“Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3” Review
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the final chapter in writer/director James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, gives us a last look at the quirky bunch as we have seen them over these last nine years.
*************** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS ***************
Picking up some time after the events of Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, we find the group engaged in rebuilding Knowhere–the giant severed head of a Celestial that the Collector had been using for his headquarters since Thor: The Dark World until Thanos decimated it obtaining the Reality Stone in Avengers: Infinity War. Starlord Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is still largely incapacitated by his loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) who died at the hands of Thanos in Infinity War but then returned as an alternate version who had never had a relationship with him. This proves unfortunate when the superpowered but intellectually immature Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) shows up blasting everything in sight in search of Rocket (Bradley Cooper.) The gang manages to fend him off, but not before Rocket takes a potentially fatal injury whose recovery is complicated by mechanisms related to his original creation at the hands of the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji.) The Guardians set off in search of the information to save him with an unwilling Gamora (now with the Ravengers, led by Sylvester Stallone) in tow and a ton of individual personal baggage to work through on the way.
While we see each team member struggle to find their own path in the new post-Avengers: Endgame “unsnapped” reality, the main story here is that of Rocket’s brutal creation, shown in flashbacks that are often horrifyingly cruel (don’t see this with your PETA friends!) Gunn has stated that in some ways the whole trilogy has had Rocket at the core all along, and here we really get to see what the factors are that have gone into making him the brilliant, angry, anti-social creature we met in the first film.
Iwuji does a great job with the High Evolutionary, making him a truly reprehensible villain on an operatic scale. Like any good antagonist, he has his own justifications for the torture he inflicts, but they are as unconvincing as his plastic surgery.
The Guardians themselves are particularly good this time around, with everyone given their own quirky moments to shine. Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) in particular have standout scenes that really give their characters more time to develop and display their growth from the time they joined up with this ragtag band. Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Nu!Gamora are fun to watch as their roles have slowly moved to the reverse of what they once were at the beginning of this tale. Quill continues to deftly combine a similar combination of “screw-up” and “oddly competent” that Johnny Depp blends in his “Jack Sparrow,” although with space rum, I guess. And Groot…is Groot.
While the Rocket part of the story works very effectively, some of the rest is a little uneven. A long segment on a planet called “Counter-Earth” seems to amount to very little with a lot of time spent trying to communicate with native creatures we never see again. Part of this may be that it just seems as though anything that takes away from our time with this group on their last outing ought to be pretty important. Cameos abound in this film as well, which is a double-edged sword that on the one hand amuses and on the other hand takes you out of the film a little as you sit there thinking “wait, is that…?”
For the most part, however, the writing is pretty tight and answers most of the questions it should. If it sometimes seems mystifying that the group can manipulate and utilize totally foreign technical data on sight, it is probably because the story isn’t really about that. It’s about a group of people who started out as loners and became a team in the first film, a family in the second, and now have to say goodbye. We know this is, in many ways, the end of the line for them as several of the actors have called this the last time they’ll be putting on the makeup for these characters, and Gunn is taking the next spaceship out of the MCU on his way to the DC side of things. Knowing that, it was a nice touch to make this one an essentially stand-alone film unburdened with the glorious purpose of elaborating the Multiverse. Instead, it was able to concentrate on these hilariously flawed and tragically damaged beings who, over the course of three films, gained enough strength from being together, to now find their own ways apart.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is presented by Marvel Studios. Rated PG-13, it stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, featuring Vin Diesel as Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket, Sean Gunn, Chukwudi Iwuji, Will Poulter, and Maria Bakalova.
Directed by James Gunn and produced by Kevin Feige. Screenplay by James Gunn. The Executive Producers are Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Nikolas Korda, Simon Hatt, and Sara Smith.
The film enters general release on May 5, 2023, and is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
