Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Review
The cinematic universe of Kevin Feige's box office-dominating superheroes has experienced creative difficulties since Avengers: Endgame. Even though they're still making a sizable profit, audience interest has significantly decreased as a result of the overcrowding in the kitchen and the underwhelming quality of their served meals, with the most recent offering, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, leaving an unpleasant aftertaste.
Thank the creative heavens above that James Gunn is aware of his task and that altering audience expectations for Marvel stories is a welcome course of action.
In a genre that so many people, for lack of a better term, still mistakenly believe is for children, Gunn is acutely aware that maturity resonates throughout and that the demographic that benefits most from the evolving nature of stories that thrive on spectacle but succeed on their human interaction is older audiences.
Gamora’s challenging relationship with Peter and the other Guardians – Nebula (Karen Gillan), her sister, Drax (Dave Bautista, once again a comedic delight as the literal straight-shooter), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Kraglin (Sean Gunn), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), and Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) – allows Gunn’s script to indulge in certain conflict throughout, but they’re all afforded their own arc; the film truly leaning into the nature of what it is to be a rounded ensemble picture.
The main focus of Volume 3 is Rocket's past and present, despite the fact that they all appear to be on the hunt for their own goals. Again, without getting into details, Rocket's origin story is the darkest the MCU has ever gone in terms of violence and unrestrained passion.
The storyline really comes to life in his origin story, which borrows some ideas from Grant Morrison's great We3 comic book series from 2004 and throws in a dash of Plague Dogs (1977) for good measure.
The MCU's most evil and potent antagonist since the aforementioned Thanos is presented to us as The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). The audience and I am finally alarmed about the safety of our heroes because of the actual dread and unpredictability in his personality.
In action movies like this, it's uncommon for us to think that our primary characters will perish. After all, we all knew that Thor and Ant-Man would survive their respective adventures. Gunn's decision to incorporate such a potentially polarizing attitude into his writing is a further evidence to his talent.
Of course, Volume 3's components are not all perfectly balanced. While Iwuji's performance is phenomenal, Will Poulter's Warlock has been cast as a supporting role and reduced to a bimbo rather than the innocent but strong character he is in the comics. Actually, he was sorely underused and really needed his own standalone film.
Additionally, Rocket's backstory could have been the entire focus of the movie, which would have been fantastic, but there are so many other side plots that they crowd it out and lengthen the movie's running time.
The third act is a cacophony of admittedly cool action scenes and discoveries because of the erratic editing, which also hurts the rhythm.
The set design, makeup, and costuming continue to be top-notch, and this is one of the most visually creative MCU films to date. The song choices seemed forced; in the past, they felt organic when they cropped up, but in this film, it feels awkward.
Looking past the flaws though and adding the positive points together, this is certainly a rival to ‘No Way Home’ for best MCU film since ‘Endgame’
Whilst Gunn’s moving to spearhead DC is a loss for Marvel, they’ll always have this Galaxy to reference how they got things so right. A course that needed correcting, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a healthy reminder of why we became so invested in these films in the first place and even though it’s certainly not a perfectly unscathed conclusion, we have to remember that the ending is always the hardest part to pull off.