‘Creature Commandos’: James Gunn’s Heart Still Belongs to the Tragic Weirdos
Creature Commandos might seem like an odd choice to be the first new project of James Gunn’s tenure running DC’s film and TV operations. Why kick off this post-Snyderverse era with a gory and frequently sad animated spinoff of Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, populated largely by DC Z-listers like GI Robot and Dr. Phosphorus, plus public domain characters like Frankenstein’s monster and his Bride? Why not go straight to Gunn’s Superman film, and save the quirky obscurities until after the brand has been more properly rebooted.
But Gunn didn’t get to the top of the comic book movie and TV mountain through big brand names. He did it with the help of characters even most hardcore comics fans didn’t care about from Rocket and Groot — respectively, a talking raccoon and a talking tree — in Guardians of the Galaxy to Peacemaker (a xenophobic idiot with a shiny bucket helmet) and Polka Dot Man (self-explanatory) in The Suicide Squad. Now that he’s the man co-running DC Studios, Gunn has to lean into the mainstream at least a little, but his heart clearly still lies with the four-color freaks and geeks as it does with the Man of Steel and his more famous friends.
As such, Creature Commandos feels very on-brand for Gunn — who both created it and appears in animated form in the show’s opening credits, banging away scripts on a computer keyboard — even if we’ll have to wait a while to see how much it presages what other filmmakers will do while working for him and his co-chair Peter Safran. Not only does Creature Commandos feature a collection of absolute weirdos you’ve never heard of before, but it’s a delicate tonal high-wire act. You go in assuming you’re meant to laugh at our unlikely heroes, and instead they’re gradually revealed as utterly tragic figures who deserve only sympathy, not mockery.
It’s like if Gunn had started the Guardians franchise with the third film, with its dark storyline about animal experimentation, rather than the relatively light and nimble first installment. He’s both a more accomplished storyteller now and a more professionally powerful one, so he can get away with it more easily now(*).
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(*) Gunn’s collaborators include Dean Lorey, who co-created Max’s fantastic Harley Quinn animated series, where Gunn also appeared in cartoon form. Harley has so far improbably managed to survive the purge instituted by cinema-hating Warner Bros. Discovery chairman David Zaslav, though it remains to be seen how much longer that show (and its fun spinoff, Kite Man: Hell Yeah!) can stick around. It’s worth noting that a couple of DC characters featured in Harley and/or Kite Man pop up here, albeit portrayed very differently. But Harley in the past has used characters who were appearing in other DC properties, and so far Gunn is happily continuing characters and stories from stuff he was working on before the regime change. Nonetheless, some news about the delayed fifth Harley season, and/or a Kite Man renewal, would be very welcome at this time.
Creature Commandos picks up on a plot thread from the end of the first season of Gunn’s Peacemaker series, where Amanda Waller’s daughter told the world that her mother (still played by Viola Davis) was using incarcerated people as government agents. In the aftermath of this, Waller explains to Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), father of the Squad’s late field leaders, she now has to get creative, which means recruiting operatives who don’t technically qualify as people. This includes the patchwork Bride (Indira Varma), whose relationship to Frankenstein’s monster (David Harbour) gets explained over the course of the seven-episode season; Dr. Phosphorous (Alan Tudyk), a radioactive man with transparent skin that leaves him looking like a glowing skeleton; GI Robot (Sean Gunn), built to kill Nazis during World War II and directionless ever since; Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao), a shy, amphibious woman with fish-like features; and the animalistic Weasel (Sean Gunn again), one of the few survivors of The Suicide Squad.
This motley crew’s mission is to stop Circe (Anya Chalotra), a Wonder Woman villain who has recruited an army of whiny toxic men who are upset that Themyscira is for women only, and who are for some reason trying to invade a small European country ruled by Princess Ilana (Maria Bakalova). This is just an excuse, though, for Gunn to do two of the things he seems to enjoy most as a filmmaker: pairing chaotic action sequences with unexpected soundtrack cuts, and exploring the long-ago traumas that turned his characters into a makeshift, frequently macabre family. Most of the episodes split their time between the present-day adventure and the origin story of different Commandos. We see, for instance, how adrift GI Robot was for decades after the war without any Nazis to kill, and this eventually leads to a scene of him in more modern times with his gun-arms ablaze, scored to “Coin-Operated Boy” by The Dresden Dolls. Another episode features a montage of the Bride and Frankenstein battling each other through many eras, and many distinctive fashions (Twenties flapper, Sixties rocker), while Gogol Bordello’s “American Wedding” pounds away. The animation is clean and stylish, the set pieces coming together nicely each time.
Though the Commandos all look ridiculous at first, Gunn quickly takes pity on each of them. Even Weasel, a character played entirely for laughs in The Suicide Squad, becomes convincingly, effectively tragic. The series’ affection for these misfits is palpable throughout. When the Bride tells Flag Sr., “You wanted monsters? You got monsters,” it’s at a moment when she and most of her comrades have been rendered in fully, sadly human dimensions. For all that the fictional DCU government has attempted to turn these characters into things they can deploy as expendable tools — an unfortunately timely commentary on how many groups are subject to dehumanizing treatment — they all come across as people by the end. Even the robot, at least a little.
It’s a strange show, but an effective and endearing one. The success or failure of Gunn’s Superman will say a lot more about the state of DC Studios in the short and long term, but this official launching point feels very much in line with what the guy in charge likes to do.
The first two episodes of Creature Commandos begin streaming Dec. 5 on Max, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all seven.