So this latest phase of Marvel movies has been, well, a pretty big disappointment. Marvel needed a win pretty bad. And in come the Guardians of the Galaxy to deliver the goods. Volume 3 is a double edged sword: James Gunn is taking over DC Comics, so he makes this movie his Marvel swan song, and that air of finality gives the movie a laser focus and also a bit of melancholy, because change is coming for Peter Quill, Gamora, Drax, Mantis, Nebula, Rocket, and Groot, and maybe the whole of the MCU, forever and ever.
Since Thor Love and Thunder, the Guardians of the Galaxy minus Gamora (Zoe Saldana) have settled on Knowhere, the giant empty head of a celestial, as their home base. Disrupting Peter’s (Chris Pratt) drinking bouts is Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) from the Sovereign (the gold people) race, who immediately goes after Rocket (Bradley Cooper). Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax (Dave Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), and Groot (Vin Diesel) successfully stop him, but Rocket is badly injured, forcing the Guardians into a race against time to save their “not a raccoon” friend.
James Gunn I think is running DC Comics right now because of how Marvel treated him with Guardians 3 (he was fired, then rehired after backlash from the cast). As such, Volume 3 frees him from the corporate part of Marvel’s machine. Creatively this works wonders for the movie, because Gunn has no real greater MCU story arcs to fill, and can just tell his story about the weirdo family we’ve grown to know and love. Peter is sort of a side character in this one, as I would say the star breakout Rocket finally gets his backstory told. And whoa, if you’re an animal lover, tread lightly here. I don’t have any pets and I was recoiling in horror and what poor Rocket had to deal with from the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) before we met the not raccoon in the OG Guardians. Gunn doubles down on his Tod Browning Freaks flag here, giving us more outwardly creepy but inwardly beautiful creatures to fall in love with, like Lylla the otter (Linda Cardellini) with similar scars as Rocket or various creatures on the High Evolutionary’s ship. Gunn’s sets are strange and specific, and feel like him bringing a piece of old monster movies into the modern day. Nothing better epitomizes Gunn’s vision than a sequence where the Guardians land on a planet that looks like Earth but isn’t Earth. During that sequence, there’s stuff there that people will instantly connect and relate to…only to have the rug pulled from under them with someone or something unlike anything they’ve ever seen, teetering the audience and unmooring them in silly but slightly scary ways. That sort of deranged daring coupled with Gunn’s finality means for the first time in a while, the fates of characters we love are up in the air, which Gunn pays off I would say pretty satisfyingly the more time I spend away from it, cheesy pop song montages and all!
And if this is the last hurrah to this iteration of our Guardians, let’s shout em out. (A little love too for Will Poulter, game for the big gold doofus they turn Adam Warlock into). Chris Pratt lovingly cedes center stage in the third film, content to be sidekick Star-Lord to his best buddy Rocket. His affable prickly charm works so well when he’s charming the women in his life, or new ones (shout out to Daniela Melchior). Zoe Saldana could have been sulky about how Gamora has been grabbed and pulled in all sorts of random directions, but she rolled with it, and maybe gives her best performance of the 3 films in this one, a woman torn between a past she doesn’t understand and her current situation around these people who she supposedly loves. The sneaky MVP of Volume 3 is Pom Klementieff’s Mantis, who’s adept understanding of emotions helps keep the team together during this really vulnerable time. Dave Bautista owes a lot of his current success to Drax, which he figured out in Volume 2 and simply has fun side quests with Mantis in #3. Karen Gillan’s Nebula I might miss the most; she’s taken a sorta empty nothing bad guy part in her first film and really made the character something interesting and meaningful (she was a pretty big reason Endgame was so good). Vin Diesel is still killing it with the greatest casting in movie history. And finally, the Guardians secret sauce, Bradley Cooper’s MCU Han Solo, Rocket. In this one Cooper gives us new shades to the not raccoon, laying bare how the wisecracking cynical, deeply sad “vermon trash” we saw in the first Guardians got that way through some truly traumatic experiences. We also see how 2 movies of friends have transformed Rocket again; he’s more than just the funny CGI sidekick: he’s bonafide hero material worth following thanks to Cooper’s wonderful voice portrayal.
As we’ve seen with Marvel’s Phase 4, eventually if you keep things going too long they lose something in the process. James Gunn, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 carries itself by knowing that it’s time for some change. Yes, that’s sad. But it’s also ok; Guardians can proudly stand alongside Captain America as maybe the best trilogy of Marvel movies, because it was never afraid to try to do something strange and different. So let’s be happy all, and see if James Gunn can take his signature weirdness and inject DC comics with the same juju he put into the MCU with these bunch of a holes.