Film Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
JAMES GUNN BIDS FAREWELL TO THE GUARDIANS
Colors! Personality! Stakes! James Gunn closes out the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy with the wildly vivid Vol. 3. Crafting an intimate farewell against the fabric of Marvel cosmic, Gunn brings something that rarely finds its way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe: finality. It’s one last hurrah as the Guardians race against the clock to save a grievously injured teammate, touring through James Gunn’s warped imagination in a surprisingly personal goodbye. Like many superhero movies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is overlong and stuffed to the brim with talented-but-shortchanged actors, but it helps that this is the best looking Marvel movie of the last ten years. Minor spoilers ahead…
The release of every new Marvel movie is now accompanied by a time-honored - but largely justified - tradition: grumblings about the crushing boot heel of the Disney house style. A critique that reaches even farther back than the MCU’s current Phase Four and Five foibles, it’s a longstanding gripe against the Mouse House’s stubborn allergy to color and its tendency to snuff out any auteurism in their director’s chair hires. But there’s one filmmaker mostly immune from the cogs of the Marvel grind: Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn. Having carved out the cosmic subspace of the MCU for himself since 2014, Gunn - with much of his charmingly warped sensibilities intact - has transformed a group of comic book C-listers into households names. The Guardians films are no Troma nor Slither-esque barf-fests, but his signature humor and colorful imagination - tamped down to less gross-out levels - have largely remained unscathed through the corporate machinery.
Gunn is now saying goodbye to his ragtag team of spacefaring protectors with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, his Marvel swan song before he jumps ship to steward the newly-rebooted DC Universe of films. Doubling as a farewell for the characters that he has led for nearly a decade, Vol. 3 injects the Marvel Cinematic Universe with something it hasn’t really seen since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame: finality. Eschewing universe-rending threats and unfathomable stakes, the Guardians finale opts for a more personal touch amidst the backdrop of James Gunn’s untethered, extraterrestrial phantasmagoria. It’s a tearful goodbye for the crown jewel trilogy of the MCU, and it’s also the best-looking Marvel movie of the last decade.
“Eschewing universe-rending threats and unfathomable stakes, the Guardians finale opts for a more personal touch amidst the backdrop of James Gunn’s untethered, cosmic phantasmagoria.”
Taking place after the events of Endgame, Vol. 3 finds Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and his squad of reluctant do-gooders settled on the disembodied celestial skull of Knowhere. Riddled with unease and heartbreak after Gamora’s (Zoe Saldana) miraculous, time-displaced resurrection wiped their romance from her memory, Starlord passes his time by routinely drinking himself into a stupor. The Guardians team, now also caretakers for Peter, have remained mostly the same: there’s gadgeteer raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper), alien empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff), irony-defying heavy Drax (Dave Bautista), sentient tree Groot (Vin Diesel), and reformed cyborg Nebula (Karen Gillan). There’s barely time to bring newcomers Kraglin (Sean Gunn) and Cosmo (Maria Bakalova) into the fold before they’re waylaid by a mysterious, gilded powerhouse: Adam Warlock (Will Poulter). The Guardians barely fend off the Sovereign onslaught, but in the bare-knuckle melee, Rocket is grievously injured. Desperate to save his “best friend” and teammate, Peter musters up some sobriety and gathers the troops for one last mission.
As the team’s genius-level tinkerer with a mean streak hiding some earnest sentimentality, Rocket can easily be seen as a stand-in for James Gunn himself; it’s no secret that he’s Gunn’s favorite Guardian. With a tragic backstory that has been kept under wraps for the first two films, Rocket finally takes center stage in Vol. 3 as his friends race against the clock to save his life. Steering into a breakneck collision course with Rocket’s harrowing past, the Guardians come face-to-face with the nasty High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, a refreshingly despicable performance with no pretense): Rocket’s creator and a deranged, godlike eugenicist obsessed with creating the perfect lifeform within the perfect society. At an overstuffed 150 minutes, Vol. 3 bites off much more than it can chew, but the film’s highly personal thread works like gangbusters. Rocket might spend much of the film’s overlong runtime bedridden, but his equally heartwarming and gut-wrenching flashbacks are the most potent a Marvel movie has been in quite some time.
“…you would be surprised how easy it is to overlook Vol. 3’s shagginess in the face of its technical and stylistic prowess: it’s the best these movies have looked in years.”
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is likely the most unwieldy of the trilogy, overflowing with emotional ideas trying to finagle themselves into cohesion. As Rocket’s backstory is filled in - a Grant Morrison We3 pastiche that tugs at everyone’s latent affinity for baby animals, and one that can only end in tragedy - much of the film’s present-day urgency struggles for lockstep. Some of the cast, both old and new, feels shortchanged: Adam Warlock and his mother Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) are holdovers from a Vol. 2 tease and are treated as such, and a few of the Guardians themselves - like Groot - are more or less sidelined. But you would be surprised how easy it is to overlook Vol. 3’s shagginess in the face of its technical and stylistic prowess: it’s the best these movies have looked in years. Gunn pulls out all the stops on his final vision with sumptuous production design and eye-popping colors. Director of photography Henry Braham, retained from Vol. 2 and now a frequent Gunn collaborator, lenses bombastic action and gnarly xenoscapes in direct opposition to eyesore sludge of recent Marvel fare (here’s looking at you, Quantumania). A heist aboard a floating, fleshy space nodule is gruesomely beautiful, a late-game oner stuns as it finds the team working together one last time, and the creature effects - a mix of practical and CGI - are simply delightful.
James Gunn’s immense weirdness and his teeming affection for these characters make for a powerful sci-fi elixir. Despite the schoolyard humor (still very funny, by the way), slapstick violence, and gooey video store grotesqueries, Gunn knows that the simple earnestness of misfits finding family in each other is the key to the entire team-up business. Many will view Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 as the last gasp of a dying breed of superhero movie fading through its farewell, but it just might as well be a punch in the arm: a colorful reminder that the best of these aren’t made by committee, but by the sincere weirdos who love the craft and love these heroes.
