James Gunn's approach to the characters of The Suicide Squad borrows what helped make Guardians of the Galaxy so great. In between making Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Vol. 3, Gunn has switched from Marvel to DC (following a firing and subsequent re-hiring by Disney). His not-quite-a-sequel, not-quite-a-reboot successor to 2016's Suicide Squad will mark his first film as director since 2017, and it looks to be worth the wait.

Gunn directing The Suicide Squad is a touch ironic, given the first movie received so many comparisons to Guardians of the Galaxy, and that was a style and tone Warner Bros. wanted to emulate with the DC villain movie. For a variety of reasons that didn't work out, including the studio's interference in David Ayer's vision, but now they've got the real deal in Gunn. The Suicide Squad doesn't look like a Guardians copy though, with its R-rating and villainous characters allowing for a more twisted adventure that calls back to Gunn's Troma roots, just on a much bigger scale.

Related: The Suicide Squad Theory: The 7 Characters Who Die In James Gunn's Sequel

The director may be distancing his new movie from Guardians of the Galaxy, and it's true that in terms of tone, visuals, and story, this is comfortably different from his MCU outings. But his approach as a writer and director has obviously carried over, and that's clear in the members of Task Force X. Again, they're not direct matches for the Guardians, but The Suicide Squad trailers suggest that Gunn has once more excelled at taking a bunch of minor comic book characters - who are complete oddballs to boot - and made them characters people care for, root for, and want to invest their time in, which was one of his great triumphs with Guardians of the Galaxy, a risky project at the time.

The Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy

One of the reasons Guardians of the Galaxy worked so well is because of Gunn's take on the characters. They may have ranged from a talking raccoon with an attitude problem to a tree who can only say what his name is, but he imbued them with so much depth and hearth that audiences fell in love with them. There a various reasons to laugh at them, but their inherent weirdness or otherness is rarely made into the butt of the joke for viewers to mock. Instead, he took the most peculiar aspects - such as a talking raccoon - and gave it the same level of study any other character would get.

While it's still early, and unclear if there'll be quite the same level of emotional arc as Rocket Raccoon gets, some of the same can be said for The Suicide Squad, even when one of the characters is a murderous weasel and another is a giant shark with the voice of Sylvester Stallone. Task Force X are even stranger - unlike the Guardians, there's much less of a sense of cool about them, instead going straight-up, full-on bizarre - but Gunn once again has a clear reverence for them, treating them with a sense of respect, and that shines through in the footage.

Since The Suicide Squad will kill off many characters, then it'd perhaps be easier to have them as expendable weirdos. But by putting in the attention to detail, and creating villains that people will actually care for, then it'll make those deaths all the more impactful. Gunn has a love for the bizarre, and he's able to put that into these characters; there's obviously a silliness to them, but it's backed-up by a seriousness in terms of what he's doing. It ended up working brilliantly for Guardians of the Galaxy, and while The Suicide Squad is a very different movie in so many ways, it too benefits from it greatly.

Next: When Does The Suicide Squad Fit Into The DCEU Timeline?

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