Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 2023

The Awesome:

• It features the best band of characters Marvel ever created in my opinion, I actually care about every one of the Guardians. Their fate makes me anxious. They all had a chance to shine too which is awesome.
• It has heart. Because of the characters but also because of Rocket's backstory it gave it an emotional edge. Almost made me tear up a couple times. Definitely one of the most memorable backstories in the Marvel universe.
• Absolutely love the darker tone, there was potencial for a horror movie there!
• Comedy was awesome, I was laughing constantly. Nebula, Drax and Mantis always deliver for me but pretty much every character made some good humor at some point.
• The High Evolutionary was a great villain to hate, I wanted to punch him in the face. Hasn't happened in a long time in a Marvel movie.
• This has to be the most pro animal protection movie i've ever seen.
• The corridor fight scene was epic, I didn't want it to end.
• Great design for the cyborg animals, couldn't get enough of them.

What I didn't like:

• The stakes weren't high enough. It didn't feel like the end of a trilogy but rather an adventure that leads to maybe a conclusion in a Chapter 4.
• Too long, like a good 30 minutes too long. I can't say it used the runtime to it's advantage either, lots of character arcs feel unfinished. Wanted more development for Rocket in the present.
• The soundtrack. Of course I love the songs used and this has been a thing for all movies in the trilogy. It just felt like none of them were earned compared to how they used them in the previous movies. There's too many of them and most feel jarring and unnecessary.
• I cringed at the ending, like Florence + the Machine but the whole dancing was too much for me. I wanted to sink into my seat from too much cringe.
• Too safe, not that I wanted people to die but I kinda did... I wanted to be emotionally damaged sinse this is the end.

Just thoughts:

• They didn't go for the obvious happy ending love story between Quill and Gamora. Cheers, but at the same time it felt like they barely talked about anything which was a weird direction. Wanted more interactions.
• One of my favorite moments is when Nebula realizes Rocket had it worse than her. Pure gold. It would have been interesting to see them have a talk, I just feel like these two have a lot in common. I believe Nebula respects Rocket to some extent now, which is an interesting development for her character.
• Bold of Marvel to call this their last Guardians movie, this is a cash cow and you need to milk it as much as possible!
• The new Guardians team intrigue me, a spin-off movie would be welcome. Had no idea what that little girl was doing there though.

Warning - Vegan propaganda ahead, if you're not vegan you WILL be triggered, read at your own risk! LOL

As I watched this movie I couldn't help but wonder 3 things,
1. why in the world is it so long? there felt like so much that could have been left out and kept it at 1 1/2 to 2 hrs at most.
2. are the characters Peter Quill and Gamora really necessary for this installment of GotG and
3. I wonder how many people are watching this and actually getting emotional by the exploitation, enslavement, dismemberment and murder of animals? How many of the viewers would be yawning and saying such things as "they're only animals who cares" or would they actually be able to feel for the non-human characters that made up such a large part of the story line? and if they did were they actively taking part in the support of a real life industry that did all those things by purchasing the products that came directly from it like milk, butter (on popcorn for example), chocolate and so much more?
Would ANY of the people that did feel emotional actually be able to break free of their indoctrination/brainwashing since birth, their cognitive dissonance, and be able to put 2 and 2 together and realize the reason they feel emotional is because what people do to animals is immoral and the saving of those animals was in fact the heroic thing to do and many of us (vegan or not) would want to do the exact same thing Rocket (et al) did.
As I now read comments not only here but on sites like IMDB I read things like "emtional ride" "laughs and tears" "made grown men cry" and so forth. I have no clue if Mr Gunn is vegan, if any of the writers are and I am almost positive none of the actors are either, Pratt would be more anti-vegan if anything given his propensity towards hunting and how murdering an animal can be so beautiful if done right (too bad he couldn't give The High Evolutionary some tips and kept the movie to 2-3 minutes instead.) which really made me wonder if any of THEM were able to piece it together themselves?! Let's make a super hero movie where the bad guy is the one exploiting, torturing, enslaving and ultimately murdering animals and it's the heroes that are saving them... while also eating others (see movie poster, the irony), the audience gets emotional, some cry, others cheer... the vast majority, perhaps even all??, completely missing the fact they themselves are more like our villain supporting the animal agriculture industry than they are like the heroes and yet they don't need to travel the galaxy and be one of it's Guardians to be a hero, they just need to stop supporting the villains. Can you imagine if they actually just made The High Evolutionary the animal agriculture industry and still made the movie how fast those "emotions" and "terars" would quickly disappear... if you do wonder just check and vegan street activism and listen to the people defending their choices and the AnAg industry and then ask yourself if The High Evolutionary was really the bad guy?

I'll admit, my favorite part of the movie was when Rocket freed the Kits, yes, it was emotional!!. And yet they STILL had to have a character question why they were saving the animals and not just the "higher species", talk about missing a perfect opportunity to have Rocket make a witty remark like "yeah, why did we let humans on board first anyways??", perhaps they didn't want to be too 'preachy' or perhaps it was actually a perfect example of the writers missing what was behind their very own message. All lives matter, and sentient beings, regardless of their intelligence level or ability to communicate in your language and not just their own, deserve the basic rights not to be enslaved, exploited, oppressed and murdered. If only humanity could find a little Rocket in all of us.

I gave the move a 5 not for any of those reasons though of course, I found it too long, I found the characters Peter Quill and Gamora almost useless and felt like the writers couldn't really fit them in but also didn't know how to write the movie without them, perhaps they should have made 2 movies and split the story lines? I found the ending, and how easily they dealt with The High Evolutionary, to be far too quick (strange right? movies too long but the final conflict not long enough LOL), the story at times felt like they were just making up as they went along and inserted characters because they felt they had to or that the cameos would somehow make up for any short comings.
The movie would have been so much better had they stuck with just Rocket, Nebula, Drax and Mantis (I would have even been fine without Groot), and made it just Rockets origin story despite the fact they couldn't explain why Rocket never mentioned any of this before or more importantly why he wasn't hell bent on vengeance until he was thrust into the situation after almost dying. I don;t htink it would have taken much to simply imply, or outright say, he DID in fact seek vengeance but somehow could just never find The High Evolutionary or something along those lines.

[7.7/10] In a way, the Guardians of the Galaxy films have always been about acceptance. Far from the Captain Americas and Iron Men of the world, the Guardians are not noble champions or playboy geniuses. They’re rough-edged miscreants stuck to the boot of society. To suggest, in the first place, that they too have value, that they too could be heroes despite their flaws and foibles, is its own sort of radical message these movies are built around.

In this third (and seemingly final) at-bat, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 brings that idea to the fore and takes it even further. The latest installment is a wide-ranging, occasionally overstuffed, and committedly dark film in its structure and subject matter. But it is also a story founded on the idea of acceptance: of those in need, of your fellow man, and most of all of yourself, no matter the quirks or traumas that have shaped us along the way. In that, as appropriately shaggy though the film may be at times, it is the apotheosis of the welcoming, accepting ideals that have animated this series from the beginning.

Guardians 3’s plot centers on combating the machinations of someone who represents the opposite of those ideals. The High Evolutionary is Rocket’s creator and abuser, and the film’s villain. He harbors an obsession with “perfecting” the universe by “correcting”, razing, and even genociding anything that doesn’t fit his vision. The High Evolutionary wants Rocket back, to examine his unique brain and capacity for independent thought, and the dastard is not above sending all manner of goons, setting various traps, or withholding the key information necessary to treat Rocket’s grievous injuries in order to achieve his aims.

I don’t want to say that the ensuing plot points here are pointless. Boiled down to, “The Guardians race to find the means to save Rocket’s life after a serious attack” and “They infiltrate and fight their way through various ploys from the High Evolutionary to do so,” there’s plenty of thematic resonance and fireworks-filled exploits to fill up the movie’s runtime. But trying to trace all the narrative threads -- of who’s partnering with who to save whom and then coordinating with someone else to trade spaceships/locations/planets on a whim -- is a fool’s errand. As is often the case with the Guardians, it’s more about the excitement and the hijinks than about clockwork plotting.

And yet, amid such byzantine narrative architecture lies a heartbreaking series of vignettes that finally reveal Rocket’s backstory. It turns out that he, alongside many other poor souls, was a disposable experiment born of a harsh madman.

The audience witnesses a tiny terrified raccoon, shaking in fear after receiving the gift of speech and abstract thought with a concomitant amount of pain. We see the solace he finds in a friendship with Lillah, Teefs, and Floor, a collection of similarly “enhanced” animals who form bonds within bondage and give Rocket his first real family. Later, the film unveils Rocket’s grim realization that the paradise their creator has promised isn’t meant for them, but rather that they’re intended as mere stepping stones along the way to his perfect society. And in the movie’s most hard-to-take scene, we watch Rocket’s attempt to free himself and his brethren end in brutal bloodshed at the hands of their craven and jealous benefactor, something Rocket is still riddled with guilt over all these years later.

It is, in a word, harrowing. Despite the death and destruction that are the stock and trade of superhero films, Vol. 3 mostly plays around with a tone that keeps the proceedings thrilling enough without putting your heart in your throat. Despite an amusing “No killing anybody!” bit of banter in the early going, Guardians 3’s signature sequence comes in an elaborate oner where our heroes slaughter a room full of bad guys with the balletic silliness of a blood-soaked Looney Tunes cartoon. A whole planet’s worth of families are destroyed, and it largely comes off like more blockbuster fodder. The good and bad alike get knocked around like ping pong balls, and for the most part, it’s all in good fun.

Nevertheless, writer-director James Gunn and company play the Rocket flashbacks as serious as a heart attack. In the throes of this otherwise loony, if characteristically warm-hearted film, is a series of Watership Down-esque interludes that drive you to ruin with animal cruelty, psychological abuse, and a craven treatment of the helpless and dependent as disposable with gut wrenching force. Skeptics tend to write off the Marvel movies as kids stuff, but I’d have serious qualms about taking younger fans to see Vol. 3 given how heavy this material comes off.

Despite that, there remains a decent helping of the Guardians’ usual mirth and merriment. One-liners and snark fly freely across the interstellar landscape. The production design and costuming shines in the first act climax set aboard a flesh-grown, candy-colored corporate HQ, which carries the series’ dark-but-goofy vibe. A running gag involving Kraglin calling Cosmo a “bad dog” tickles the funny bone until it lands in a predictably but no less effectively heartwarming place. Fans of the humor and slanted perspective that have defined this sub-franchise to date will be pleased to see Gunn’s unique sensibilities still reign.

So too does the more political bent that popped up in The Suicide Squad. For the second film in a row, Gunn highlights the ultimate villainy of the bad guy by showing how they keep kids in cages. Rocket’s story comes with a clear statement against animal testing and experimentation. The metaphor of communities of acceptance in the face of rejection and desires to “fix” what is rather than embrace it has a particular resonance in a time of a rise in laws and hatred meant to cabin the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals. And the stirring climax of the film comes in the rescue and welcoming of refugees. Again, for all those who churlishly write off these films as “for babies”, Gunn’s superhero flicks in particular haven't been afraid to bake in some potent and timely bits of commentary.

For all the darker concepts Gunn and company tackle in the film, Guardians 3 is, ultimately, a heartening story about collections of misfits finding their better angels, overcoming those hardships, and coming together to accept themselves and one another.

“Starlord” Peter Quill is still in mourning over Gamora’s death in Infinity War, a grief complicated by the Endgame arrival of a version of her from the past who doesn’t share the experiences or memories of the woman who became a Guardian. For her part, Gamora is understandably resistant to “Quinn” trying to jam her into another person’s mold, one that doesn’t fit her harder-edged personality. Gunn and his collaborators find a nice middle ground for the pair and this conflict. The 2014 Gamora eventually sees the nobility of the Guardians’ cause, and is willing to put her neck out to fight alongside them, if not adopt their viewpoint wholesale. She returns to the Ravagers, having found a home and acceptance apart from Thanos. And Peter comes to be okay with that, recognizing that this is a different, no less valid Gamora than the one he loved, and that he too needs to take her as she is, not the someone else he wants her to be.

It’s an unexpectedly mature take on the inevitable superhero resurrections that are the stock and trade of the genre. Bringing the character back in another guise, one that makes our Gamora’s death at Thanos’ hands still meaningful, while showing that there were other, equally valid paths for her, with or without the Guardians, is a bold spin on the usual kill-and-bring-back cycle that otherwise neuters dramatic character deaths in speculative fiction.

Peter gets a different happy ending, choosing to embrace the life on Earth he’s been running from since his mother died. It requires accepting his grandfather, a harder man who presumably suffered his daughter’s loss as much as Peter did. The reunion between them is the most touching moment in the film, and another tribute to the animating notion of accepting one’s full self and life, and understanding the people who make it up.

The same idea permeates the rest of the film too. Nebula is harsh with Drax and Mantis, who often play the Tweedle Dum and Tweede Dee of the group, to hilarious effect. But after being read the riot act by Mantis, who commendably stands up for them, she sees what they bring to the table, as allies and as people. Drax speaks the language of the refugee children, something Nebula never considered because she only sees him within a narrow box. Rather than fend off the snarling beast the Guardians neutralized at the beginning of Guardians 2, Mantis has the courage and the compassion to realize they’re the ones who are afraid, and tame them instead.

It ties into that broader idea, of seeing things that seem frightening, or foolish, or simply different, and seeing the value in them for what they are, rather than discarding or dismissing them for what they aren’t. Drax may be a destroyer, but contrary to his hulking physique, he is also the perfect father figure. And as hard-nosed as Nebula has been and remains, she is the one who chooses to build something new within Knowhere, to make the kind of home she wanted when she was ripped away from her family, for all the people who need such a place.

This is, after all, a film whose stirring climax rests on heroes both ordinary and extraordinary working to save scads of people scooped up only to be “improved” and giving them a new home where they can be and flourish as they are. It’s a film where even Adam Warlock, the supe with the body of a bruiser and the mind of a child, is given a second chance after dealing the blow that nearly felled Rocket in the first place, and pays back that faith by saving Quill. It’s a film where the greatest sin is to treat others as disposable objects to either be fixed or thrown away, rather than taken in with open arms for who they already are and can be.

No one embodies that ideal better than Rocket himself. He spends much of the present in a coma. But the flashbacks tell the story of someone who suffered incredible abuse, internalized a sense of abuse and worthlessness instilled by his surrogate father, and then lost his found family in a bout of brutality he blames himself for. These are tremendous things to overcome.

But through a bout of spiritual forgiveness from Lylla on death’s door, from awaking to his new family embracing him and having gone to the ends off the galaxy to save him, and from having the chance to confront his abuser and realize how small and ugly this horrid man truly is, Rocket is able to move forward.

He doesn't want revenge. He just wants peace. After instinctively snapping at people for calling him a racoon, a sign of his bleak and, to Rocket's mind, shameful origins, he sees the name on the cage of a group of tiny baby animals in need of care and rescue like he once was, and finally adopts it as his own. When confronting his abuser, he firmly takaakes the name “Rocket Racoon” and his worthiness to be at the center of the story, a sign of the self-acceptance he is able to achieve.

And he is also able to extend it. This is not a narrow or myopic form of acceptance, where Rocket forgives himself and takes himself as he is but denies the same privilege for others. He insists on rescuing the other animals and bringing them into the same space for refugees and lost souls on Knowhere. In a moving moment, he accepts leadership of the Guardians from Peter, and fills it with a new crop of misfits who need a home and someone to see their value.

At the beginning of the film, he finds comfort and misery in equal measure in Radiohead’s “Creep”, a song of alienation and self-loathing. In the end, he finds the spirit to dance to Florence + the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over” with his best friend and an entire community of people who accept one another as they are. It becomes an anthem of moving past those traumas, an exultant moment of kinship and self-worth for someone who never thought he deserved either, and a tribute to three films’ worth of a simple but powerful message. There is greatness in places unseen and people unbidden, and great humanity in accepting one another, and ourselves, for who and what we are.

Gunn’s humor is more miss than hit for me, I think, and I think you can tell he and many others were ready to move on. There’s some creative action sequences especially using Nebula, but some of the comedy is almost perfunctory and Gunn going through the motions before going after his DC passion. And Bautista makes his material work, and there’s a nice bow to it that made it click for me, but he’s still underserved and clearly ready for meatier stuff.

But the Rocket stuff? That hits. That’s what he’s still invested in, and Rocket has always- from the movies to the Telltale game- been far and away what I’m most invested in with the Guardians. It’s raw, honest stuff showing his growth and getting into something more traumatic than the usual MCU fare. Iwuji delivers as the villain, a man who’s idea of perfection is himself, and everything else can strive only to his design. The entitlement and indignation is palpable on his face and every movement, and it makes for the most cathartic villain defeat.

But what really sold me in the end was the finality. Resisting the cliche heroic sacrificial death and easy closure of the Avengers. People change. People move on. And you have to move forward. It’s so rare for this mega franchise to do. Guardians is, except for maybe Coogler and Panther, the most personal and tied to its director. It’s a shame to see it go, an end to an older era of Marvel when the current one is so impersonal and sanded down and made by producers and execs. But it’s also a relief to see it go on its own terms, as it’s own flawed fun messy thing.