...this movie is good. Go watch it.
Yeah, that's... that's pretty much it. That's the takeaway here. Go.
Right now.
Go.
...alright, fine. But don't say I didn't put up a spoiler warning.
This is the third and - it seems - final part of the saga of the Guardians of the Galaxy. The end of a road that began way back in 2014 with the first movie. It's kind of a bittersweet feeling. When I first walked into that theater, I barely knew anything about the Guardians. Sure, I knew names like Gamora and Drax from their time running around with Adam Warlock and Nebula from Infinity Gauntlet. But the rest? The team itself? A virtual mystery to me. Consequence of being a lapsed comic book fan for several years after Marvel's first Civil War event.
Now, though? The Guardians are pretty much my favorite team, if only just for the MCU versions. I relate heavily to the character of Star-Lord in particular, his backstory hitting particularly hard for me on a personal level. I laugh because Dave Bautista as Drax is hilarious, I pump my fist whenever Rocket pulls out some fantastic new gun and starts laying down fire. I do the same when Gamora draws his sword to rain down some serious pain on her opponents, rolling her eyes at how ridiculous her teammates are being. And, of course... I am Groot.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 picks up more or less where the team's time in Thor Love and Thunder left them off... namely flying away as fast as they could from that awful, awful movie. If anything, you wouldn't miss anything by not having seen Love and Thunder, I'm happy to say. The team, minus Gamora, has settled on Knowhere after the events of Avengers: Endgame. While Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) have stepped up into more leadership-like roles for the team and indeed the people of Knowhere, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) has become a heartbroken drunk still pining for Gamora (Zoe Saldana), who was killed during Avengers: Infinity War by Thanos. Not even the words of his sister Mantis (Pom Klementieff) or his second best friend Drax (Dave Bautista) can help him through his grief.
...oh, yeah, Mantis is Peter's half-sister by Ego. Watch the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. It's absolutely wild and probably one of the most heartwarming things that Marvel has ever produced.
When a mysterious flying golden man (Will Poulter) comes and critically injures Rocket, triggering a killswitch mechanism that will have him dead in 48 hours. To save him, they must reunite with the 2014 Gamora and the Ravagers and trace Rocket's origins back to their beginning, when he was a simple raccoon genetically and mechanically altered by the insidious High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who seeks to remake the universe in his own image... regardless of who or what he has to destroy to make it happen.
The film is largely concerned with, of course, the story of Rocket and explaining things that have only been hinted at in the previous films. Despite never having a moment of screentime, Bradley Cooper gives a hell of a performance that is translated perfectly to Rocket's CGI form. You feel for the trigger-happy fur ball like never before, and you absolutely crave to see him stick his boot so far up the High Evolutionary's ass that he vomits Rocket's boot polish.
The High Evolutionary in particular is something I enjoyed immensely. Rather than attempting to make the villain sympathetic in the vein of Loki or trying to make their plan at least seem like it made sense like Thanos, HE (as I will now abbreviate it) is not either of those things. He is an irredeemably evil bastard in every single scene he is in. He is evil and he has to be stopped, not just for Rocket to avenge all that he has lost, but for the fate of literally everything in creation.
On the front of Peter and Gamora, it's a one-sided thing unfortunately. This Gamora is not the Gamora who died during Infinity War, and was pulled out of her personal timeline at a point before even the events of the first Guardians film. Despite Peter's earnest attempts to reach her, she makes it very clear that she is not his Gamora and likely never will be. Peter's arc in this film is basically him coming into the Acceptance stage of grieving and coming to realize via Drax (and Mantis!) that his focus may just have been in the wrong place all this time.
Ironically, the character statuses of Gamora and Nebula have reversed from the first movie. Where Gamora was the one reluctantly going along with these idiots but nonetheless forming unbreakable bonds with them and Nebula was the openly-hostile one, the reverse is now true. In the time since Love and Thunder, Nebula has really stepped up and is (reluctantly) forming unbreakable bonds with these idiots while Gamora is openly-hostile to everyone but Nebula (if only just).
Other than all of that, you get the stock "universe is in trouble" plot with a few monkeywrenches thrown in every so often as is James Gunn's well-known style at this point. The comedy is still there as it was in the previous two films - a few moments, in particular Drax's discussion of metaphors, had me laughing openly due to how fantastic Dave Bautista's comedic timing is - but the overall tone is far darker. The moments that are meant to be taken seriously rarely have anything to cut any tension that comes up, and that is most definitely a good thing and it's a very hard tight rope to walk for even the most talented of filmmakers. Gunn does it well here, and the film is all the better for it.
Add onto it the usual Guardians rocking soundtrack and some nice visuals (and both together, in the case of a "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn"-scored sequence) and you have a hell of a good movie. I know the MCU has caught a lot of flack in the post-Endgame films and that's been more than a little earned in a few places (looking at you, The Falcon and Winter Soldier), but this is a film that doesn't fall into that same funk. Maybe it's because it is intended to be the final film for at least a majority of these characters. As I said, it's a bittersweet thing. However, if we don't ever see any of these characters again, I'm happy with where things have gone and how things are wrapped up here.
Of course, with Secret Wars coming up, all bets are off on who or what we'll be seeing. I mean, I joked about Kang the Conqueror in my Age of Ultron review. All bets are off!
To sum up adequately: go in expecting a good time and you'll definitely get it. It's darker, but it's better. You will laugh, you will cry, you will cheer. And, regardless of anything else it was nice to fly alongside the Guardians for one last ride and watch them go out in style!
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is now in theaters from Marvel Entertainment and Walt Disney Pictures.
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