Since the unveiling of the film’s Super Bowl promo, the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 floodgates are now officially open, and not a day goes by without some intriguing morsel of information (or promo!) finding its way online.
The latest deluge of info hails from Screen Rant, who recently conducted an interview with Marvel boss Kevin Feige about all things Guardians 2. And so, after skating around the sequel’s narrative arc, Feige was quizzed about the ways in which Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Ayesha (Elizabeth Decki) factor into the story at hand. Indeed, thanks to the recent onslaught of TV spots, fans have been acquainted with the latter character and her striking visual appearance, and it seems she’ll be causing all sorts of headaches for Star-Lord and the gang in a few months’ time.
How do Ayesha and her Sovereign race impact the story of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2? Allow Kevin Feige to clue you in:
“[Ayesha is] the one who hires the Ravagers to go after Quill, because after the opening that I already described, where they’re paid to protect these super-duper-expensive batteries, that run the entire Sovereign planet, Rocket reveals to Drax that he’s stolen like three of these batteries, because they’re really expensive and they’re not going to notice and who cares, and the Sovereign are kind of dicks anyway. They’re very pompous, and they’re gold and they’re easily offended, which we’re also told early in this sequence, and that there’s a very particular way you need to deal with them, and you need to speak with them and you need to be delicate, which is not easy for the Guardians, and certainly not easy when Rocket reveals that he’s snagged these things right out from under them, and that creates a bit of strife for them as the Sovereign end up chasing after them, less because they want those three batteries back, but more because how dare they insult the great Sovereign people.”
From one badass female character to another, Feige then shifted the focus over to Nebula. As the estranged daughter of Thanos, Gillan’s blue-tinged alien looks set to enjoy a fairly major role in Guardians 2 – writer-director James Gunn trumpeted her sibling rivalry with Zoe Saldana’s Gamora in a recent interview – and here, Feige reveals that Nebula has been captured by Ayesha and her people.
“She cut her own hand off, jumped onto a ship, and flew away. She comes back into the story relatively early on. In fact, we realize that the payment for the mission that the Guardians have done on Sovereign is to get Nebula. The Sovereign have captured Nebula, and are doing sort of a prisoner exchange for the services of the Guardians helping them. They want to take Nebula back to Xandar to have her arrested. Things go awry on that journey, and she becomes a much bigger player in the film than she was in the first one, and as James said in the sizzle and can talk more about today, you explore that dynamic between them as sisters, as adopted sisters who both clearly were raised in less than ideal circumstances by Thanos. It’s sort of Nebula’s deciding does she want to kill Gamora or is she going to set aside this sort of internal rage within her. And she does spend some time teaming up with Taserface for much of the movie too.”
In a separate interview, James Gunn spent time reflecting on the early treatment for Guardians 2, which seemingly added another Guardian to the fray. Exactly who that Guardian was remains a mystery, but see if you can decipher Gunn’s clues below.
“I’ll say one major thing that happened during the treatment phase, not even during the script phase, during the treatment phase there was another character that was a major character. That was a part of the treatment. Although it kind of worked generally in the story, I got to the place where there were too many characters. I think Civil War handles a lot of characters really well, but they’re minor characters, and in this movie, every character has their own arc, their own thing. And I thought it was one character too many, so I took one of the characters out of the story about half way through the treatment phase.”
Last and certainly not least, don’t expect Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to feature all of the songs that have cropped up so far in the sequel’s marketing campaign – like “Fox on the Run,” for example.
https://twitter.com/JamesGunn/status/830893589710266369
https://twitter.com/JamesGunn/status/830900678167891969
It’s already scoring off the charts in test screenings, apparently, and we’ll be able to find out for ourselves what all the fuss is about when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 slams into theaters on May 5th.
