Over his career, James Gunn has shown that he has an affinity for the outcasts, the dumped on and the monstrous, tragic figures that most other people would simply label “villain” and move on. From his early stint with Troma Entertaintment to his work with Marvel and beyond, his fascination with weirdos and fuck-ups probably became most apparent with 2021’s The Suicide Squad where, instead of the skewed heroics of the Guardians Of The Galaxy, he moved onto a team of real bad guys.
The experience obviously proved to be liberating for him because not only is he now running DC Studios, but he’s putting every inch of that “misunderstood bad guy” ethic into Creature Commandos as he doles out tragic backstory after tragic backstory to each twisted member of Task Force M. After giving us the skinny on the backstory of the Bride last episode, it’s now the time for the Nazi obsessed automaton and Sean Gunn voiced G.I. Robot to take the spotlight. What secrets does the past hold for a machine whose only love appears to be shooting fascists in the face?
As Rick Flag Sr. and the rest of Task Force M head towards the mansion where the Bride and Nina Mazursky where attacked by Circe and the Sons Of Themyscira, they arrive to find their two errant members out of commission but strangely not killed. However, it soon occurs to Flag that this whole assault was nothing more than a decoy to lure Task Force M away from Princess Rostovic so they can finally launch their assault upon the sovereignty of Pokolistan. However, after rescuing the Bride and Nina and streaking back to the castle, we get little interludes that introduce us a lite better to one of the Creature Commandos’ more blanker canvases – G.I. Robot.
Created during World War II for the rather unsurprisingly task of killing Nazis, G.I. Robot soon is embraced by his fellow platoon as he enthusiastically carries out exactly what he was programmed for, but in the years following the war, he finds his talents strictly limited by civilian life. But while doing spots on TV shows or being studied by scientists doesn’t give him the Nazi-killing thrill he’s constantly striving for, his artificial brain still yearns for a simpler time when he was actually a use.
As time goes by, his lifeless form is discovered in the 1990s by World War II collector Sam Fitzgibbon, who proudly takes him from the dusty antique store and gets him working again in order to be his companion. However, when G.I. Robot discovers that Sam is a neo-Nazi after being taken to a meeting, his old program takes over and the ensuing massacre is what gets his dull, metal ass locked in Belle Reve for over thirty years.
However, back in tbe present, when Rick Flag Sr. tells him that the Sons Of Themyscira are actually Nazis, he blissfully gets back to enjoying his favorite past time – although withba tragic end, but after Circe is brought down, she infers that it is not actually she who is the real villain here.
From the confident stance of the super sassy Bride, we now move onto the blank, vacant stare of the Nazi-killing, G.I. Robot and it seems obvious that James Gunn is dedicated to delivering as many amusingly tragic and bloodily poignant origin stories as the episode count can possibly allow. Basically, what we have here is a sort of Iron Giant scenario where an innocent (or as much as innocent will allow during wartime) robot slowly manages to gain an almost childlike sentience while simultaneously being to unable to fully process the world and its many complexities beyond the relatively simple programming of “kill Nazis”. You get the sense that G.I. Robot is some wide-eyed, lantern jawed metaphor for the military training up men to fight in wars with no program in place to ease them back into reality because the second World War II ends, there is literally no reason for the metal bezerker to exist and no one seems to want to properly take responsibility for him.
This doesn’t seem to bother the oblivious robot of course, which somehow makes it all the more sad, especially when he confesses that he misses his war days. But while the running joke is that he simply cannot shake the installed desire to slaughter Hitlers troops with maximum efficiency, when asked what he misses from those days, he mentions the names of his war buddies with obvious pride. Once again, Gunn takes a character who, when taken from a certain point of view, can be utterly terrifying (his sly delivery of “That’s what a Nazi would say” when scanning for enemies, even while on a TV show is funny, but if reminds to that he’s positively itching to kill at all times) and adds truly somber layers to have you spiraling into existential musings. The real tragedy is not that G.I. Robot doesn’t have emotions (because he sorta does), but it’s that he doesn’t understand just how unfairly he’s being treated because he has no basis to process it. He obviously bonded with his war pals much in the same way he’s bonded with Nina, but he just doesn’t get why that is important and it’s tough for the world in general to feel empathy for an automaton who, when triggered, is a kick-ass engine of destruction.
Of course, the episode balances this all out with scenes of gore-strewn carnage that essentially plays as Isaac Asimov meets Inglorious Basterds and even though the curious quirk of fate that sees G.I. adopted by Michael Rooker’s lonely and unsuspecting neo-Nazi results in multitudes of bigots sprayed up the side of their meeting lodge with machine gun fire, it’s an amusing fusion of joy and disaster.
To whip over into the plot line set in the present, things are picking up nicely with yet more carnage, quips and surprises, but while the main one is a rapturous G.I. Robot finally being allowed to kill “Nazis” once again (actually invading incels) meeting an early end after getting blown apart by one of Circe’s magic blasts, the villain herself is taken down surprisingly quickly when The Weasel catches her unawares and claws her to ribbons. After a quick radioactive facial from Doctor Phosphorus and it’s all over bar the shouting, but just when you think that everything’s been wrapped up a bit soonish, a bloodied and burnt Circe makes a rather startling claim. Apparently – according to Circe, anyway – Task Force M has doomed the world by thwarting her efforts and while the episode doesn’t give her time to elaborate, no doubt the typically fast-paced present day stuff will fill us in soon enough.
However, that doesn’t help poor G.I. Robot, whose severed head powers down in Nina arms while seemingly sated by one last killing spree. Will he be back? Who knows – Gunn does enjoy killing off his casts – but right now he’s two for two when it comes to delivering a humanising tough to massacre happy monsters.
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