Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 review: James Gunn’s trilogy ends with a big, brash blaze of glory
For his final outing with Marvel's intergalactic misfits, Gunn delivers a thrilling if sometimes overstuffed capper
Film Reviews James Gunn
A lot has happened in the world of Guardians of the Galaxy since the last time they had their own movie. Within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they’ve battled Thanos, lost one of their own, watched half of their number blip out of existence for five years, and ended up buying the headquarters of Knowhere in the Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special. Back in the real world, Guardians writer, director, and mastermind James Gunn was fired by Marvel, then rehired, then busy with two separate DC projects for Warner Bros., all while his cast went off and did many other projects of their own. And that’s just the abbreviated version.
Now, after all that and then some, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 is finally here, and it carries with it the weight not just of the six years it took to get it made, but of a certain sense of finality in a fictional universe that’s seriously lacking in endings lately. Longtime MCU viewers know by now that nothing in that world ever really ends. Characters die sometimes, villains are defeated, and storylines wrap up, but they’re all cogs in a larger machine, threads in an ever-growing tapestry designed to link to the next thing. Yet here’s Gunn and his cast, doing their best to create some kind of satisfying conclusion to a story they started nearly a decade ago, back when a lot of people thought a movie co-starring a talking raccoon and a sentient tree had no chance at the box office.
The gravity of that intention, of Gunn’s effort to conclude his story with his original team of actors, is laced through even the most irreverent moments in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, a film that, like its predecessors, has no shortage of irreverence. It’s a juxtaposition that gives the film a different tone than its predecessors, making it the darkest in the series so far, but there’s also something else you’ll notice right away, something arguably more important. In a franchise full of earnestness and unrestrained energy, this feels like a cast and a crew who are ready to throw everything they have at us one last time. It’s not just a film, it’s a blaze of glory, and that sense of daring is both the best thing about Vol. 3 and, occasionally, the worst.
Picking up in the wake of the Holiday Special that hit Disney+ last year, Vol. 3 finds the Guardians at a crossroads. They’re all trying their best to build a new community on Knowhere, but the team’s not holding together like it used to, in part because Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) can’t stop drinking himself into a stupor over the loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldana). But the team members have to set their other concerns aside when two things happen almost simultaneously: A new superpowered being named Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) quite literally blows up their enclave, and one of their own is mortally wounded. Racing against time to save their friend, the Guardians must journey to parts unknown, face a tyrannical mad scientist known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), and stare down their own potential ending in more ways than one.
In a bare bones narrative scaffolding way, the film is basically laid out like a series of quests to retrieve certain objects and information that can solve the team’s problems, but Gunn is too canny to let those old rhythms overshadow what he’s really after with this installment. The urgent, adrenaline pumping way that the film sets up its stakes in the opening minutes ensures that the Guardians faithful are hooked right away, and therefore the searching around for solutions isn’t just something for the team to do. It’s a backdrop upon which they can each explore certain emotional depths. Rocket (Bradley Cooper) carries the brunt of this exploration with a number of flashbacks to his creation, and the darkness he left behind, but he’s not alone. Peter must contend with the emotional damage he’s been avoiding for years, Drax (Dave Bautista) must face the idea of losing his family for a second time, Mantis (Pom Klementieff) must explore the idea of independence for herself, Nebula (Karen Gillan) must learn to look past her own anger, and so on. It’s heavy stuff, which imbues this installment with a greater sense of potential emotional devastation than even the daddy issues-laden Vol. 2, and that’s before Gunn digs even deeper into the life-or-death choices upon which his plot hangs.
But that heaviness is buoyed by the sense that, first and foremost, it’s just good to see everyone back in top form again. Gunn directs with the same sense of action-comedy bravado that made him a blockbuster filmmaker in the first place, sprinkling entertaining needle drops and fun camera angles through the film with impish delight. His cast, led this time by standout work from Bautista and Klementieff, feels like they’ve just been hanging out together for six years, waiting for the day the cameras will roll. It’s all comfortable and familiar and even joyful, which makes it easier to pull off the film’s delicate balance of many, many elements.
Which isn’t to say that balance is always just right. Even by Guardians movie standards, Vol. 3 feels overstuffed with setpieces and creatures and big new environments designed to show the scale of the cosmic world the characters inhabit. Even within individual scenes, as the Guardians are trying to juggle the High Evolutionary, Adam Warlock, a bunch of nameless monster creations and their own insecurities and hang-ups, the film feels like too much at times, like Gunn couldn’t help but keep throwing every idea into the mix as though it’s his last chance. At its best, this exuberant sense that the film is bursting at the seams works in its favor, giving it the explosive shine of something that just can’t help being this big, this bold. At its worst, it makes us gasp for intellectual breath, wishing the narrative would refocus.
But these moments are ultimately few and far between, and the overall impression of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 is one of a refusal to leave anything unsaid, to abandon any opportunity to offer just one more narrative trick or clever visual. If the first film was about finding a purpose, and the second film about finding a family, then the third is about finding a legacy, and deciding what to leave behind. In true Guardians fashion, Gunn and his intrepid crew decide their legacy is to go down swinging to the very end, and that will always be both intensely entertaining and unforgettably endearing.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 hits theaters on May 5.
49 Comments
Very excited for this one. Seems like the MCU has found a way (temporarily, at least) to right the ship. Here’s hoping I like it as much as you did!
With Gunn’s departure, it feels like DC is the one about to get back on track.
maybe. i’m not convinced Gunn has a great handle on how to handle characters who aren’t firmly in the lovable oddball camp. he tends to make the more square-jawed alpha male types doofuses so i wonder how he handles Superman, Green Lantern, and the like. But i’m definitely on board with giving him a shot
I hear you, but I think Gunn will bring the Christopher Reevesiness back to Supes. Cavill was stiff as a Sears catalog model, with no perceptible Clark Kent. Reeves relished both roles. I’m betting Gunn knows that. (PS: I’ve long thought Jake Lacy would be ideal as Superman)
one thing that never quite gelled for me is that they call themselves ‘the guardians of the galaxy’ but don’t ever really seem to do that. i haven’t revisited the first 2 or their avengers appearances in a while, but…why do they call themselves that in the mcu specifically?
How often do the avengers avenge things?
One specific time stands out (“I went for the head”).
But not really that often.
much looser name!
If I remember rightly, Ronan sarcastically dubs them the Guardians of the Galaxy during the finale of the first and Starlord owns it.
saw it, loved it. top ten mcu for me and i say that as someone who hates guardians 2. felt like a great issue of a comic book.
i say that as someone who hates guardians 2OMG, I feel seen.
MEEEEEEEEEE TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! OMG! Someone else…like me??? 😀
there are dozens of us.
Better yet, where did Pete come up with “Starlord?”
Saw it this afternoon , really great , better than 2 , no spoilers , it contains many cameos including actors from Suicide Squad and Archer…
Saw it last night. It’s one of the best MCU movies. Lower stakes than normal, which is a good thing, as it is more personal and affecting. I teared up a couple of times, as did several others in the audience, judging by the sniffles and eye wipes around me.It also has the most despicable, hateful bad guys I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. I really wanted them to die.
Went to see The Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 yesterday. Sold out theatre and I can say that the entire crowd loved this movie. Lots of laughs, some tears and just a fun ride.
For me the Guardians movies really stood out in the MCU. I think Gunn is definitely a director/writer with his own style and this vol. 3 is a fitting (though bittersweet) end for his Guardians.
I’m really looking forward to what he’s going to do with the DC movies/series etc. At this point I can’t think of a better creative mind than Gunn for this job.
I mostly loved this one. There’s a sentimental streak, but one it keeps undercutting. And it’s nice to see an MCU movie where the comedy actually landed. So much stone-cold audience silence during Shang-Chi and that last shitty Thor movie; everybody was really into this one.
in a world of green screens and piecemeal scenes stitched together from other deleted scenes, it was nice to see actual costumes. Sets. Makeup. Have emotion that was meant to be emotional – the least funny MCU movie in ages because it wasn’t trying to be jokey at every opportunity. The exact opposite of whatever Taika was hack-jobbing and it was great.
Saw it tonight and while I’d still put Wakanda Forever over it, GOTG3 was solid. But maaaaan if you’re a Jim Starlin fan, do not expect to come out happy.
eh, if you’ve coped with the changes they made to Drax, I’m sure you can handle the changes they made to Adam Warlock
I am sure now that I am done seeing it and the glow has worn off I could nitpick some issues with the film. But I really did love it. The whole 150 Min experience flew past and I was in tears for most of it. Well done.
I enjoyed it, but I feel with all the focus (rightfully) on the main cast, Adam Warlock ended up feeling kind of pointless. He didn’t have much in common, character-wise, with his comic book incarnation, and I don’t think Gunn found any sort of hook for him. Hopefully they’ll find something for him to do.
Sorry for the late comment but I just saw it last night: I thought Gunn used Warlock’s classic comics power of ‘being the deus ex machina’ pretty well, myself.
Recommendations: MoonrocksIt’s just algorithms all the way down, isn’t it
Spoiler-free review: man, I really wanted to love this. I love Gunn, love the characters, but it’s so sloppy in some respects and SO schmaltzy at the end that I couldn’t help but yearn for the structure and relative discipline of the first movie. There’s a lot to like— jazzy camera moves, an incredibly staged and acted ‘origin moment’ for Rocket— but the highs only made me resent the lows all the more. The ultimate resolution of the team felt so tacked on, the emotional beats of the finale felt so cringey and forced— there are moments at the end that make Peter Jackson’s twelve LOTR endings look like cinematic minimalism by comparison. And yet, the design of the film is so gorgeously trippy— it feels like Gunn’s ‘Fifth Element’— a movie I’d kind of like to own but don’t necessarily think is all that good.
“Gunn’s ‘Fifth Element’” is kinda the perfect description, really. That “moon walk” sequence, with the colored suits and the Spacehog song, was maybe my favorite scene in a movie in long, long time. But yeah, like the Fifth Element, fun movie, probably a good rewatch, but by no means perfect.
If someone told me a movie I’d made was my ‘Fifth Element’ movie, I’d take it as a high compliment.
imo best mcu movie since endgame (unless you count no way home, which is fair). been awhile since i left theaters feeling satisfied after seeing a marvel movie. sad to think this was it for gunn and marvel as they really worked well together. probably not a popular opinion but i think gunn does better when constrained by a PG-13 rating. but man does this movie make most of phase 4 look bad by comparison.ymmv but i found a lot of rocket’s scenes in particular to be tearjerkers.
Saw it today and it was really, really good. Much better than GotG 2, where I felt Gunn fumbled a bit, though I do enjoy that movie. This one is just everything Gunn excels at, which is wringing emotion out of absurdity and bombast, mainly by being to true to his characters. It’s definetely one of the darkest of the MCU movies, but when there is a comedic beat it’s grounded in what you’d feel these characters would say or do, rather than just a joke for the sake of a joke. Throughout, the characters shine and there’s some genuine pathos. There were a lot of sniffles in the theater, myself included. It probably helped that the High Evolutionary’s agenda was horrific in a too real way. Mainly it just works because Gunn has mastered the formula of making imperfect characters finding solace in an extended family, just trying to do good despite the odds.
“This one is just everything Gunn excels at,”Also what he excels at- casting the same actors in everything. Not that I really mind it, but there’s almost no one in this movie who wasn’t in another Gunn movie. Even if you don’t count his wife and brother, there’s like five other people from Suicide Squad in this. The only time it’s sort of distracting is when I don’t immediately recognize the person, like Ratcatcher playing the orange-skinned admin lady. Then I just spend the next few minutes trying to figure out who it was. I’m kinda surprised Cena wasn’t somewhere in there in heavy makeup.
This is excellent. A- or A whatever you want to give it. It’s great. Commercials ain’t lying when they say its the best Marvel movie since Endgame. I’d say its the best of the Guardians movies too. A lot of the criticisms you see in the post-Endgame movies from people is they lost their edge, its too formulaic, there’s no real story, you have to watch so much other stuff to get it, so and so on. That’s not the case here. You really don’t even have to have seen the other Guardians movies (though it helps) to get it because it tells its story well enough. None of those criticisms apply to this movie the way some other recent ones have. If you don’t like this movie, you’re just not into Marvel movies anymore (and that’s ok, just saying). This felt like peak Marvel
YARRR, HERE BE SPOILERS
Like seemingly everyone else here, I really liked it; I agree with the assessment that it’s the best MCU movie since Endgame (although I really liked No Way Home and I also liked Multiverse of Madness a lot more than most people; Zombie Strange wearing a cloak made from the souls of the damned makes up for a lot). I’m probably just getting cynical in my old age but I was able to predict a lot of the story beats in this movie (something I’m historically pretty bad at), but that was okay; they were mostly pretty satisfying nontheless.I did have one major issue with the movie (again, spoilers), which was when a certain character erases the short-term memory of another character. Doing that to a hostile/enemy character would be one thing, but doing it to one of your best friends? That’s pretty fucked up. I wouldn’t have minded except the movie doesn’t comment on it at all. None of the other characters so much as bats an eyelash. And this isn’t the first time that character has done that.The other issue I had was that Adam Warlock is barely much of a character at all; I know he’s a popular character (at least, the comics version, which I’m not familiar with) but he could really have been dropped from the movie entirely without losing much, and that might have prevented it from feeling “overstuffed.”
I kind of took it that part of the reason Mantis left at the end was not only so she could be her own person, but so that Drax could flourish on his own without her cleaning up after him (including erasing memories.) Not actually said in the movie, granted, but it was in my head.
My spouse made the same point, but I still think that casts it as a behavior that’s fundamentally okay (if unhelpful), rather than the severe moral violation I see it as.
The mind wipe felt like an expedited “Please forgive me for saying that I didn’t mean it,” which, I confess, is a handy superpower I’d have trouble avoiding. Here I’ll chalk it up to “ooh, we learned something about Mantis here.” Weak sauce, I know. Re: Multiverse of Madness, I too overall liked (not loved) it. But my “makes up for a lot” is two Stranges literally battling each other with Elfman notes. I hear DS:MoM’s harshest critics’ qualms, I just didn’t mind them as much. What did work worked pretty well. Plus, compared to Quantumania (the most disappointing and infuriating MCU for me since Iron Man 2), it’s Coen, Kubrick, and Spielberg rolled into one.
I think the only important thing about Adam Warlock being in this movie is that… Adam Warlock is in this movie. This was just to introduce him into the MCU and I’m sure he’ll be more important going forward, either solo or whatever iteration the new Guardians take. They just needed to introduce him in a lower-stakes way, give him the classic comics crossover plot of being an initial antagonist turned ally, give him 2 or 3 zingers, and boom, new character for the next 10 years to milk.
That didn’t bother me so much as the fact that an entire world of sentient beings is pretty much wiped out and it’s treated like it’s comic relief. That wasn’t necessary to advance the plot—the High Evolutionary’s ship could have simply taken off without that destruction and CounterEarth saved by his eventual defeat. You see all of these families, and they all are destroyed, with nary a mention other than jumping off a ship onto an exploding planet is a unique escape plan.It made the movie darker but also cynical in a way that the previous two weren’t. It was a major miss, IMO.
Hm, I think I agree. Having the HE’s evilness be based on “he’s created civilizations before and then wiped them out when they didn’t live up to his expectations” is one thing, but to have that happen again 2/3 of the way through the movie and then be treated as an afterthought is weird.A different approach would have been to give Quill the ultimate classic moral choice of whether the good of the one outweighs the good of the many: does he save Rocket, or does he save a billion people he doesn’t know? And his failure with Thanos could inform that, too. He decides that as much as he loves Rocket, he can’t live with the idea of letting a civilization be destroyed, so he does what’s necessary to save Counter-Earth.
(And then Rocket is saved anyway, because, I dunno, Adam Warlock or something; we don’t want to see Rocket die!)
I think it’s treated as an afterthought because it literally is one. At that point, all the characters are still focused on saving Rocket, and by the time events have slowed down enough for them to reflect, there’s considerable narrative distance, and going back to it would feel either clumsy or half-hearted.To be honest, I had more of a problem when they actively risked the entire populace of Knowhere, seemingly without giving them the slightest say in the matter, or even a warning. And it’s not like it would’ve slowed the film down to just show the residents with weapons and/or barricades or something, to make it clear that they were prepared for a fight and weren’t just being recklessly sacrificed.
Like a different article I read pointed out, the new Ant Man movie told us about how Kang was so evil and would destroy entire realities but didn’t show much of it. This movie told us about how the High Evolutionary would build wholes civilizations and then destroy them and then went on to actually show it. That’s much better storytelling.
Showing it’s fine. Treating it like a punchline isn’t.
Na, it’s absolutely fine, these are the kinds of things that happen in comic books and comic book movies.
***Spoilers, sort of.***
Loved it. So emotionally satisfying. It’s not particularly tough to make me cry at a movie, so I definitely cried a good amount. (Teefs! Floor! Lylla!) It moved at a good pace, none of the set pieces lost their welcome in my opinion. The villain was an outright evil bastard, really no shades of gray, which is a nice change of pace for a Marvel movie. And no real connection to the wider MCU so completely enjoyable on its own. I wonder sometimes what we might be missing because Disney caved so quickly to the BS online cancel attempt and fired Gunn. I’d like to have seen him do more in the MCU, though admittedly, oddball teams seem to be his sweet spot. I loved his Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, but I’m not sure what he would have done for Marvel outside GotG. Great Lakes Avengers? And I think we’ve seen what can happen when someone gets a little too confident with Taika completely shitting the bed IMO with Love and Thunder.
Maybe Gunn will be able to get the DCEU whipped into shape. I’ve been reading more DC comics lately and I’ve liked some of the DC movies but I’ve been reading Marvel comics since the 80s, so the MCU will always be my home. If Gunn succeeds, I’ll be happy for DC but I’ll more regret what he might have been able to do with Marvel.
Kinda don’t wanna know people that didn’t cry during at least some part of Rocket’s origin story. Cuz they just ain’t right.
Well there’s no shortage of oddball teams Gunn could take up in DC. Kinda curious if his Superman will be any good. If not, he can always try to adapt Challengers of the Unknown or Creature Commandos or Seven Soldiers of Victory.-edit- shit, I didn’t even know there was a Creature Commandos cartoon in the works…
I’m glad James Gunn was able to cap off the strongest trilogy within the MCU.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/gotg-vol-3-flies-off-into-the-beautiful-forever-sky/
I’m now eager for upcoming DC films for the first time since (checks notes) Dark Knight Rises.