way back to normality, or would ever want to. There are battles with kraken-like inter-dimensional space monsters; hyperspace jumps so intense that they bend our heroes’ expressions into cartoonish parodies of themselves; even a trip to a bizarre psychedelic planet that (in the human form of Kurt Russell’s Ego) politely informs Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord it is his daddy.

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Along the way, the Guardians also encounter the golden-skinned Sovereigns, a race of genetically perfect beings whose cowardly use of arcade machine-style drone warfare is a source of much amusement. Equally valuable for comedy purposes is the introduction of Pom Klementieff’s Mantis, a weird-looking alien whose insect-like antennae allow her to glimpse the deepest emotional secrets of her companions. Back in the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), when Tony Stark’s power-suit was the most preposterous story element on show, such additions might have seemed outlandish. But in Marvel’s brave new world of weird, we hardly bat an eyelid.

It’s not always been this way. Early superhero movies of the modern era seemed generally disinclined to embrace the wacky cosmic potency of alien-obsessed comics. In 1978, a time when DC mainstays such as Batman, the Green Lantern and the man of steel himself had been taking tea with strange alien races for decades in the comics, Warner Bros released Superman, the first superhero movie of the modern era. Bar a few short opening scenes set on Krypton, it kept Kal-El’s gaze focused firmly on his adopted Earth. Superman II saw the alien General Zod and his snarling minions arrive to do battle, but Superman stayed within Earth’s immediate environs.

Later on, Batman would barely leave the Gotham city limits over the course of seven movies under the eye of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher and Christopher Nolan, while Sony’s Spider-Man trilogy briefly introduced the Venom alien symbiote in Spider-Man 3, only to mess up the moment by failing to hand the famous comic book storyline its proper dues.



So how has Marvel shifted the zeitgeist? And why has it taken Hollywood generally so long to embrace the cosmic nuttiness of the sci-fi and magic-obsessed comic book silver age? The answer might lie in Hollywood’s traditional struggles with space fantasy in the wake of Star Wars’ barnstorming box office success in the late 1970s. From 1980’s camp cult curio Flash Gordon to 1987’s execrable Masters of the Universe, with Dolph Lundgren as the kids’ sword-wielding cartoon space hero He-Man, studios have often struggled to rack up the box office greenbacks when venturing into boys’ own extra-terrestrial adventures.

More recently in 2012, Disney wrote off $200m following the botched release of the criminally underrated John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels about a 19th-century Confederate veteran of the civil war who travels to other planets, gains superpowers and romances a beautiful alien princess. A year earlier, Warner Bros’ debut attempt to venture into silver age comic book space fantasy, Green Lantern, had proved even more disastrous. And the studio has not had much more luck since with its fledgling DC Expanded Universe, an attempt to beat Marvel at its own game. Its more outrageous offerings – the alien zombie-clone Doomsday from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Suicide Squad’s gyrating ancient witchy princess The Enchantress – have been among its most deeply unpopular.

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So why is Marvel currently getting right what so many film-makers have got wrong over the past 40 years? It can’t just be advances in digital special effects, even though these have undoubtedly helped the studio to depict outlandish fantasy worlds with remarkable verve (as well as ensuring the galaxy no longer has to be populated entirely by conveniently humanoid alien species), because every other studio has access to the same tools. It probably has plenty to do with Marvel’s ability to deliver whip-smart dialogue that helps audiences forget they have just seen a talking space rodent berating a giant walking tree, but the deeper truth is that the Disney-owned studio has been slowly connecting the more eccentric corners of the Marvel galaxy to its less ambitious terrestrial episodes since the beginning.

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As far back as 2011, we were introduced to Chris Hemsworth’s Norse god Thor and his Asgardian homeland, with Kenneth Branagh’s movie taking the brave decision to set a full two-thirds of the movie in the CGI heavens, just as it might have been in the comics. The movie was chock full of the kind of nutty cosmic content that made the silver age so popular, from giant blue frost giants to mystical artefacts and magical interplanetary pathways. Marvel’s journey into the weird had begun.

The original Guardians of the Galaxy took the studio even further into the extraterrestrial leftfield in 2014, imagining talking raccoons and tree creatures freewheeling through the stars while being chased by blue-skinned space pirates and angry purple gods of death. Then last year’s Doctor Strange began to explore the even stranger magical side of the MCU, as the future Sorcerer Supreme learned to access heavily psychedelic planes of interdimensional, shifting realities.

Moreover, the studio’s descent into far-out fantasy has only just begun. The next Avengers movie will see both Strange and the Guardians, who are expected to play a pivotal role, joining up with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes for a battle against the alien deity Thanos (who was first introduced in the first Guardians of the Galaxy film). And the studio president, Kevin Feige, has hinted heavily that the cosmic side of the MCU will only be expanded once Avengers: Infinity War and its as-yet-untitled sequel bring the current phase of Marvel movies to a natural close. As Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 hits cinemas, it seems the movie’s motley gang of assorted space weirdos have moved from the far outer reaches of the Marvel universe to its very core.

