SPOILERS AHEAD!

Director: James Gunn | Writer: James Gunn | Actors: Chris Pratt, Chukwudi Iwuji, Bradley Cooper

There is no God! That’s why I stepped in!

– The High Evolutionary

MOVIE ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION

In this third film, we have the final for the original team. This time, the villain is Cosmic Charles Darwin The High Evolutionary, a villain who claims that God is dead and now he must complete her job on the evolution task. On the movie, he confirms an old God but denies the current existence of one… nietzschean.

For years, he has created societies and has the goal of create Switzerland… I mean the Perfect Society. But he just created one individual with a peculiar kind of intelligence: Bradley Cooper on the movie Limitless (2011)… but he settles for Rocket Raccoon, one of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” voiced by Mr. Cooper.

Through a serial of bio-engineered animal testing conducted by his company OrgoCorp (maybe one of the Dirty Dozen enlisted by PETA), initially he created humanoid animals who present natural violent aggression due to an evolution of the body but not from the mind or instincts. But only Bradley Cooper is the key to a better evolution.

Things happen, CGI floods everything, things explode, and we all cried for the movie and take opportunity to cry for other things in the dark, you check “Green Peace” site for that weekend but didn’t enlist at the end. A good movie.

COMMUNITAS PERFECTA

We have a lot of reference to the perfect community, such as: Arcadia, Fortunate Isles, Shangri-La, Zion (not from “The Matrix”), Utopia (from Thomas More, not “Zootopia”).

Thomas Aquina made observations based on Aristotle’s notes on “Politics” that the state (civitas) is the perfect community (communitas perfecta):

As one man is a part of the household, so a household is a part of the state: and the state is a perfect community […] Consequently he that governs a family, can indeed make certain commands or ordinances, but not such as to have properly the force of law.

Thomas Aquina, Summa Theologiæ

Obviously, Catholic church took that as “We are like the state, we are a self-sufficient or independent group which already has all the necessary resources and conditions to achieve its overall goal (final end) of the universal salvation of mankind”… and it has historically been used in order to define church–state relations.

BIOLOGY AND AGGRESSION

Maybe you have a neighbor who likes to have loud parties, all night long, from Friday to Sunday, and the normal manifestation is to yell at him with verbal aggression. But not all the animals have the same manifestation as other animals.

Studies shows that bonobos (Pan paniscus), our closest relatives, have conducts like “self-domestication”. One study (link) suggest that selection against aggression is the key, and that this difference evolved because of relaxed feeding competition, compare with other relatives.

Neuroscience keeps bringing light to some important issues like this. Lee et al. (2022) (link), study male mice of different social ranks in a dominance hierarchy and detect candidate genes and cellular pathways that underlie status-related plasticity. Within the mPOA, oxytocin (Oxt) and vasopressin (Avp) are more highly expressed in subdominant mice compared to other ranks, while nitric oxide synthase (Nos1) has lower expression in subdominant mice. Within the vHYP, they find that both orexigenic and anorexigenic genes involved in feeding behavior, including agouti-related peptide (Agrp), neuropeptide-Y (Npy), galanin (Gal), proopiomelanocortin (Pomc), and Cocaine- and Amphetamine-Regulated Transcript Protein prepropeptide (Cartpt), are less expressed in dominant animals compared to more subordinate ranks.

In summary, they suggest that this may represent a reshaping of feeding circuits in dominant compared to subdominant and subordinate animals. Furthermore, they determine several genes that are positively and negatively associated with the level of despotism (aggression) in dominant males.

ANIMAL TESTING

Biotechnology has a lot of ways to make things easier and effective, the animal testing topic is not an exception.

According to Humane Society International:

The term “animal testing” refers to procedures performed on living animals for purposes of research into basic biology and diseases, assessing the effectiveness of new medicinal products, and testing the human health and/or environmental safety of consumer and industry products such as cosmetics, household cleaners, food additives, pharmaceuticals and industrial/agro-chemicals […] Most animals are killed at the end of an experiment, but some may be re-used in subsequent experiments.

Even Cruelty Free International has some alternatives for animal testing:

Those associations and PETA will bring you more information and I will leave here the short film “Save Ralph” (2021), from “Humane Society International” and voiced by Taika Waititi:

Thanks for reading!

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