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James Gunn loves his outcasts. One of the most interesting things about his “ Guardians of the Galaxy ” movies has been watching the tug-of-war between Gunn’s outsider instincts and a franchise-generating machine that’s as insider as it gets. He's one of the few filmmakers who has operated in the massive system of the biggest movie money-making factory in the world without sacrificing his voice. Watching his “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is to see a director who knows how to balance corporate needs with personal blockbuster filmmaking. Mostly. This sci-fi/action/comedy still succumbs to a few of the MCU issues of late—bloated runtime, things-go-boom finale, too many characters—but there’s a creativity to the filmmaking, dialogue, and performances that modern superhero movies often lack. Much of the recent talk has been about the potential for AI-generated blockbusters , and I like when “GoTG 3” is at its messiest. Gunn is like that kid who is not only playing with his action figures; he’s pulling them apart and smashing them back together to make them into new creations. He doesn’t just love these losers, he wants to see them save the universe again. You will too.

“Vol. 3” opens with Rocket Racoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper ) listening to “Creep” by Radiohead. In another film filled with clever needle drops, it’s a tone-setter. Rocket sees himself as the weirdo, the creep, but the movie will teach him that he’s so f-ing special, of course. 

It all starts with an attack. The golden-hued Adam Warlock ( Will Poulter ) comes speeding into Knowhere, pummeling everything in sight with strength that would impress Superman. Rocket takes the worst beating and hovers near death for most of the movie, putting the film on two tracks—a flashback to Rocket’s origin story and the present-day tale of the Guardians trying to save him. The mission leads them to the High Evolutionary ( Chukwudi Iwuji ), a mad scientist who tried to speed up the evolutionary process for a utopia called Counter-Earth and created Rocket all those years ago.

Of course, the Guardians bring baggage on their quest. Peter ( Chris Pratt ) is emotionally unstable over what happened with Gamora ( Zoe Saldaña ), who was killed by Thanos but has returned as an alternate timeline version of the character who doesn’t remember her time with the GotG. Gamora gets involved with the Rocket mission, but the love story between her and Star-Lord doesn’t drive the narrative like the first two. Many filmmakers would have made “Vol. 3” about reuniting Peter and Gamora, but it’s more about a background to Rocket’s story, which allows for different chemistry between Pratt and Saldaña. She’s particularly good here, looking at the rest of the Guardians skeptically, especially the one who claims to love a different version of her.

As for the rest of the gang, it’s gotten a little too big for one movie to hold. Dave Bautista is fun again, but Drax has little to do. Same with Karen Gillan as Nebula, who has become a functional part of the team but lacks actual development. Mantis ( Pom Klementieff ) is back for comic relief, and Groot ( Vin Diesel ) does his thing, but it’s hard to shake how this “Guardians” is overcrowded. I didn’t even mention the talking dog (voiced by Maria Bakalova ), Elizabeth Debicki as Adam’s creator Ayesha, or Sylvester Stallone ’s return.

"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is most appealing when it defies a “product over art” aesthetic by being clunky and weird. It might sound silly to say a film is at its best when it’s less refined, but many recent blockbusters lack the human touch. It's thrilling to see Gunn push through some of his genuinely unsettling creature designs, or settings that feel like they’re taking place in actual physical spaces instead of the bland CGI that makes superhero movies look like watching someone else playing a video game. There’s a version of “Vol. 3” that’s even more chaotic and personal—the final act especially feels like it’s knocking off prerequisites on an MCU checklist—but every time this blockbuster felt like it was edging more to content than art, it won me back.

It's in the small choices made by Gunn and an ensemble that would clearly follow him into battle at this point. Pratt has been phoning in some of his lead film roles lately, but he’s always clicked best on-screen as Peter Quill, equal parts hero and chump. Giving him a broken heart allows Pratt to push away some of the cocky smarm that has derailed him in other projects and allows us to like Quill again. Saldaña is having fun returning to the basics of a warrior like Gamora, convincing us she could carry a movie like this alone. But, most of all, this is Rocket’s film, a story of how he overcomes trauma to be the hero he was always meant to be.

While the villain is a bit underwritten—most characters are simply due to the cast's sheer size—something interesting here unfolds on a thematic level beyond the basic hero/villain narrative. Without spoiling all the details of Rocket’s origin, his arc shifted when he solved a problem in the High Evolutionary’s experiments on his own, sending the villain off into a spiral of insecurity and sociopathology. In a sense, this is a story of a vengeful God, someone who lashes out when his creation not only proves himself independent but arguably more intelligent than its creator. Tales of creations who turn on their wicked creators are as old as myth, but Gunn weaves that idea through a Marvel vision with just enough clever subtlety to give his film more depth than a lot of its peers. Gunn reckons with the idea of a wicked God, one who sees his creations as experiments more than actual beings. It’s a story that fits Gunn perfectly as he tries to defy the Hollywood machine by bringing his imagination to life. He's the creator who wants his creations to outshine him. 

The flashback/mission structure of “Vol. 3” sometimes drains the film of momentum, and everyone who has seen a Marvel movie knows that this will end with many team-ups and explosions. And yet even when the film is checking those items off the list, it does so with Gunn’s personality intact, whether it’s in his music choices or intense imagery that could startle younger viewers. So much of the recent MCU has felt cravenly desperate to do just enough to turn a profit. “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is a reminder that the best blockbusters don’t just sing along to a well-known tune like “Creep”; they make the song their own. After all, we’re all the weirdos. And Gunn would say that makes us all pretty f-ing special too.

In theaters on May 5 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (2023)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements.

150 minutes

Chris Pratt as Peter Quill / Star-Lord

Zoe Saldaña as Gamora

Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer

Karen Gillan as Nebula

Pom Klementieff as Mantis

Vin Diesel as Groot (voice)

Bradley Cooper as Rocket (voice)

Sean Gunn as Kraglin / On-Set Rocket

Chukwudi Iwuji as The High Evolutionary

Will Poulter as Adam Warlock

Elizabeth Debicki as Ayesha

Maria Bakalova as Cosmo the Dog (voice)

Sylvester Stallone as Stakar Ogord

Daniela Melchior as Ura

Writer (comic book)

• Andy Lanning
• Greg D'Auria
• Fred Raskin
• John Murphy

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'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3' sends off its heroes with a mawkish mixtape

Glen Weldon

L to R: Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Drax (Dave Bautista), Quill (Chris Pratt) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) go for a walk in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Marvel Studios hide caption

L to R: Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Drax (Dave Bautista), Quill (Chris Pratt) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) go for a walk in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

What, in your mind, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe still missing?

We're neck-deep into Phase 5 now, after all; we've had dozens of movies and streaming series and one-off specials. And while critics can and do bemoan the surface similarities these disparate properties tend to share, the strength of the MCU remains how much variation it manages to offer up in tone, scope, stakes and subject matter. Looking for street-level angst ? Cosmic sweep ? Paranoid thrillers ? Mystic mumbo-jumbo ? Sitcom satires ? Gods and monsters ? Coming-of-age dramas ? Subatomic shenanigans ? Afro-futurist utopias ? Whatever the hell Eternals was supposed to be ? The MCU has something for you.

But maybe, after all these years, you find that your own very particular Marvel itch remains somehow unscratched. So I say this to a vanishingly small subset of you: If you've ever found yourself walking out of an Marvel movie and said to yourself, "I liked it. It was fine. But I don't know. I can't help thinking it could have used...just you know a lot more vivisection," then rest assured your tastes have finally been catered to, you sicko freak.

The gang's all here, sort of

But first: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is pitched as a sendoff to the rag-tag gang of misfits first introduced in James Gunn's 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy , who've since cropped up in several corners of the MCU. As a team, they've always leaned more into mercenary violence and bro-ish banter than anything so hopelessly quaint as heroism, though they do tend to wind up saving the day, despite themselves. They've added some new faces to their roster, one of which is technically an old face. (Zoe Saldana here plays an alternate-timeline version of her character Gamora, whom we met back in the first film; long story.)

There's dim but headstrong Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), dim but strong-strong Drax (Dave Bautista), gruff Nebula (Karen Gillan), empathic Mantis (Pom Klementieff), laconic space-Ent Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) and tough but fuzzy raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper).

Also along for the ride: Kraglin (Sean Gunn) a space-pirate struggling with performance issues, Cosmo (Maria Bakalova) a telekinetic space-dog, and a brand new antagonist, Will Poulter's Adam Warlock, a genetically-engineered super-being with the mind of a petulant child in the body of an Instagram fitness influencer.

They're all up against a powerful being known as The High Evolutionary, played with gratifyingly over-the-top, scenery-devouring brio by Chukwudi Iwuji.

The High Evolutionary's nefarious plan? To engineer a perfect species to live in a perfect society of his creation. Which, alas, is where All! That! Vivisection! TM comes in.

Doing Moreau with less

Look, if you're trying to come up with a villain for audiences to dutifully, even reflexively hiss, eugenicists are a pretty good place to start; I get that. And if said eugenicist should also happen to go about their evil business by conducting unholy cybernetic experimentations on cute fuzzy animals like Rocket (in flashbacks) and innocent, adorable, wet-eyed toddlers (in the present day)? Sure. Fair enough. Bad guys do bad things, after all. It's in the job description.

The problem at the core of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 isn't the mere depiction of said animal experimentation, which created not only Rocket but a cadre of twee furry cyborg pals we get to (briefly) meet. It's the fact that writer/director James Gunn approaches those scenes without trusting his audience to naturally recoil at the idea of animal cruelty.

There is violent imagery, yes. But what makes those scenes profoundly unpleasant to sit through is not their violence itself, but Gunn's mawkish, maudlin, manipulative approach to it. Using every cinematic tool at his disposal, he so feverishly attempts to crank up the horror of those scenes that he only succeeds in exposing their cynical, plot-driven artifice. And by juxtaposing them with moments in which the experiments' animal subjects spout platitudes about the joy of friendship and their dreams of escape, Gunn's unbearable, ham-handed execution aims for pathos but achieves only bathos, its laughably inept evil twin.

Baby Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), one of the film's subtle, understated appeals to emotion. Marvel Studios hide caption

Baby Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), one of the film's subtle, understated appeals to emotion.

You can only tug on the audience's heartstrings for so long before they start to snap off in your hands. To watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is to watch a filmmaker under the wildly mistaken belief that the best way to get you to absorb what he's saying is by screaming it directly into your ear.

There's more to the film than Rocket's trauma narrative (in those flashbacks, Sean Gunn attempts to personify a younger Rocket by pitching Bradley Cooper's dese-and-dose Brooklyn accent up an octave or two, so we the audience get to experience some trauma ourselves).

Game, cassette and match

The central metaphor of Gunn's Guardians films has been the mixtape. Peter Quill's beloved, long-lost mother made him one filled with classic rock jams that supplied the soundtrack to his life (and to the first Guardians film).

Nowadays, Peter's updated his old cassette with a playlist that provides this third film with a more eclectic collection of needle drops (Beastie Boys, The The, The Replacements, Florence + the Machine).

And like any mixtape/playlist, Guardians Vol. 3 includes some real gems. At one point the team visits a space station that's entirely organic, and the production designers go to town creating doorways like heart valves and airlocks like open wounds. There's an extended slow-motion fight in a corridor featuring digital camerawork that swoops around the characters as they trade punches and kicks and laser blasts in a physics-defying manner. It's visually stunning if viscerally inert, like an extended videogame cutscene.

But some of the other songs in this cinematic mix don't hit as hard as they could. Poulter's Adam Warlock feels shoehorned into the overstuffed proceedings, and while Klementieff's Mantis gets more to do than she ever has, both the character and actor still feel underused.

The Guardians, as a team, have never adopted the usual superhero admonitions against the taking of lives. Even so, a scene in which one of our heroes casually instructs another one of our heroes to "Kill them all," still can't help but rankle.

Barbs and insults get well and truly traded — a Gunn hallmark — and most of them land. Mostly, though, a weirdly somber mood pervades the film. Maybe it's that the scenes of animal abuse linger longer, and cast a deeper pall, than the filmmaker has accounted for. If Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a mixtape, it's the one that your ex sends you after you break up with him, full of syrupy, sentimental tunes meant to reignite any last lingering sparks of feeling you may have once shared. It's "Seasons in the Sun" followed by "Alone Again (Naturally)" followed by "Everybody Hurts" followed by "The Christmas Shoes," and it serves only to remind you how right you were to dump the sappy chump when you did.

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‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ Review: Raccoon Tears and a Final Mixtape

This dour, visually off-putting two-and-a-half-hour A.S.P.C.A. nightmare of a film may only be for completionist fans.

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By Maya Phillips

Animal lovers, comic book fans and unofficial adjudicators of narrative continuity, action and style in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Lend me your ears. “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is not the movie for you.

Perhaps this dour, visually off-putting two-and-a-half-hour A.S.P.C.A. nightmare of a film is only for completionist fans like myself, arriving at the theater armed with overpriced popcorn and the hope that the director James Gunn’s latest could replicate the romp and anti-gravity gambol of the first .

For those who need help getting their multiversal timeline untangled, “Guardians” is the second film of the so far ecstatically bad Phase Five of the M.C.U., after the, to quote my colleague, “thoroughly uninspired” “ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. ” We last caught our whole team of lovable riffraff together in “ Avengers: Infinity War ,” when Thanos (Josh Brolin) threw his adopted daughter and galaxy guardian, Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), into an abyss to get one of the Infinity Stones, which he used to snap away half of the universe. (There were some dancing Groots and a cute holiday special about abducting Kevin Bacon, but — sorry, Kev — they were irrelevant.)

Now the Guardians are settling in at Knowhere, a community in the severed head of a celestial that serves as their home base. With Gamora gone, Peter (Chris Pratt), a.k.a. Star-Lord, is still grieving, unaware of the fact that somehow Gamora — or, rather, a variant — is alive, sans her memories of him and the Guardians. When, a few minutes into the film, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) becomes victim to a deadly attack, the team is reunited with a hostile, partially amnesiac Gamora, who is reluctantly dragged into their plot to save him.

While Rocket is in critical condition, Peter and company do some risky snooping through Rocket’s traumatic back story to figure out how to save his life and stop the man pursuing him, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). A powerful god-figure, the High Evolutionary has genetically altered Rocket, other animals and even children to create a perfect race to inhabit his imagined utopia. (Yes, that’s another Nazi-coded villain for your Bingo card.)

So much of “Guardians 3” seems to erupt from left field, most prominently the main story, which is driven by Rocket, even though the Guardians have mostly played second-string to Star-Lord, the plot-driving hero. The shift makes sense given the role this film plays as the end of the trilogy, resulting in a Guardians team with a different starting lineup and an unclear position in the context of the rest of the M.C.U. But the shift also feels belabored and emotionally manipulative; scenes upon scenes of shot, blown up, tortured and incinerated C.G.I. animals with big, emotive eyes are as merciless as clips of injured animals set to a Sarah McLachlan song .

It seems “Guardians” needs this much gratuitous trauma bait to establish its stakes and prove that the bad guy is, in fact, bad. Which is unfortunate because Iwuji, who offered a much more nuanced performance in Gunn’s edgy-fun DC Extended Universe series, “Peacemaker,” is left with just a thin silhouette of an antagonist to work with here. (Will Poulter and Elizabeth Debicki also appear as idiotic secondary antagonists, for no real reason.)

Something like Thanos Lite or a knockoff Dr. Frankenstein, the High Evolutionary represents one of the central problems the franchise is facing in a post-“ Endgame ” M.C.U.: characters and circumstances that pale in comparison to Thanos and his cataclysmic, conclusive multi-arc-spanning plotline. Because at least the extent of Thanos’s power and the roots of his villain philosophy were clear. “There is no god — that’s why I stepped in,” the High Evolutionary says at one point. This tiny germ of a motivation does nothing but indicate all the questions that the film could have answered about this character to make him more interesting. Surely an atheist with a narcissistic personality and obsessive-compulsive disorder has some deeper psychology to unpack. Ah well.

Though this “Guardians” is certainly less fun than the others, there are still glints of joy in the more mundane and ancillary quibbles among the found family of misfits. Dave Bautista gives another priceless performance as Drax, and Bautista’s signature chemistry works with Pom Klementieff as Mantis. Groot (Vin Diesel) has leveled up in the bang-bang-shoot-em-up category, as has Nebula (Karen Gillan). Though the film makes no attempt to explain the logic behind Gamora’s magical reappearance (“I’m not some infinity stone scientist!” Peter exclaims after trying to puzzle things out), it does at least give Saldaña the opportunity to reinvent her character, which she manages beautifully. The same for Rocket, who gives an Oscar-worthy performance — via Cooper’s great voice acting, of course, but also via the animation, which makes his faces, postures and movements look so unbelievably believable.

Gunn makes the curious, bold choice to chase an unpleasant aesthetic that’s part Cronenberg, part “ Osmosis Jones. ” A series of scenes take place in a ship fashioned like viscera and innards, with fleshy globules and architectural dendrites, often in nude tones. Squishy sound effects add an unwelcome layer of grossness.

Even when the movie switches back to the more lambent palette of nebulae and the luminous shine of the stars, Gunn’s direction doesn’t serve the full tableau. His camera is too voyeuristic, spinning enthusiastically on every axis during group fight scenes rather than giving us a steady look at the choreography.

At least this “Guardians,” like the previous ones, stays on beat with a fantastic soundtrack of Spacehog, Beastie Boys and Earth Wind & Fire. But pumping soundtrack aside, after a breakout hit and the sequel, “ Everything Would Have Been Fine if Your Dad the Space God Played Catch With You: The Movie, ” this final piece of the trilogy makes one thing apparent: “Guardians” was just a one-hit wonder.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Rated PG-13 for some swearing and a zoo of horrors. Running time: 2 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the actress who plays a secondary antagonist along with Will Poulter. It is Elizabeth Debicki, not Maria Bakalova.

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Maya Phillips is a critic at large. She is the author of “NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse” and the poetry collection “Erou.” More about Maya Phillips

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the best Marvel movie in years

The last of James Gunn’s Marvel movies doesn’t get caught up in the multiverse.

by Alex Abad-Santos

Saying that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the best Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame feels like a loaded statement. Maybe one that should come with multiple asterisks.

Since Endgame , Marvel’s slate has included some uncharacteristically middling movies like Thor: Love and Thunder and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness . Spider-Man: No Way Home is fantastic but it’s considered a Sony and Marvel collaboration. The studio has also released some extreme stinkers into the wild, like Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania . It’s all led to the feeling that Marvel is in a relative rut .

When I say that Guardians Vol. 3 is the best Marvel film since Endgame , however, I mean it as a genuine compliment: The movie is great and not just the best house on a bad block.

Director James Gunn’s final Guardians chapter rips and roars with the confidence and emotions that nine years and multiple movies featuring this band of space underdogs bring. It achieves all this by, thankfully, ignoring Marvel’s grand design.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 is about picking up the pieces and the evil of eugenics

The third Guardians movie, the first since 2017’s Vol 2. , begins with rebuilding. That’s the only option when half the universe’s living beings were zapped away in 2018’s Infinity War only to come back, five years having passed, in 2019’s Endgame . Marvel’s various movies and Disney+ shows have tackled “the snap” and “the snapback” in their own ways, showing us glimpses of how people in the MCU dealt with the blip. Clint Barton found an apprentice; Wanda Maximoff got way too deep into demonic paraphernalia; Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson became bros, and Wilson became Captain America. 

The Guardians, who briefly appeared in the surprisingly dismal Thor: Love and Thunder , have started to build a headquarters on Knowhere — introduced in the first movie, Knowhere is the massive, cosmic skull of the celestial being that was mined for organic matter and then became a seedy intergalactic outpost. With Thanos defeated and trillions of beings snapped back and forth between existence, Nebula (Karen Gillan), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), and Drax (Dave Bautista) have created a home for anyone that needs one.

It’s a full-circle moment for the Guardians, who began this trilogy as individuals, homeless and alone. In each other, this cybernetic assassin, talking tree, raccoon with genius intellect, insectoid empath, and extremely literal destroyer have found a family. And together, they’ve taken it upon themselves to give fellow space weirdos a place for comfort and relief, the way this makeshift family has done for themselves.

The two names noticeably absent in this rebuild project are Peter Quill a.k.a. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana). Star-Lord is physically with the Guardians on Knowhere, but emotionally, he’s in a wasteland. He grieves over Gamora, the one who died in Infinity War and the currently alive time-displaced one who came back in Endgame. This new Gamora isn’t the one he loved, and she’s nowhere to be found. Quill drinks to numb the pain. 

Star-Lord’s drinking and depression isn’t the main villain of the story though. The big bad is the entity known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a powerful mad scientist who dabbles in cosmic eugenics. The High E genetically tinkers with all kinds of beings — walruses, otters, orphan children — and possesses a grand vision of creating a perfect utopia. Each time these utopias fail, the High Evolutionary starts over, killing all his creations. He sees this as a kind of mercy for his imperfect creations. 

It turns out that Rocket and the High Evolutionary have a connection, and for some nefarious reason, the High E now wants Rocket back. The bounty hunt on Rocket also introduces a superpowered himbo named Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) into the fray. 

And as these pieces begin to lock into place, the third movie unfurls as part Rocket origin story and part heist. The Guardians are off to save their furry friend.

How will the team save Rocket in this infinite universe? Well, without giving too much away, in a galaxy where everyone is so insignificant, nothing is more powerful than family. It isn’t always perfect, and sometimes it hurts, but whether it’s the one you’re born into or the one you find, family is the only thing saving us in this cold, enormous expanse.

Thank god this isn’t the multiverse

As saccharine and as corny as that all sounds, it’s worth noting that Guardians Vol. 3 is a Marvel movie. Marvel’s films and the comic books they’re based on aren’t actually all that abstract, at least at their best. Marvel’s characters were created to tell stories about friendship and goodness, and teach children how to be better to one another. Gunn hasn’t shied away from that since the first Guardians movie in 2014, and now, the new movie is still tracing out these characters and the bonds they share some nine years later.

This is not only Gunn’s last Guardians movie, it’s his last for Marvel. He’s been named co-chairman and CEO of Warner Bros, which will see him become the DCU version of Marvel’s Kevin Feige. It’s not too hard to see why DC wanted to give him the reins; his Guardians franchise has been incredibly popular.

That popularity has given Gunn more freedom than other directors in the Marvel system. You can see that leeway in the way he plays with visuals. 

In this film, we get genetically modified, freakishly adorable otters and walruses, a villain whose grafted skin is stretched sheerly thin over his robotic modifications, aliens chomping on skewered rodent street food, and a fleshy pink planet that’s purposely sphincter-like. The movie’s aesthetics often veer into incredibly gross and gooey, a deliberate choice each time. There’s a thoughtfulness to the physics, weight, and scale of every scene. The fight sequences, bright and bold, are choreographed with that same philosophy.

There’s no mistaking Guardians for any other Marvel franchise.  

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania , which came out earlier this year, and Guardians Vol. 3 essentially take place in the same setting: a weird alien world that doesn’t look like Earth. Still, they look drastically different (derogatory). Quantumania ’s visuals had no defining qualities; they were aggressively generic. And based on the way it was shot, I’m not even sure if any of the film’s actors were ever in the same room at the same time. If Quantumania looked half as good as Guardians , it wouldn’t have been as awful as it was.

More importantly, though, Gunn’s freedom also affords Guardians Vol. 3 the benefit of not being bound to the MCU multiverse.

The multiverse , as established in MCU projects like Spider-Man: No Way Home , Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness , Quantumania , and the Loki Disney+ series, is a concept derived from quantum physics in which there are infinite parallel worlds that contain parallel versions of ourselves. For the MCU, that means infinite versions of our superheroes and supervillains. 

Now, imagine the burden of spelling that idea out every time.

Marvel itself isn’t even consistent with the multiverse rules. They seem to change from project to project — for instance,  in No Way Home , Spider-Man is played by multiple actors; in Multiverse of Madness , all of the Doctors Strange are played by Benedict Cumberbatch. The studio has to deal with an off-screen controversy too: Jonathan Majors , who was arrested for domestic abuse in March, is playing multiple versions of the villain Kang. 

The MCU’s timeline itself is also extremely confusing. 

Loki establishes that there’s an entire agency that culls parallel timelines, and at the end of the series, Loki himself plays a part in its demise, which results in all these alternate universes sprouting up from nowhere. What’s unclear is how those events happened within the context of Multiverse of Madness , which establishes this multiple universe theory as something that Wanda Maximoff and Doctor Strange seem to have some knowledge about (despite no interactions with Loki). Nor do we know when the events of both those projects figure into Quantumania ’s timeline. The multiverse is supposed to connect this next batch of Marvel movies as a throughline, but Marvel hasn’t done a good job spelling out how. 

Aside from the time-displaced Gamora, which the entire movie waves off as fluke time-travel, Guardians Vol. 3 has no interest in the multiverse. It’s much better off for it.

Instead of getting deep into the (variable) scientific weeds, the Guardians are allowed to live in this world with one another. That often results in these sardonic, literal, naive, and brash characters bouncing off each other to comedic effect. But in this installment, Gunn pushes his cast into more somber territory, toying with the idea that if found families help us all to grow and heal, what happens when you grow enough to be on your own? What if you’re brave enough to find your own adventure? And what does that goodbye feel like?

It turns out that answering those questions makes for a pretty fantastic Marvel movie.

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• Movie Review

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a gorgeous spectacle that confuses schmaltz for sentimentality

James gunn’s third guardians movie is packed with stunning set pieces, but its saccharine attempts at sentimentality and a by-the-numbers plot keep it from ever reaching lift-off..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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The appeal of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films has always been their ability to feel truly set apart and distinct from the rest of Marvel’s multigenre cinematic universe, all while sticking to the studio’s house style just enough for crossovers to make sense. The first Guardians humorously opened up the MCU on a cosmic scale , and the second solidified its ragtag team of space outcasts as both a family and an important part of Marvel’s plans for the end of Phase 3 . Though Phase 5 is just ramping up , almost everything about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is crafted to be a celebratory farewell to the movie’s characters and the recent era of Marvel’s films they helped define.

Narratively, that’s a fantastic place for the third film in a series to be working from, and Vol. 3 feels like Gunn is working hard to show you just how much these movies have meant to him as a director. But for all of its stunning set pieces, imaginative production design, and a fascinating villain, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 gets bogged down by a morass of cringey jokes and a schmaltz so cloyingly “sweet,” it’s almost insulting.

Set some time after the Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special , Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 tells the action-packed, flashback-filled story of how Rocket Raccoon’s (Bradley Cooper) life being gravely endangered gives the rest of the Guardians a reason to come together and really start working on some of the emotional issues that’ve been haunting them since Endgame . With Thanos gone and the universe mostly restored, things have been going relatively well on Knowhere, the severed Celestial head out of which Rocket, Drax (Dave Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Kraglin (Sean Gunn), and Cosmo the Spacedog (Maria Bakalova) operate as the newest incarnation of the Guardians. 

Despite having become an angry drunk since we last saw him, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is still very much a part of the team as Vol. 3 opens on him mourning the death of the Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) he knew and loved before Thanos murdered her in Infinity War — a loss that hit all the Guardians heavily. But unlike Quill, who spends quite a bit of Vol. 3 lashing out with an unpleasant surliness that makes him difficult to sympathize with, pretty much everyone else on the team has made their peace with the fact that while their Gamora might be gone, there’s a different Gamora from the past (see: Endgame ) running around the galaxy now for them to love from a healthy distance.

Figuring out how to pick up narrative threads post- Endgame without feeling excessively stuck in the past is a challenge many of Marvel’s recent movies have struggled with, and Vol. 3 is no exception. There was no way for Vol. 3 to avoid addressing the Gamora paradox problem, and it’s actually a concept that’s always felt intriguing enough to warrant deeper exploration. But rather than unpacking that bit of existential time weirdness and all the ideas about grief baked into it, Guardians of the Galaxy focuses the bulk of its energy on revealing the secret, tragic backstory that led to Rocket’s creation and also conveniently frames him as the latest example of Marvel framing (animal) people as MacGuffins.

The specific reason the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) — an alien geneticist obsessed with engineering perfection into living beings — wants Rocket is far more interesting than the Scarlet Witch’s rationale for hunting down America Chavez in Multiverse of Madness and more unhinged than Namor’s plan to kill Riri Williams in Wakanda Forever. But whereas those films both tried to give their living MacGuffins active roles to play in the present, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 tries to tug on your heartstrings with a series of flashbacks to Rocket’s gruesome childhood of being experimented on alongside other sentient, talking animals like Lylla (Linda Cardellini), an otter with cybernetic arms, Floor the Rabbit (Mikaela Hoover), and Teefs the Walrus (Asim Chaudhry).

As it’s jumping between the past and the present, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 often feels like a film that’s overstuffed with ideas, both good and bad, and doing everything in its power to make them all work in too short a time, even though the movie clocks in at over two hours.

The Guardians’ battles with the High Evolutionary’s Sovereign underlings, High Priestess Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), and her prematurely hatched failson Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) make for some of the movie’s most dazzling fight sequences and do a very solid job of presenting them as a team of cosmic superheroes. But the more time Vol. 3 spends in the past focused on young Rocket — an uncannily cute CGI procyonid Cooper voices like a man doing gruff, stilted baby talk — the more it feels like Gunn doesn’t exactly trust you to have emotional responses to things without being spoon-fed concentrated schmaltz beforehand.

What Gunn does seemingly (and rightfully) have faith in is his own ability to dream up brilliantly twisted, fanciful locations and production designer Beth Mickle’s ability to bring them to life in absolutely stunning detail. As tired as many of Vol. 3 ’s gags and emotional beats are, almost every single one of its transitions to a new locale is a delightful showcase of what all Marvel Studios is capable of, visually speaking, when it’s firing on all cylinders to realize the vision of a filmmaker whose ideas it trusts. It’s also clear that the film’s cast has faith in Gunn, and he in them, and the result is a set of performances that — Pratt aside — work surprisingly well when the movie’s script isn’t getting in the way by making them say unfunny things. Unfortunately, though, that tends to be the case more often than not.

The degree to which you’re going to enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will largely depend upon how personally invested you’ve become in these characters over the years. Because the movie really is meant to be a send-off rather than an adventure that will make you fall in love with the Guardians for the first time. To that end, Guardians of the Galaxy does manage to send its eponymous heroes off in a way that feels thematically “right” for a trilogy that’s always been about misfits finding themselves with the help of their found families and marching to the beat of their own weird drums.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 also stars Sylvester Stallone, Daniela Melchior, Nathan Fillion, Nico Santos, and Dee Bradley Baker. The movie hits theaters on May 5th.

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‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ Review: Rocket’s Backstory Reveals Why These Are Marvel’s Top Heroes

James Gunn brings the underdog superhero trilogy to a satisfying close in this team effort to save Bradley Cooper's smart-aleck raccoon.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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For those who didn’t know the Marvel catalog inside-out, when James Gunn first unleashed “Guardians of the Galaxy” back in 2014, it felt like the company was suddenly calling in the B-team. Spider-Man, Hulk, Captain America, Thor. Those guys were household names who deserved standalone movies. But Star-Lord? Drax the Destroyer? Lethal green-skinned Gamora, grunting tree-thing Groot and a sarcastic raccoon named Rocket? They felt like parodies of the better-known Marvel characters — not so much superheroes as a ragged crew of sci-fi scoundrels roaming the cosmos in search of trouble.

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In the interval since “Vol. 2”, Thanos smote his stepdaughter Gamora (Zoe Saldaña). Her death left the whole team in despair and sent Chris Pratt ’s dork-stud Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, spiraling. Frustrating as such off-screen developments may be, Gamora’s death and subsequent resurrection provides a unique opportunity for Gunn, who dedicates an entertaining subplot to Star-Lord trying to convince Gamora’s replacement that they made a good couple. “That person was some alternate future version of me,” she explains, hinting at how crazy-complicated the timelines and multiverse wrinkles of the other Marvel movies have gotten.

“Guardians” otherwise remains grounded in a single reality, which doesn’t mean that it’s not an incredibly complex and demanding narrative to follow at times. Floating in space on the severed head of a Celestial, the Guardians are interrupted by a visit from Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), the gold-skinned son of Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) and someone who, according to the comics at least, is destined to join the Guardians at some point. For now, he arrives in berserker mode, smashing up Knowhere (as the outpost is called) and dealing near-mortal damage to Rocket, who spends most of the movie on life support, cueing flashbacks to his origins in a grimy, “The Secret of NIMH”-style science lab in another corner of the galaxy.

Warlock has come searching for the genetically modified raccoon, whose “creator” — a demented mad-scientist type known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) — is obsessed with repopulating an Earth-like planet with the most advanced form of various animal species. “There is no God! That’s why I’m taking charge!” Iwuji bellows in a performance of Al Pacino-level over-the-top-itude, playing this maniac as if his face had been ripped off and reapplied as a skin mask. The simple task of trying to summarize the High Evolutionary’s aims reveals just how loony they are, and yet, audiences go along with it because they care about Rocket.

Gunn has been incredibly successful about navigating the line between ironic self-awareness (on his part) and sincere emotional investment (on ours), and there are fewer of the absurd tonal shifts here than in the two previous “volumes” — as when Kurt Russell shattered a serious father-son moment by announcing, “Gotta take a whiz,” last time around. That strategy might get easy laughs, but it undercuts audiences’ connection to the characters. Here, Gunn tries his luck in the opposite direction, risking cheap sentimentality (if not full-blown bathos) by introducing likable new characters whose deaths will jerk tears a few scenes later — except he’s so darn good at it that audiences were audibly weeping when it happened at the film’s premiere. So mission accomplished on that front.

With wisecracking Rocket out of commission, the others get to step up their banter as the action zooms from one imaginative new environment to the next. First stop is Orgoscope, the High Evolutionary’s flesh-covered lab station, which looks like a giant tumor and allows Gunn to turn a standard snatch-and-grab heist into a trippy early-MTV set-piece, full of kooky costumes and old-school comedy routines. From there, the Guardians travel to Counter-Earth, a familiar-looking blue-and-green biosphere based on Star-Lord’s home planet, circa 1980, except the life-forms are all Highly Evolved animal species that walk and talk like humans.

The movie is such a mile-a-minute idea factory that Gunn will introduce a wonky high concept like this and devote just a short segment to exploring it. Fortunately, audiences have grown surprisingly comfortable with this strategy in a time of multiverse storytelling, which means the film can keep throwing fresh concepts at them every few minutes, and so long as Gunn takes a beat to show how this or that new alien species behaves, we get it. A good example might be the giant monsters Mantis encounters aboard the High Evolutionary’s getaway vessel: They look terrifying, with row upon row of shark-like teeth, but aren’t nearly the ferocious people-eaters they appear to be.

While the transportation comparison certainly fits, the obvious model for such level-to-level showdowns has been video games. But unlike other filmmakers, who make it feel like we’re sitting back and watching someone else get to play, Gunn keeps the surprises coming, so audiences are actively engaged throughout, trying to manage multiple storylines and the ever-changing loyalties between characters.

More than mere fancy, the genetic experimentation thread ties back to the state of contemporary earth science, while the High Evolutionary’s views toward Rocket suggests the unknown and slightly intimidating frontier as artificial intelligence threatens to outpace human thought. It’s easier to feel for an anthropomorphic raccoon than for a pseudo-sentient chatbot, but the ethical questions addressed are one and the same. Does the High Evolutionary “own” his creation? What higher purpose does experiment “89P13” serve?

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” arrives as the latest in a series of franchise-wrapping movies, and audiences have reason to be wary of what that means, given the send-offs received by characters such as John Wick and James Bond. Gunn toys with the mortality of his ensemble as well, but he does so responsibly, honoring the bonds we’ve made to these characters over the years, and recognizing that the Guardians can and will evolve.

Reviewed at Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, April 27, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 150 MIN.

• Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Marvel Studios presentation. Producer: Kevin Feige. Executive producers: Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Nikolas Korda, Simon Hatt, Sara Smith. Co-producers: David J. Grant, Lars P. Winthe.
• Crew: Director, writer: James Gunn. Camera: Henry Braham. Editors: Fred Raskin, Greg D'Auria. Music: John Murphy. Music supervisor: Dave Joran.
• With: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Sean Gunn, Chukwudi Iwuji, Will Poulter, Maria Bakalova.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 review: James Gunn bids an emotional goodbye to the MCU

The finale to this sci-fi superhero trilogy is a welcome pivot from a recent run of Marvel disappointments.

Christian Holub is a writer covering comics and other geeky pop culture. He's still mad about 'Firefly' getting canceled.

It's been almost a decade since the first Guardians of the Galaxy film debuted, and a lot has changed since then — both for viewers and for the characters. While we've watched Chris Pratt become a movie star and the MCU take chances on more colorful characters in the wake of Guardians ' success, these space-traveling heroes have run the emotional gamut: Pratt's Star-Lord killed his biological father and lost his surrogate one; Gamora ( Zoe Saldaña ) died and was replaced by a younger version of herself; Groot ( Vin Diesel ) has lived an entirely new life cycle as a baby, willful teenager, and now buff young man since his near-death at the end of the first film; Drax ( Dave Bautista ) has pivoted from seeking revenge for his lost wife and daughter to being an important emotional pillar of his found family; Nebula ( Karen Gillan ) has built a purpose for herself as a supportive teammate rather than her despotic father's custom-built weapon; and Mantis ( Pom Klementieff ) has learned that empathy is more about meeting people where they are than forcibly changing their mind.

That leaves Rocket ( Bradley Cooper ), who finally takes center stage in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for an emotional arc of his own. The previous films have only hinted at how an average raccoon became such a loud-mouthed pilot and skilled engineer, but now we are treated to flashbacks that show how he was a weapon experiment at the hands of an intergalactic geneticist called the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) who is trying to engineer the perfect species for a perfect society. Though Rocket was only meant as a test subject on the way to that greater plan, the little guy's cleverness surpassed even his creator, who will stop at nothing to get him back after so many years apart. Rocket, meanwhile, wants to ensure that no other innocent animals or children have to suffer the same horrors that he did.

(Note: These origin flashbacks are probably the most lively that CGI animals have ever looked; Disney's 2019 The Lion King remake pales in comparison. That could be a double-edged sword for younger viewers, though. Proceed with caution if you plan on bringing kids who might blanch at seeing pain inflicted on cute animal characters.)

In standing against the High Evolutionary's exclusionary eugenics and celebrating the unique humanity of every misfit and outcast, GotG 3 comes closer to being an X-Men movie than any other MCU installment to date, and that's a high compliment. It's always nice when superhero movies remember that they're supposed to be about saving lives rather than taking them, and GotG 3 often plays like a celebration of life — even for animals that can't talk or fly spaceships. Unfortunately, sometimes this morality feels inconsistent. In one early scene of banter, Star-Lord chides Drax for even considering killing people to accomplish their mission; later, in the film's centerpiece action sequence (which is indeed awesome), the heroes drop one body after another. Sure, those are "bad guys," but either stand behind your principles or don't espouse them so proudly.

This might not be the last time we see the Guardians on screen, but it is the last time we'll see them directed by James Gunn now that he's moved into a more powerful role at rival superhero studio DC Films. In addition to turning formerly C-list Marvel characters like Drax the Destroyer into global icons, Gunn is one of the few filmmakers who were able to imprint his own distinct style and tastes into this massive franchise that can too often feel (especially lately) a bit impersonal. That personal touch includes the rockin' mixtape soundtracks, the trippy cosmic flourishes, even Star-Lord's upbringing in Missouri…all of which, rest assured, come into play in this finale to Gunn's sci-fi trilogy.

But the new movie also introduces a few new elements into the mix. Adam Warlock ( Will Poulter ) finally arrives after he was first teased at the end of 2017's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 . He comes off like a mix of the Zack Snyder/Henry Cavill Superman (an overwhelmingly powerful ubermensch who blasts across the screen and beats everyone else to a pulp) and Kid Miracleman (whose overwhelming power is fused to an adolescent naivete). Originally created by Marvel masterminds Stan Lee and Jack Kirby but most notably characterized by Jim Starlin, Adam Warlock is the reason we have Infinity Stones in the first place. He used to run around with the Soul Stone on his forehead, and the other five eventually followed.

Arriving as he does into a post-Infinity Saga MCU, Poulter's Adam still has an unexplained gem on his forehead but ends up feeling a little rudderless. His boyish innocence and try-hard quips are a far cry from the brooding, existentialist cosmic wanderer of Starlin's comics, and though it's fine for adaptations to riff on their source material, it doesn't seem like Gunn or producers knew exactly what they wanted from their version of the character. Adam is stuck grasping for screen time in the margins of bigger emotional arcs for characters we've known much longer, playing both antagonist and potential future hero from one scene to the next as if they were trying to squeeze the Rock's Fast Five arc into 15 minutes.

More successful is Iwuji's debut as the High Evolutionary, the intergalactic geneticist who originally experimented on Rocket to change him from a normal raccoon to the wise-cracking pilot and engineer we recognize. While so many Marvel villains are defined by their relatable motivation, the High Evolutionary is a straight-up megalomaniac willing to do anything to achieve his aims. Unlike Jonathan Majors ' Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania , Iwuji isn't burdened by the daunting task of having to be the MCU's main villain for the next decade. Instead, the Shakespearean actor focuses all his energy on showing us a character who refuses to recognize the futility of his own worldview and keeps raging through failure after failure in pursuit of an impossible goal.

What GotG 3 shares with Quantumania is a clear influence from Rick & Morty in its use of non-human alien characters with gibberish names. However, that kind of spacey wackiness plays better in the mini-franchise already known for out-there adventures rather than the one known for down-to-earth heists. Perhaps due to Gunn's mounting responsibilities, GotG 3 does lack some of the visual flair of the preceding films. There's a lot of walking-and-talking, and the main group of characters walk towards the viewer in slow-motion enough times that you can't help but get a little tired of it. Though nothing quite matches the sequence from GotG 2 where Yondu (Michael Rooker) massacred an entire mutinous spaceship crew with his handy red needle, the aforementioned battle scene does have to be seen.

GotG 3 definitely marks the end of an era, though viewers shouldn't necessarily expect a repeat of beats from 2019's similarly climactic Avengers: Endgame . The MCU has been stumbling a bit since it bid goodbye to Captain America and Iron Man, and by reuniting us with characters we've known and loved for years, GotG 3 marks a welcome pivot from a recent run of unimpressive experiments and disappointing debuts. It'll be a long time, if ever, before we feel this kind of emotional payoff from this franchise again. Grade: B+

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Related content:

• James Gunn says he needed to finish Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Rocket
• The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 trailer teases one final adventure
• Zoe Saldaña explains why she went into Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 feeling 'bitter'

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Reviews

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is about Rocket finally getting to heal those wounds and do what he could never do before when he was just becoming aware—stopping this madman. This part of the MCU has always been about healing childhood trauma.

Full Review | May 25, 2024

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 manages to be more than honest-to-god entertainment, one that has the liberated weirdness of material (like a stealth We3 adaptation) that was never expected to find a mass audiences.

Full Review | Dec 9, 2023

This is the last time we see the beloved guardians. The film is laced with emotional and entertaining bits that make the swan song a thrilling ride at the movies this week.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 27, 2023

For me, it was an unsatisfying conclusion as the wear and tear had begun to be exposed, caused mostly by a scrambled storyline and wayward storytelling.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 27, 2023

Now that nearly every other cinematic release reads like a holding pattern until they finally get around to mutants, Guardians Vol. 3 is the first sign in a while that Marvel might actually have some genuine enjoyment left in the tank.

Full Review | Oct 16, 2023

GotG3 has no real tie-in to the larger MCU. There are a few references to Thanos, the Snap, and the Infinity Stones, but that's about it. This tracks with the trilogy as a whole, which has always stood outside the larger Marvel narratives.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 8, 2023

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a surprisingly risky blend of dark tones and sinister villainy with great visuals, tasty music, and the emotionality we expect.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2023

While the fun, laughter, and quips, set to jukebox favourites that made this ragtag MCU family a joy to hang with are all present and correct, there are some problems with the Guardians’ third outing

Full Review | Aug 27, 2023

The strongest material is perhaps the most unexpected: the backstory of Rocket Raccoon, which is involving and even touching in ways that the rest of the picture is not.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 27, 2023

It’s hopeful and poignant, filled with moments of empathy and integrity. Equal time is given to spectacle, with lots of stunning action sequences and psychedelic space weirdness.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2023

While not as engaging or fresh as the first two films Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 still had the usual James Gunn combination of dazzling CG environments, enjoyable action and great dialogue, so it was still a fun way to spend an evening.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2023

A gut punch of a film that had me in tears as much as it had me smiling.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Gunn weaves a story with Rocket that is as horrifying as it is heartwarming.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 8, 2023

…all just feels like indulgence of foppish creatives who don’t have much in the way of new or relatable ideas….

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 5, 2023

Rocket's origin story is great and the only highlight of the movie. Tonally it's all over the place and the runtime is about 25 minutes too long. After the brilliance of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 we're left wondering what happened to this series.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Aug 2, 2023

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is an emotionally powerful, tear-inducing "farewell" to James Gunn and his Guardians. Rocket's bittersweet storyline is the soul, heart, and engine running the best MCU film since Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 25, 2023

While the first two "Guardians" films might have been about Peter and the Guardians coming together, "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" is about the search for one's true identity and contribution to the greater good.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" shows [Marvel] still has fuel in the tank and is capable of making good movies. [The company] just needs to remember how to make character-driven stories that give its heroes something fun to accomplish.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is unique because Gunn not only bids farewell to our beloved rejects but helps them find self-acceptance.

While the script falters, the production design soars. The world of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is vivid, bold, and exciting.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

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‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ Review: These Intergalactic Weirdos Are the Real Heart of the MCU

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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While every Marvel film that has followed “Avengers: Endgame” — in which that missing half of the population was restored, care of the Avengers, who had suffered their own grievous losses — has briefly touched on how emotionally devastating such an event would truly be, none have fully reckoned with it. Even “Spider-Man: Far from Home,” the first film to arrive after “Endgame” and itself the actual conclusion of “The Infinity Saga,” glossed over the feeling of the post-Blip world with a handful of jokes and a class trip to Europe (maybe get these kids some  therapy ?).

But eight films on from the end of that saga, only one film has even attempted to truly tap into the big, messy heartbreak that should have been guiding this franchise for at least the past four years: James Gunn ‘s “ Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 .” Even Gunn’s film, his final Marvel entry and a closer on the trilogy he’s helmed for almost a decade, doesn’t directly tackle “the Blip” (does anyone remember that the Guardians lost more than half of their members for five years? no? OK…), it does aim straight for the kind of emotional honesty the MCU so desperately needs.

It doesn’t always quite land, but it says something about Marvel, about these characters, and about this filmmaker that this third film in a series that fits into a franchise of 32 total features is one of the most audacious, emotional, and original entries the MCU has ever seen. There’s life in this cinematic universe yet, if only other films within it are allowed to take the kind of swings that Gunn and co. opt for when it comes to proving something we’ve maybe all known: this intergalactic band of weirdos really is the heart of the MCU, and man, does it need some serious heart these days.

Set in whatever passes for the present day in the MCU, we find our wacky band of unlikely heroes hanging out at their current base of intergalactic operations: scrappy ol’ Knowhere, AKA the severed head of a Celestial (for anyone in need of an MCU catchup, just picture a super-race of massive gods, now picture one of their giant heads as a makeshift space station filled with a variety of colorful denizens). While Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax (Dave Bautista, hilarious as ever), Mantis (Pom Klementieff, in her best MCU turn yet), Groot (Vin Diesel), and Kraglin (Sean Gunn) are trying to keep things as normal as they can possibly be in Knowhere, other members of the Guardians aren’t doing quite as well.

Gunn, who also wrote the film’s script, wastes zero time in getting to the meat of the matter: while Adam Warlock — long-teased in these films , Poulter is extremely funny as the character; while there could be more of him in this first entry, it does set up a continued tenure for him — wreaks havoc on the Guardians as a whole, he’s really looking for Rocket. And when he delivers a terrible injury to the pint-sized, genetically engineered super-raccoon, it sets into motion a fitting franchise-capper for the crew.

Like all Marvel baddies, he’s a man with a plan: a seemingly ageless scientist, the High Evolutionary wants nothing less than to create a “perfect species” who can then lead his “perfect society.” What that means in practice? He’s spent decades experimenting on a full range of “lesser” beings in an attempt to build an enlightened being (Rocket, plus a trio of new pals, including an otter, a bunny, and a walrus, are part of his 89th batch). And while the High Evolutionary’s ideas and ideals have an impact on the wider universe, it is refreshing to face off with a Marvel villain whose existence doesn’t threaten literally every other being in the MCU. He’s basically small scale!

But his impact on Rocket? That’s big enough. And while we know Rocket did eventually escape from his clutches, the path there is much darker and much more painful than most audiences could possibly imagine. The trick: Gunn doesn’t abuse that emotion, he uses it to fuel his other characters into action. The Guardians appeal because their hard-won bonds feel real, even within the confines of the outsized MCU and the particular environs the space jerks find themselves in.

As Peter and the gang (including Gamora, who is along for the ride as part of a job, no matter how much that hurts Peter) head for the High Evolutionary, they know it’s something of a trap (“a face-off!,” Peter tries to redirect), the kind that will inevitably lead to all sorts of big battles. Throw in Adam Warlock (and, in sadly limited amounts, his mother, played by the divine Elizabeth Debicki), add a serious dash of daddy issues, and plenty of winking humor, and you’ve got a classic “GOTG” adventure, one made of many disparate parts that mostly coalesce.

Gunn has always managed to bring his own flavor to the MCU — an outlier in a franchise that continues to flatten its stories and characters in hopes of fitting them all in one big box, over and over again — and his final entry in this space offers the kind of send-off only he could craft. And while it, inevitably, opens the door for more adventures for this wild band of unlikely heroes (the appetite of the franchise world is, of course, never fully satiated), it does so on its own terms. And, really, it does something wild, something increasingly rare along the way: it makes you feel , as messy and strange and unexpected as that might be. Now that’s a super story.

Walt Disney Pictures will release “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3” in theaters on Friday, May 5.

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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.

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.

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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.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is, depressingly, the best Marvel movie since Endgame

Trilogy-ender breathes life into a wilting marvel cinematic universe.

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Marvel has a direction problem. 

That's not to say it has a directors problem; the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has never hurt for big names behind the camera. But beyond the people at the helm, the biggest problem with Marvel's latest films hasn't been the films themselves: It's the direction they're all headed in. 

After a series of increasingly interconnected releases managed to build a narrative arc that started all the way back in 2008's Iron Man and finished in that single snappy second of Avengers: Endgame  in 2019, the franchise has been mostly unmoored. 

Because the incredible achievement of the MCU has been creating what is essentially a gigantic crossover episode — varied enough that it can attract fans of multiple genres, and big enough that following along feels like a communal experience. 

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However, every conflict eventually needs a resolution, and unfortunately, even Marvel Studios CEO Kevin Feige couldn't keep the same game going indefinitely. Eventually the bad guy had to go, the hammer had to be handed off, and the long intertwined threads that gave the MCU its allure had to, mostly, wrap themselves up. While that is satisfying, it's not good for the franchise's future, as these stories are much less compelling when it feels like they don't have a reason to exist. 

So when I say Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the best — and first actually good — Marvel entry since Endgame, maybe you can extend me some latitude.

It's one of the earliest MCU properties still putting out movies, and (though James Gunn is not the only director with writing credits) one of only two solely written and directed by the same person. That gave Guardians Vol. 2 a unique voice, even when its contemporaries were relatively strong. 

Now that nearly every other cinematic release reads like a holding pattern until they finally get around to mutants, Guardians Vol. 3 is the first sign in a while that Marvel might actually have some genuine enjoyment left in the tank.

Finale of trilogy a dark departure

As to the plot, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 continues the friends-are-family ethos at the group's centre since the beginning. After the events of Endgame , Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) no longer remembers past love interest Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), and is instead employed as a Ravager — essentially a space pirate — under the guidance of the still confusingly underused Sylvester Stallone. 

Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) bump up against one another in the compelling-enough friendship b-plot that already found its zenith in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Here, the journey is less about them finding strength in one another, and more about that relationship wilting on the vine.

Quill, meanwhile, is drowning himself in alcohol at the very start of a self-pitying character arc that develops into something more off-putting than humanizing. And taking care of him is Bradley Cooper's Rocket, perhaps the most depressed creature of the bunch.

​Sean Gunn on playing Rocket Raccoon and his big Guardians moment​

That very much not a raccoon (according to him) character is stuck in the past. We find him moping around their space-home Knowhere, listening to an overwrought acoustic recording of Creep , reminiscing about his soon-to-be-revealed animal-testy background while tears stream down his face.

It's all very slow and very sad — that is, until he's blown through about six buildings into a coma that requires the rest of the gang to race across the universe for a cure.

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If that sounds like a departure from the zany but shallow fun of previous Guardians installments (and virtually everything else on the Marvel big screen lately), that's because it is. In Gunn's closing of the trilogy, his writing and direction exhibits a barbed animosity for his characters; the aw-shucks millennial humour that's become the bane of virtually everyone's existence is replaced by a bitter — and surprisingly violent — undercurrent. 

With it, you can pretty much throw all the messages the previous films built up out the window. While that might be the worst fate imaginable for some past fans ("Remember when these movies were fun? James Gunn doesn't," reads Mashable's review ), the mature take kick-starts Marvel out of its rut. The resentment developing between just about everyone on this team does more to serve the characters than any amount of weak comedic jabs or saccharine come-together moments ever did. 

Compelling villain, strong action

For example, Quill's painful attempts to argue Gamora into loving him again result in a series of explosive monologues — refreshingly original to those who found Adam Sandler's attempts to manipulate a trauma victim in 50 First Dates deeply unsettling.

Rocket's coma-flashbacks through his experimental upbringing do a surprisingly good (if sometimes mawkish) job of tying the story together, while cementing Cooper as one of the few genuinely talented live actor turned voice actors out there.

The Guardians' newest villain talks working with James Gunn and Chris Pratt

And our villain, Chukwudi Iwuji's High Evolutionary, pairs an impressive performance with a backstory good enough to actually warrant his existence — unlike Christian Bale's solidly acted but narratively one-note Gorr the God Butcher.

And even still, despite the somewhat dour turn, the comedy is still there. Will Poulter (who cut his teeth in the genre all the way back in his Son of Rambow and School of Comedy days) does well here, though he unfortunately adds even more to Marvel's glut of "too-dumb-to-live" comedic relief characters. 

Ignoring the cloying, doll-eyed cast of animals Rocket is given to draw obvious pathos from, the strength of Vol. 3 is undeniably in its action (the trilogy-ender has some of the most impressive fight scenes yet), multiple climactic moments and grown-up, but-not-too-grown-up tone.  

For the first time in a long time, it's a Marvel movie made to tell a story, instead of dragging a story along as an excuse for bright colours and explosions. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is twice the excitement with half the fat, which may not be all that appetizing to those just here for the dessert.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jackson Weaver is a senior writer for CBC Entertainment News. You can reach him at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter at @jacksonwweaver

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 review: The best Marvel movie in years

Writer-director james gunn has since jumped ship to dc, and the mcu will miss him dearly, article bookmarked.

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When the Guardians of the Galaxy first debuted in 2014, they were a band of relatively obscure heroes served up as an amuse-bouche between the snappy spectacles of Iron Man and pals. Writer-director James Gunn had done a few splattery horror movies, an ultra-violent, indie comic book adaptation, and two Scooby Doo s. And leading man Chris Pratt was known primarily as the goofball from Parks and Recreation . But here’s the thing about being an outlier: you have nothing and everything to prove, and Guardians of the Galaxy taught every future comic book movie that there was no limit to how funny and dorky but still deeply sincere you could be with your heroes.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 is a farewell to the franchise (at least from Gunn’s perspective, as he’s since hopped over to DC), that’s really a reminder that they always represented some of the very best Marvel has to offer. What Gunn’s done here isn’t even rocket (raccoon) science – he’s just crafted well-drawn, textured characters in a story told with care and commitment. And it’s a story told in a world that continues to feel distinct and almost entirely self-contained, something safely quarantined away from the wider narrative of the MCU. Vol 3 contains both Marvel’s very first f-bomb (landed with perfect timing) and a heist on a fleshy satellite in which the Guardians bounce around in primary-coloured, 2001: A Space Odyssey -style space suits.

Gunn, who also wrote the film’s script, had repeatedly said that his trilogy finale would focus on one member of this intergalactic crew – the Bradley Cooper-voiced, eternally cranky Rocket Raccoon. That’s certainly true in one sense. Here, the majority of the action revolves around the Guardians’ quest to uncover Rocket’s true origins, which are linked to experiments conducted by galactic eugenicist the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, who makes for an exquisitely grandiose but sinister villain). We get flashbacks a-plenty to baby Rocket – watch out Grogu, your merchandise empire is about to fall – and the de facto family he finds amongst his naive, severely traumatised fellow experiments, voiced by Linda Cardellini, Asim Chaudhry, and Mikaela Hoover. It is, as you might be able to guess, sob-inducingly moving.

However – and this is frustratingly rare in comic book films – Vol 3 is fully invested not only in how its core characters have evolved so far, but how they can continue to evolve. No one is sidelined. No one is wasted. It is, on top of its main plot, a break-up movie about the hollow feeling of bumping into an ex and realising they’ve moved on. Although in this case Star-Lord (Pratt, reminding us that he can be extremely charming when the role calls for it) is having to deal with the fact that his ex, Zoe Saldaña’s Gamora, is actually an alternate-universe version with no memory of him.

Vol 3 is also about realising the friend that’s the butt of every joke is a complex person whose life still has worth and meaning (true in both cases when it comes to Pom Klementieff’s gremlin-souled Mantis and Dave Bautista’s overly literal Drax – their friendship is the funniest and sweetest element of the film). It’s also, finally, about the pressures of being covered in gold and absolutely shredded – Will Poulter’s Adam Warlock, created to be the perfect man, actually turns out to be the pouty toddler to Elizabeth Debicki’s flustered mum Ayesha.

It doesn’t matter who these characters are, whether they’re aliens, psionic dogs (the Maria Bakalova-voiced Cosmo) or adult men who haven’t emotionally moved on from the Eighties. The Guardians films have always been about the fact that many of us are like putty – shaped not by where we’ve come from but where we are and could end up. Vol 3 should make audiences thrilled about what comes next for Gunn in his new position as co-head of DC Studios. As for Marvel – well, it’ll be their loss.

Dir: James Gunn. Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Sean Gunn, Chukwudi Iwuji, Will Poulter. 12A, 150 minutes.

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3’ is out in theatres

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Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 Review

05 May 2023

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3

No one expected that the one about the tree and the raccoon would be a highlight of the Marvel Cinematic Universe , but so it proved with the first  Guardians . After a weaker second instalment and a fun Christmas special, director James Gunn closes out his four-part trilogy with a triumph: a big, scrappy mix of humour and terror boasting a heart as big as Drax. The result may be a little too chaotic and sprawling to match the pace of the first film, but it’s packed with great moments and far more emotionally resonant.

This time, the danger is not some amorphous threat to life all across the galaxy but a personal crisis: one of the Guardians’ own is put into serious peril after a disastrous attack on their Knowhere home. The rest must find the key to saving Rocket ( Bradley Cooper ), with the clock ticking and their own emotions at the limit. The resulting quest involves teaming up once again with Gamora ( Zoë Saldaña ), who has no memory of their time together, and facing a new and terrifying adversary in Chukwudi Iwuji ’s High Evolutionary. To say he has a god complex undersells it; having found the universe lacking, he seeks to remake entire civilisations to his own design – including, it turns out, the Sovereign we saw last time, and their immature creation Adam Warlock ( Will Poulter , excellent despite limited screentime). The Evolutionary is also tied to Rocket’s origins, which it turns out are every bit as painful as Mantis ( Pom Klementieff ) once suggested.

Iwuji’s Evolutionary is not Marvel’s showiest villain, but he’s a great adversary for the Guardians, a gang of imperfect, damaged people driven by their own grief and pain to save others from both. What could be more at odds with their outlook on the world than someone obsessive about the perfection of all things? The strength of this cast has always been in their weaknesses, the failures and emotional scarring that meant they relied on one another just to get through the day, never mind guard the galaxy.

This film allows the Guardians of the Galaxy to face their fears and abandon the status quo, even if that means saying some painful goodbyes.

Having established that his heroes are in this surrogate family for a reason, Gunn smartly looks at what might happen if they dared to look beyond it and actually deal with their trauma rather than hiding from it in the acceptance of one another. So, we get flashbacks to Rocket’s genesis, witness Gamora’s anger as she struggles to reconcile the person she is with the stranger everyone else seems to remember, and see Star-Lord trying and mostly failing to imagine life without her. If Nebula ( Karen Gillan ), Mantis, Groot and Dave Bautista ’s superb Drax remain much as ever, that’s only because they were perfectly formed to begin with. But all their attempts to move forward result in a dramatically satisfying and remarkably grown-up approach to a comic book movie, especially one with this film’s wild visuals (giant organic space stations! Bat people! A Ravager merman who communicates with emojis!) and blinding colours.

This isn’t perfect. There’s bagginess around the middle, thanks to a welter of new characters and a laudable determination to give each member of the ensemble something worthy of their considerable talents, plus a couple of fight scenes are cut so fast as to be little more than brightly-coloured blurs. Then there’s the all-too-common superhero thing where monumentally horrible things happen only to be brushed aside for another quip, another scrap, another heart-to-heart. But the love that Gunn has for these characters is overwhelming, and that carries it through the rougher and slower patches. He successfully balances his tendency towards occasional snark by letting that love shine through every frame, to often heartbreaking effect.

That’s why it feels right that this film allows the Guardians of the Galaxy to face their fears and abandon the status quo, even if that means saying some painful goodbyes. The High Evolutionary succeeded better than he knew. He forced our favourite bunch of A-holes to grow, and become, perhaps, slightly better people, and that should give us all hope.

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Still reeling from the loss of Gamora, Peter Quill rallies his team to defend the universe and one of their own - a mission that could mean the end of the Guardians if not successful. Still reeling from the loss of Gamora, Peter Quill rallies his team to defend the universe and one of their own - a mission that could mean the end of the Guardians if not successful. Still reeling from the loss of Gamora, Peter Quill rallies his team to defend the universe and one of their own - a mission that could mean the end of the Guardians if not successful.

• Jim Starlin
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• 1.5K User reviews
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• 11 wins & 83 nominations total

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• Trivia (at around 23 mins) In this film, Drax refuses to share his zarg nuts with Mantis. This is because in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022) , she ate all of his without permission.
• Goofs In the closing credits for Special Thanks, Bobcat Goldthwait 's last name is misspelled as "Goldthwaite."

Rocket : Someday I'm gonna make great machines that fly. And me and my friends are gonna go flying together, into the forever and beautiful sky.

• Crazy credits SPOILER: There is a scene in the closing credits: a new roster of the Guardians of the Galaxy goes to work.
• Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: One Giant Iago Ahead (2019)
• Soundtracks Creep (Acoustic Version) Written by Jonny Greenwood (as Jonathan Greenwood), Ed O'Brien (as Edward John O'Brien), Colin Greenwood (as Colin Charles Greenwood), Thom Yorke (as Thomas Edward Yorke), Phil Selway (as Philip James Selway), Albert Hammond , and Mike Hazlewood Performed by Radiohead Courtesy of XL Recordings

User reviews 1.5K

• May 6, 2023
• How long is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3? Powered by Alexa
• Why is Gamora still alive in this film when her 'alternate self' should no longer exist with the death of Thanos and her present self sacrificed herself to ensure that. According to Bruce Banner and The Ancient one, these alternate selves should no longer exist. Other characters who died the same way have stayed dead.
• The past version (2014) of Gamora should have turned to dust after the Endgame snap to reverse what Thanos had done in Infinity War - is (past) Gamora alive or dead? How?
• May 5, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• New Zealand
• Official Marvel
• Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3
• Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Marvel Studios
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• $250,000,000 (estimated)
• $358,995,815
• $118,414,021
• May 7, 2023
• $845,555,777

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 30 minutes
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track

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Guardians of the galaxy vol. 3, common sense media reviewers.

Trauma, teamwork at heart of darker MCU threequel.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Like previous installments, focuses on teamwork, p

Guardians are brave (if at times impulsive), smart

Centered around a White male lead. Though people o

Several upsetting scenes involving Rocket's past,

Flirting, intense eye contact, and a couple of com

Includes the first use of "f--k" in the Marvel Cin

Brands visible include Sony, Ford. Part of the bro

In an early scene, Peter gets so drunk that he mus

Parents need to know that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the third (and theoretically final) feature film in the massively popular MCU sub-franchise about the ragtag found-family group. This time around, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Drax (Dave Bautista), Groot (Vin Diesel), Nebula (Karen Gillan), and Mantis …

Positive Messages

Like previous installments, focuses on teamwork, perseverance, and empathy. Demonstrates power of friendship and found family, the reality of coming to terms with your past while also moving forward, the necessity of offering -- and accepting -- forgiveness and second chances. Lessons about believing in yourself, warnings about the evils of bigotry, eugenics, supremacy.

Positive Role Models

Guardians are brave (if at times impulsive), smart, thoughtful, strategic. They might have had shady pasts, but they stick by a code and are loyal to one another, acting heroically to save their families and friends. They are examples of how individuals form kinship bonds. Peter learns to accept that things won't always work out the way he wants them to. Some villains are outright evil, but at least one finds redemption, illustrating the franchise's belief in second chances.

Diverse Representations

Centered around a White male lead. Though people of color play several key roles, nearly all are hidden under makeup and VFX, including Zoe Saldana (Black Latina) as Gamora, Dave Bautista (Greek-Filipino American) as Drax, Pom Klementieff (Korean) as Mantis, Vin Diesel (multiracial) as Groot, dulling any sense of ethnic diversity. The main visibly non-White character is The High Evolutionary, the central villain, who's played by Nigerian actor Chukwudi Iwuji. Women are more than sidekicks here and don't just exist to prop up the male characters. They have agency and contribute to the group, whether it's physical strength or super empathy/persuasion.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Several upsetting scenes involving Rocket's past, which is revealed to be a traumatic story of grief and animal torture/death (hybrid creatures made through experiments may be alarming to young kids). Massive destruction. Many weapons (guns, bombs, blades, more) used to blast, threaten, harm, and kill. Characters are shot, incinerated, and decapitated, with gore and skeletal remains visible. One main character is near death for much of the movie. Other sympathetic characters are killed or appear to die. Children are held captive. Intense one-on-one fights and one choreographed battle sequence that's Kingsman -like in its violence. When Nebula is badly hurt, she can snap her body parts back into place, which can be jarring. Medical procedures shown. Alien creatures bleed in many colors. Large, intimidating monsters/hybrid creatures. A character pries something out of someone else's bloody head after that person dies a violent, revenge-fueled death. A character is attacked, and his face is left a bloody mess. A character's skin-covered mask is taken off, revealing a bloody face below. Many people die when a person made for killing terrorizes and kills others. A leader destroys an entire planet of inhabitants whom he views as expendable experiments; this same attitude affects his opinion of most other living creatures. A living space station has a lot of squishy, goopy features that may be unpleasant for some. Mantis sometimes makes creatures do things against their will. Arguments/yelling.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Flirting, intense eye contact, and a couple of compliments. Mantis makes a security guard fall in love with Drax.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Includes the first use of "f--k" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: "Get in the f---ing car." Other strong language: "s--t," "d--k," "ass," "a--hole," "d--khead," "stupid," "douche bag," "bitch," "damn," "dammit," "screw you," "dang," "shut up," "idiot," "twit," "piss," "suck my --" (incomplete), "moron," "butt," "dumb," "freakin'," "friggin'," "oh my God," "hell." Groot's comments can sometimes be interpreted as cursing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands visible include Sony, Ford. Part of the broad MCU franchise with countless tie-in products available.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

In an early scene, Peter gets so drunk that he must be carried out of a tavern -- and it's clear that it's not the first time. A character witnesses a drug deal involving underage beings. The drug is later referenced as meth.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the third (and theoretically final) feature film in the massively popular MCU sub-franchise about the ragtag found-family group. This time around, Peter Quill ( Chris Pratt ), Drax ( Dave Bautista ), Groot ( Vin Diesel ), Nebula ( Karen Gillan ), and Mantis ( Pom Klementieff ) must enlist the help of "other timeline" Gamora ( Zoe Saldana ) to save Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper ) from a villain who believes he's working for the betterment of the galaxy by trying to create the perfect species. This is the darkest and goriest of the three Guardians films: It explores the deep-seated trauma that one of the characters experienced early in life and has upsetting scenes of animal torture and experimentation. There's also explosive sci-fi action violence, mass destruction, decapitations, weapons use, blood, skeletal remains, and a huge body count (some of them sympathetic characters). Expect a fair bit of strong language, including the MCU's first F-word (dropped by Quill in a moment of frustration), plus "a--hole," "s--t," "d--k," "bitch," and more. Characters flirt, and Quill gets extremely drunk. But he's also fiercely loyal to his crew, and the Guardians continue to demonstrate teamwork, perseverance, and courage. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (70)
• Kids say (84)

Based on 70 parent reviews

Lots of Animal Abuse - Know before you go

Too sad and violent and not very good or funny., what's the story.

In GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3, the Guardians, having (mostly) survived the events of the previous MCU films , are living in Knowhere in a state of low-key PTSD. That's particularly true for Peter Quill ( Chris Pratt ), who's still mourning the death of his Gamora ( Zoe Saldana ). Then Adam Warlock ( Will Poulter ) -- a killing machine genetically engineered and raised by Sovereign leader Ayesha ( Elizabeth Debicki ) to destroy the Guardians -- ends up surprising the gang and leaving Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper ) near death. Nebula ( Karen Gillan ) and Mantis ( Pom Klementieff ) discover that Rocket has a "kill switch" inside him that needs to be overridden if they want to save his life, so the whole gang -- including Groot ( Vin Diesel ) and Drax ( Dave Bautista ) -- head off to track down the code. Their search ultimately leads to the ultrapowerful High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who's trying to create utopian societies throughout the universe. Rocket's past -- and his connection to The High Evolutionary -- reveal how he came to be, what kind of creature he really is, and even how he got his name. Meanwhile, Peter must come to terms with the reality that the Gamora who's from the other timeline introduced in Endgame never lived through the love story he shared with the Gamora who died in Infinity War .

Is It Any Good?

Surprisingly heartfelt, this movie is the darkest and most personal of the three Guardians films -- but also the most uneven. Writer-director James Gunn knows how to make this ragtag bunch work, but there's a layer of sadness that envelops the proceedings, despite the many laugh-out-loud moments. On the one hand, this mission has the established camaraderie of the second movie, one of the most ruthless villains in the entire MCU (The High Evolutionary is memorably terrifying with his perfection obsession), and a decades-spanning soundtrack that includes everything from Radiohead's "Creep" and the Beastie Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" to Bruce Springsteen's "Badlands" and Florence and the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over." On the other hand, the extensive flashbacks to Rocket's past, while illuminating, have such a different pace and character development that Vol. 3 sometimes feels like two stories smooshed together. The introduction of Adam Warlock is also uneven, and Poulter, who's a talented and funny actor, isn't given much to do except preen, kill, and whine for most of the movie.

Then there's the Gamora factor, which is necessarily complicated because she's not the same Gamora audiences have grown to love. It's difficult to feel invested in this Gamora, and her presence is sometimes more unpleasant than humorous. Like Peter, many viewers are likely to miss the old Gamora too much to enjoy Saldana's performance here. Pratt knows how to continue to make Star Lord lovable and messy and a bit of a wreck, and Cooper does a lovely job of conveying the trauma that Rocket experienced, as well as his core desire to belong to a found family. Bautista gets a great moment to shine when he forms a bond with a group of genetically engineered children, and Gillan's Nebula has her biggest role in the group to date, stepping up as a real leader. The visual effects focus on hybrid creatures created for potential utopias and sequences of violent whole-world destruction. The hybrids are purposefully uncanny and unsettling. It's unclear whether there will be more Guardians films in the future now that Gunn has left the MCU, so this is a good time to enjoy his final contribution to the franchise -- and be thankful for the questions he finally answered here.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . How does it compare to the two previous movies? To other MCU movies? What's the impact of violence on kids?

Which characters do you consider role models? How do they demonstrate teamwork , perseverance , and courage ? Why are those important character strengths ?

Talk about The High Evolutionary's vision: What's wrong with his way of thinking? What does he lose by viewing Rocket and his friends as failed experiments? Can you think of parallels to real life?

What did you think of the soundtrack to Vol. 3 ? Kids/teens: Does the movie make you interested in music from the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s?

What do you think happens next? Is the franchise done, will it continue as-is, or will it follow only a couple of the main characters?

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 5, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : August 2, 2023
• Cast : Chris Pratt , Zoe Saldana , Karen Gillan , Dave Bautista , Bradley Cooper , Pom Klementieff
• Director : James Gunn
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Latino actors, Asian actors
• Studio : Disney/Marvel
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Superheroes , Adventures , Friendship , Space and Aliens
• Character Strengths : Courage , Empathy , Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 150 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements
• Last updated : July 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Review: In ‘Guardians 3,’ ultra-weird superhero fun doesn’t have to be Rocket science

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Let’s run the numbers: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is the third movie in a trilogy (duh), the second Marvel movie to be released this year (yawn), the 32nd movie in the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe (sigh) and, as hyper-aware fans doubtless already know, the first of those 32 MCU movies to feature an uncensored F-bomb (about time). I’m not sure the last was worth the wait, though by this point in the series — after some 64-plus hours’ worth of bombastic explosions, murky action, crisscrossing timelines, intergalactic skirmishes, butt-hurt baddies, tiresome daddy issues, genocidal cataclysms, box office conquests, military propaganda and strenuously breezy wisecracks — a single PG-13-compliant four-letter expletive is certainly well-earned.

And hilariously well deployed, I must say. I won’t spoil the context — I couldn’t anyway, since the scene is already online — except to note that it feels like a nicely profane parting shot for the writer-director James Gunn, resident mischief maker among superhero auteurs, as he makes his way out of Disney/MCU headquarters. (Gunn, who also wrote and directed the first two “Guardians” movies, is now creative mastermind over at the rival DC Studios.) More to the point, the F-bomb lands in the middle of an enjoyably eccentric, insouciantly funny and often beautiful-looking jumble of an entertainment that plays — at least when it isn’t let down by a wobbly seriocomic tone and some excessive narrative multitasking — like a sincerely moving farewell to some of the more likable rogues and motley misfits in the Marvel cosmos.

They’re pretty much all back, if not quite better than ever. There’s Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), the Guardians’ goofily intrepid, ’70s rock-loving captain, who’s been drinking himself into a stupor ever since losing his bad-ass beloved, Gamora (Zoe Saldaña). Gamora isn’t dead; she’s just testy and amnesia-stricken, with no memory of her past adventures with Peter or his antennae-sporting empath sister, Mantis (Pom Klementieff), or the lovably dimwitted Drax (Dave Bautista), or the sharp-clawed, sharper-tongued Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). Gamora can no longer even understand Groot, the gnarly tree-man with the expressive three-word language and the voice of Vin Diesel; even her heated longtime rivalry with her perpetually snarling sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), seems to have gone cold.

I confess to experiencing my own Gamora-esque bouts of memory loss when it comes to recalling ancient or recent Marvel lore, and so struggled to place Kraglin Obfonteri (Sean Gunn, the director’s brother), a telekinetic dude with a highly communicative space pooch (voiced by Maria Bakalova). I did remember the imperiously gold-plated Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), since it’s hard to forget a character who swans into every scene looking like an Oscar statuette fresh out of the tanning bed. One important and annoying newcomer is Ayesha’s son, Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a callow fighter who enters the movie with a violent whoosh, launching an ambush on the Guardians that ends with Rocket unconscious and gravely wounded.

Rocket proves troublingly resistant to medical treatment, sending his friends on a valiant, sometimes bumbling journey for answers and antidotes. And so they journey far and wide, visiting distant planets and breaking into top-secret filing cabinets, bragging and bickering at every turn. The comic patter is familiar but effective, much of it swirling around Peter’s efforts to charm his way past Gamora’s hostile eye rolls. Along the way, Gunn ushers us into uncharted new realms of wackadoo production design (by Beth Mickle) and outlandish costumes (by Judianna Makovsky), reminding us that he’s never been shy about letting his stylistic freak flag fly. Why are those security guards wearing giant pan dulce? Why not?

Meanwhile, Rocket spends his coma reliving his own harrowing origin story in flashback — a development that gutsily repositions this reliable second banana as the hero of the story and perhaps of this mini-franchise as a whole. (He’s tellingly introduced first in a catch-up sequence set to Radiohead’s “Creep,” the first, longest and most effective of the movie’s signature needle drops.)

Rocket’s story also ushers in some unusually grave and, depending on your tolerance for CGI animal cruelty, potentially objectionable scenes of a grievously abused young raccoon, stuck in a cage with three other friendly, furry captives who have been and will be subjected to all manner of mistreatment. Their tormenter is a uniquely sadistic villain (played by Chukwudi Iwuji) who calls himself the High Evolutionary but is basically a veterinarian Dr. Mengele. He plans to populate a new planet with a master race of genetically engineered human-critter combos, purging as many innocent, imperfect prototypes along the way as he needs to.

At one point, Peter snarlingly dismisses the High Evolutionary as just another “impotent wack job whose mother didn’t love him trying to rationalize why he’s conquering the universe.” It’s a pretty good line, and if it exemplifies an unfortunate MCU tendency of late (let’s recycle clichés by cloaking them in self-awareness), it also firmly ensconces Raccoon alongside Peter, Gamora and Nebula, all mutts and castoffs who’ve suffered at the hands of malevolent dads and dad figures and their damnable Old Testament God complexes. The idea is driven home by a late-breaking sequence that plays like a sci-fi Noah’s Ark and, with a sense of ethical purpose that smacks of self-critique, suggests that the “Guardians” franchise, for all its intergalactic diversity, has too often focused on what one character calls “the higher life forms,” to the detriment of its animal constituents.

That’s all well and good, even if Gunn’s attempts at sincerity don’t always hit the mark. The well-meaning yet punitive heavy-handedness of the animal-abuse sequences seldom sits easily with the glibly violent punchlines that the director indulges elsewhere, including a bizarrely sour scene in which a side character is fried to a crisp while his poor four-legged (I think) companion looks on, whimpering in horror. That flair for impish, pranksterish humor has of course been a Gunn career specialty since he began writing Troma Entertainment cheapies in the ’90s, and it certainly played a role in his landing the “Guardians of the Galaxy” gig to begin with.

Gunn managed the flow of action, comedy, music, character setup and forward momentum more or less seamlessly in the first “Guardians,” and to serviceable if diminished effect in “Vol. 2.” He was famously fired from “Vol. 3” for a spell , and I can’t help but wonder if that short-lived brush with career death spurred him to pull out most of the stops here and emerge with by far the messiest, unruliest and most interesting “Guardians” movie of the three. It’s the one that feels most weirdly and defiantly its own thing, the one least straitjacketed by Marvel conventions. Which is not to say it’s as fully unhinged or unbound as it should be; entertaining as it is, the movie isn’t as fully realized as Gunn’s recent “The Suicide Squad,” a proudly R-rated, heavily Troma-influenced entertainment that wore its comic-book nihilism on its sleeve.

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” has its own appreciable mean streak, to be sure, but that streak is still largely subordinated to sentimental franchise-finale demands. That may be a compromise, but it’s not a failure. For all the visual weirdness and misfit irreverence he pumped into these stories, Gunn’s obvious love for these characters has been the trilogy’s consistent and undeniable saving grace. And he notably doesn’t sell out that love as he brings those characters all to a conclusion, or at least a mid-franchise inflection point, that carries an ache of bittersweet feeling.

End-credits teasers aside, the story here feels appreciably and even radically self-enclosed, and if its sense of finality turns out to be an illusion, it feels real and moving enough in the moment. There’s also the not-unignorable fact that after a couple of Marvel duds ( “Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” ), it’s a pleasure to see a superhero movie that actually puts a priority on aesthetics, that floods the screen with inventive, well-lighted images and, in one gleefully orchestrated single-take sequence, reminds us how more of the action in these movies should be: nasty, Grootish and short.

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’

Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes Playing: Starts May 5 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Things to do, tv and streaming | ‘guardians’ of the galaxy 3′ review: quest to save the raccoon becomes the most empty, brutal mcu movie yet.

Marvel-Disney/AP

Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax and Karen Gillan as Nebula in a scene from "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3."

Uncredited/AP

Rocket, voiced by Bradley Cooper, in a scene from "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3."

It’s the usual pale male instance of who gets the do-overs in Hollywood and who doesn’t. If you stretch for a more charitable reading, it’s an indication of some theoretically reassuring but, in this case, fruitless creative latitude afforded a highly skilled, highly uneven wiseacre.

To wit, or in this case, witless: The MCU’s gunkiest, most grotesque and most aggravating product to date comes from the same writer-director who delivered a zippy first “Guardians” entry, followed by wobbly but fairly diverting yo-yo of a middle installment. Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3,” so named because volumes are so much more impressive than “parts” or plain numbers, already has its ardent fans who (based on the one-word quotes in the TV ads) respond, on some cellular level, to the wanton brutality mixed with notably callous zingers, plus a heavy load of “Endgame”-style pathos. Life and movies and fandom: They’re all funny that way.

I’m in full agreement with my 13-year-old MCU devotee stepson who, on the long ride home after the “Guardians 3? screening, called the movie “a lot of animal abuse, plus killing, and four hours of angry people yelling at each other.”

The movie’s 150 minutes feel like 240, and Gunn spends many of those minutes dealing with flashbacks and present-day scenes of Dr. Moreau “Island of Lost Souls” cross-species experimentation in what feels like a particularly vicious animal shelter. If a superhero movie’s quality could be quantified by close-ups of bleeding, shivering, terrified digital-but-real-looking creatures, some of whom are shot point-blank for maximum traumatization of the audience, “Guardians 3? would sail straight past the Oscars to the Pulitzer committee.

The movie’s a blur of detours. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, whose eyes get wider as his material gets dumber) and the rest of the Guardians must rescue Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) from the Dr. Moreau rip-off, “The High Evolutionary” (Chukwudi Iwuji). The antagonist schemes to perfect the utopian nightmare he has begun constructing on Counter-Earth, which is “Don’t Worry Darling” suburbia populated by genetic mutants in slacks and frocks.

There’s more, notably a wary reunion of Quill and the memory-wiped reborn version of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and a trip to the Orgosphere, which is pink, skeezy-looking joint. There, and on an already broken-down Counter-Earth, Gunn favors little touches of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and, more innocently, the 1966 “Fantastic Voyage,” if “Fantastic Voyage” set course for a pus-flecked version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

These details aside: I’ve enjoyed much of Gunn’s work, especially the first “Guardians” and the recent box office flop “The Suicide Squad.” At his most intuitive, he cracks the elusive code of violence mixed with macabre humor. Here it’s just sourness and chaos the whole way, with every thundering golden-oldies hit setting the tone of things, mostly ironically, always, always obviously. The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3? may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

Is there really much of a difference between Gunn’s notion of fantasy brutality and suffering and “realistic” bloodletting? As designed and executed here, with the usual digital viscera flying around just quickly enough to ensure the (frankly idiotic) PG-13 rating, I don’t think so. The tonal clashes don’t stimulate; they flatten the collective response. I saw “Guardians 3? with a full crowd ready to whoop, and the whooping ended with the opening credits. The snark tastes like ashes in your mouth: If it’s not a casual beatdown of a mugging scored, jauntily, to “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” it’s a fuzzball of a mutated pet peeing itself for a laugh while fireballs and mayhem consume the frame, expensively.

What’s enticing to Disney and Marvel Studios doesn’t necessarily have to feel like punishment. But it does, sometimes, and maybe more often lately. The third and desultory “Ant-Man” movie, “Quantumania,” laid there like a green-screen lox. “Guardians 3? is considerately worse; it trashes the camaraderie of its core ensemble (Dave Bautista’s Drax remains the deadpan standout) in favor of one deafening, vicious flourish after another.

Worst MCU ever? I know a 13-year-old target audience member who thinks so.

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3? — 1 star (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements)

Running time: 2:30

How to watch: Premieres May 4 in theaters

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @phillipstribune

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

May 5, 2023

Action-Adventure, Comedy, Science Fiction

In Marvel Studios' “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” our beloved band of misfits are looking a bit different these days. Peter Quill, still reeling from the loss of Gamora, must rally his team around him to defend the universe along with protecting one of their own. A mission that, if not completed successfully, could quite possibly lead to the end of the Guardians as we know them. James Gunn writes and directs “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, featuring Vin Diesel as Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket, Sean Gunn, Chukwudi Iwuji, Will Poulter and Maria Bakalova. Kevin Feige is the producer and Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Nikolas Korda, Simon Hatt and Sara Smith serve as executive producers.

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 2h 29min Release Date: May 5, 2023

Directed By

Produced by.

• Nominee - 2024 Academy Award® for Visual Effects
• Nominee - 2024 Golden Globe for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement in a Motion Picture

• motionpictures.org
• filmratings.com

Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 | Streaming August 2 on Disney+

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(L-R): Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

Zoe Saldana as Gamora in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

Baby Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

(L-R): Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Karen Gillan as Nebula, and Pom Klementieff as Mantis in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

(L-R): Dave Bautista as Drax, Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, and Karen Gillan as Nebula in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo by Jessica Miglio. © 2022 MARVEL.

Sean Gunn as Kraglin in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

Cosmo (voiced by Maria Bakalova) in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

(L-R): Will Poulter as Adam Warlock in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo by Jessica Miglio. © 2022 MARVEL.

(L-R): Zoe Saldana as Gamora and Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo by Jessica Miglio. © 2022 MARVEL.

(L-R): Cosmo (voiced by Maria Bakalova), Sean Gunn as Kraglin, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Dave Bautista as Drax, and Pom Klementieff as Mantis in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

Chukwudi Iwuji as The High Evolutionary in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

Chukwudi Iwuji as The High Evolutionary in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Dave Bautista as Drax, and Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, and Karen Gillan as Nebula in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

(L-R): Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Pom Klementieff as Mantis, Karen Gillan as Nebula, and Dave Bautista as Drax in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2022 MARVEL.

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Guardians Of The Galaxy 3's Ending Is Still A Wonderful Surprise 1 Year Later

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's wholesome ending surprises with resolution, not cheap deaths, for beloved characters.
• Gunn opts for character transformation over termination, giving closure and new paths for Drax, Nebula, Gamora, and Rocket.
• Thoughtful storytelling in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 sets an example for the MCU on honoring iconic characters without tragic ends.

One year after Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 hit theaters in May 2023, the movie's unexpectedly wholesome ending is still a surprising delight. The film's moody trailers indicated a weighty tone, and it looked like writer-director James Gunn might take drastic steps to give a lasting sense of finality to characters that audiences had grown to love over the course of three main films and a host of other entries in the MCU. Both Gunn and some Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 cast members , including Dave Bautista, made statements saying they were finished with characters, leading many to expect some potentially heartbreaking deaths.

What viewers discovered instead is that the ending of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 offered a real sense of resolution to several key characters and the film's wider story without resorting to cheap deaths. With two memorable Guardians Of The Galaxy films under his belt, the expectation was that the third movie would be a grand finale, possibly at a huge cost. But rather than opt for the ‘quick fix’ by killing off a major character or using a clumsy plot hole, it felt as if Gunn had thought long and hard about the best ways to do justice to the characters.

Who Dies In Guardians Of The Galaxy 3

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's trailers had promised at least one tragic death, and the movie delivers on this promise in quite a surprising way.

Guardians Of The Galaxy 3 Gave Characters Closure, Not Death

Established characters are moved forward rather than stopped in their tracks.

In a delightful surprise, Gunn decided that transformation was better than termination, and the characters' arcs reflect this approach . Drax's ending ensured he abandoned revenge and embraced his paternal side, becoming a father figure and protector who honors the memory of his wife and daughter. Nebula, even after suffering trauma at the hands of Thanos and harboring justifiable resentment, put aside her anger and violence to become the real leader of Knowhere, where her toughness and resolve could be put to better use.

What could have been tragedy instead becomes celebration in a way that feels grounded and appropriate to the characters.

Gamora stayed alive and shunned the cliché of rediscovered love with Star-Lord, instead choosing a new home with the Ravagers. This arc does justice to Gamora's personality and makes her an individual instead of a feeble replacement for old Gamora . Rocket, the most likely candidate for death, confronted his mortality but found a way to make peace with his origins and his identity, and he became the new Guardians Of The Galaxy captain. What could have been tragedy instead became a celebration in a way that felt grounded and appropriate to the characters.

How The MCU Can Learn From GotG 3's Beautiful Ending

A thoughtful approach could do justice to other characters at their narrative climax.

Across the rest of the MCU, only Steve Rogers got a narratively satisfying, death-free ending. Characters like Bruce Banner, Thor, and Clint Barton seem near or at the end of their journey, so their fate hangs in the balance. Gunn sets the example with his work across three Guardians films, showing it’s possible to honor iconic characters and bring their story to an end without leaving an audience distraught at their loss. This template could be used for future MCU installments.

Iron Man’s death still feels appropriate given his previous conflicts and sometimes selfish nature, so death in storytelling shouldn’t be ruled out for other MCU mainstays if it helps tell a meaningful story. But such an approach should be used sparingly. In the meantime, however, the way in which thoughtful storytelling was used to such impressive effect remains a wonderful surprise. Gunn provided a delightful twist, ensuring that in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, the heroes are both utterly changed but still alive and kicking.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Director James Gunn

Release Date May 5, 2023

Writers James Gunn

Cast Pom Klementieff, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Debicki, Zoe Saldana, Karen Gillan, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Chris Pratt

Runtime 116 Minutes

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By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 6, 2024 |

May was a bleak month for moviegoing, with total box office revenue of $570 million, down from $800 million in May 2023. Last year’s numbers were buoyed by the successful Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 , Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid , and the tenth Fast & Furious movie. Those were legitimate blockbusters. However, this year’s disappointing numbers may have had more to do with Hollywood’s expectations for otherwise modest blockbuster films.

I’ve been watching the numbers of the May releases because I feel invested in the success of the moviegoing experience. Yes, while the box office was down overall, on an individual movie level, it wasn’t that bad, save for Furiosa , which unfortunately fell well short of not only expectations but also its budget ($116 million worldwide so far on a $165 million budget, plus marketing). But the other big releases haven’t done that poorly. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has earned $340 million on a $160 million budget; the dismal The Garfield Movie has been very profitable ($160 million on a $60 million price tag); John Krasinski’s IF has had solid legs and may end up being an Elemental -like hit ($140 million on a $110 million budget and still performing well); and even The Fall Guy ’s disappointing run hasn’t been a total disaster ($160 million on a $130 million budget). It may even break even(ish) at some point after VOD/digital and streaming/cable licensing are added in. It’s a great film and may have strong legs with home viewers.

When we look at the overall landscape, there have been some bombs this year — Argyle earned $100 million on a $200 million budget and Madame Web earned $100 million on a $100 million budget — but those movies were bad. There have, however, been some blockbuster-sized hits this year — Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Kung Fu Panda 4 — and some movies that have wildly overperformed: Bob Marley: One Love ($180 million on a $70 million budget) and The Beekeeper ($152 million on a $40 million budget).

What I have been most excited about in 2024, however, has been the continued success of less expensive horror movies and films targeting adult audiences. A24 had its biggest box office hit with Civil War — $114 million on a $50 million budget — and Zendaya’s Challengers has quietly racked up $90 million on a $55 million budget (and will obviously do well on digital/streaming). Mean Girls has also killed it despite the audience’s supposed dislike of musicals ($104 million on a $35 million budget), and even Dev Patel’s excellent Monkey Man has eked out a profit ($32 million worldwide on a $10 million budget). If studios want to continue making more movies like these, I’d be fine with that.

Horror, meanwhile, is never going to break box office records (with the occasional It -like movie as an exception), but these films have been surprisingly resilient. That’s true even of the bad ones — Night Swim did $54 million on a $15 million budget; First Omen has earned a decent $52 million on a $30 million budget; and Tarot has scored $42 million on an $8 million budget. The good horror movies have done well, too: Abigail earned $42 million on a $28 million budget; The Strangers: Chapter 1 made $34 million against an $8 million budget; Immaculate grossed $25 million on an $8 million budget; and the best horror movie of the year, Late Night with the Devil , earned $11 million on a $1 million budget.

It’s not all bad, and we always have to remind ourselves that most movie studios are corporate-owned, and the one thing that corporations are good at (for better or worse) is turning a profit. The domestic opening weekend box office is rarely the whole story (except with Furiosa , unfortunately). If there is one thing we have decidedly learned in 2024, however, it’s that moviegoing audiences are clearly done with the Guy Ritchie style of filmmaking (see Argyle , The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare , and the three Guy Ritchie-directed films prior to that). Then again, his TV adaptation of The Gentleman has been a huge hit for Netflix, so who the hell knows?

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