Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

Movie #4 of 2023:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)

Another rollicking cosmic thrill ride, and one that doubles as an apparent farewell to this creative corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Never say never where comic book characters are concerned, but with visionary director James Gunn now working for the DC competition, this sure feels like the intended finale to its loose trilogy.) With that in mind, the film expects the audience to have done their homework coming in, remembering not just how this ragtag crew joined into a found family and their subsequent exploits together, but also the details of how Peter left earth in the first movie, how the team set up camp in the floating skull Knowhere in the holiday special, and how there’s a variant of Gamora who doesn’t really know the others running around now, having hopped over from a separate timeline in Avengers: Endgame. It can be a lot to keep track of, especially if you haven’t seen some of those older features in a while.

And yet the main thrust of the script is wholly original, smartly filling in the backstory of Rocket the talking raccoon, a figure who had previously been used largely as comic relief. If you think it was a risk for Marvel to make a movie featuring this character so prominently back in 2014, the choice to raise his profile from sidekick to full-on protagonist here might surprise you as well. But in practice, that transition reads as perfectly natural, and his arc — the most dynamic one in the movie — generates great pathos as we learn more about his painful origin and see him finally stop fleeing from it.

Structurally, the story plays out along twin lines, intercutting scenes from Rocket’s heretofore-unseen past with his friends’ efforts in the present to find a way to save his life while he lies convalescent. To do so they need to clumsily break into a secure alien facility, bicker constantly, and ultimately face off against the animal’s twisted creator. The plot may be a tad overstuffed, but it has all the things we love about this team’s previous adventures, right down to the classic music drops, wisecracking banter, splashy color palette, and comedically inventive combat sequences.

Besides Rocket, the Guardians aren’t necessarily faced with the most meaningful personal conflicts, and I specifically dislike the pushy Nice Guy vibes of Peter insisting to the new Gamora that she could grow to love him like her other self did and the times that the narrative seems to validate him for it. Certain departures at the end strike me as poorly-motivated too, for while the team isn’t disbanding after this, some of the individual members voice their decision to step away, and not all of that registers as actually driven by the heroes themselves rather than the studio and/or the actors. (Although as a Doctor Who fan, I guess I should be used to those cast change moments sometimes coming out of left field at a story’s end.) If there ever is a Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 4 in the MCU, it will likely be with a distinctive new roster, somewhat analogous to the turnover that the Avengers are currently undergoing back on earth.

Overall this is probably a bit less fun than the first two films, especially given its darker themes, but it’s a welcome bounce back from the empty spectacle of the Disney+ holiday special, which I felt revisited the IP without managing to say anything new with it. That installment from last year could be safely skipped at the cost of only some slight disorientation here, but if you care about these characters and what they mean to each other, you should definitely catch this follow-up.

[Content warning for gun violence, alcohol abuse, animal biomedical experimentation, genocide, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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