Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 (Marvel Studios, Film New Zealand, Marvel Entertainment, Québec Film and TV Production Tax Credit, Troll Court Entertainment, Walt Disney Pictures, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 9) I went with the Bears San Diego to see the film Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 at the AMC Mission Valley 20 theatre complex. I had crammed for this by watching both previous Guardians of the Galaxy movies on Blu-Ray, and while the first one had disappointed me – it was just a superhero shoot-’em-up with splendidly staged but meaningless action sequences and just fragments of exposition connecting them – Volume 2, which I’d screened by myself the night before, was something else again. While not at the level of the best comic-book superhero movies ever made (the best-ever remains 2018’s Black Panther, followed closely by the first Tim Burton Batman from 1989 with Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker), it dealt with real human emotions and gave Chris Pratt, repeating his role from the first film as Peter Quill a.k.a. “Star-Lord,” a powerful character arc. Volume 2 was basically the story of Peter meeting his real father, Ego (Kurt Russell), at long last and building a bond with him until he realizes that, befitting his name, Ego is actually a God-like evil being whom Peter and the other Guardians must unite to destroy. Then, having lost his actual father, Peter has the dual blow of losing his foster father, Ravagers leader Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker), whom he’s come to realize fulfilled the emotional role of father far more than Ego ever did or could have. The story of Volume 2 was so powerful Chris Pratt told an interviewer that playing the role had helped him deal with the loss of his own father.

Alas, for the most part Volume 3 returned to the superhero action-porn of the first film, and to the extent that Volume 3 has any emotional resonances they’re reserved for the storyline of Rocket Raccoon (played on-set via motion capture by Austin Freeman, and voiced by Bradley Cooper), a genetically engineered creature who we learn this time around was the creation of the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a Black mad scientist who, like Ego in Volume 2, wants to evolve new species and ultimately take over the universe with them. Alas, Rocket receives a near-fatal wound in the early part of the film as the Guardians are locked in a fight scene with Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a hot young man created biochemically by Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), ruler of the Sovereign, a race of gold-plated humanoids upset with the Guardians in general and Rocket in particular because in Volume 2 some of their priceless batteries were stolen and they blame Rocket for it. By far the best parts of Volume 3 are the flashback scenes detailing Rocket’s past, as he apparently relives his entire life while he’s on what’s presumably his deathbed. Rocket was in a prison cell with three of the High Evolutionary’s other test subjects: Lylla (voiced by Linda Cardellini), an otter with whom Rocket falls in love; Teefs (voiced by Asim Chaudhry), a walrus; and Floor (voiced by Mikaela Hoover), a rabbit. There’s also a spider that’s been given metal legs. Rocket, with his superior intelligence (though how a character that through most of the first two films was just a wisecracking comic-relief guy developed a super-brain remains a mystery), has worked out a device to open the electronic locks on the doors to their cells, and he uses it to set himself and Lylla free – but Lylla is blasted to oblivion by the High Evolutionary’s ray gun and the heartbroken Rocket steals a convenient spacecraft and makes his escape.

The trick is that the High Evolutionary has put an electronic “kill switch” inside his creations, including Rocket, so any attempt to give Rocket medical treatment will trigger the kill switch and annihilate him instantly. The Guardians need to find the person who has the password for the kill switch and grab it so they can disarm it and bring Rocky back to full life. Eventually they trace it to a medallion built into the face of one of the High Evolutionary’s henchmen, Recorder Theel (Nico Santos). The Guardians have to drown Theel so they can pull the medallion off his face and use the coded information it contains to disable the kill switch and save Rocket. Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 has some great moments, including a sequence set on “Counter-Earth” – an uncannily accurate replica of the real Earth the High Evolutionary has created, only peopled with the High Evolutionary’s mutant creations instead of human-born humans, which reminded me of the fake Earth town of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. There’s a great scene in which Peter tries to steal a car to escape and then reminds both his fellow Guardian, the mutant empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff), and us that he was beamed off of Earth at age eight and therefore has virtually no idea how to drive. The film also features Nebula (Karen Gillan), half-sister or foster-sister of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), who is actually dead at the start of the film (my attempt to cram for Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 by ordering Blu-Ray discs of the first two films in the sequence and watching them before this one failed spectacularly when Gamora, who at the end of Volume 2 was alive, well and coupled with Peter at the end, was supposed to have died in one of the two Avengers films that took place in the interim) but who turns up later in the action, though apparently only as a manufactured replica of the original and with no more romantic interest in Peter.

At the end the Guardians successfully upload the passcode to turn off Rocket’s kill switch and save him, and they rescue not only a ship’s load of children but also – at Rocket’s insistence – all the animals the High Evolutionary had created as test subjects, then marked for death when none of them showed Rocket’s intelligence, which makes it ironic that reviews of the film on National Public Radio, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune condemned the film for its alleged cruelty to animals. And there’s a great final scene in which Peter Quill is about to die of the vacuum in space when he’s rescued by Adam Warlock, who’s changed sides and become one of the good guys, in an astonishing shot writer-director James Gunn copped from the famous mural of God giving the Biblical Adam the touch of life from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. At the end of Volume 3 there’s an odd scene in which the Guardians break up, sort of like The Beatles. Peter ends up returning to Earth and moving in with his grandfather, James Quill (Gregg Henry), who insists on making him mow the lawn in his suburban home even though Peter resents that he’s 45 years old but granddad is still treating him like a kid.

The six-year interval between Volume 2 and Volume 3 was due largely to a manufactured controversy by some Right-wing political activists who dug up a few old tweets James Gunn had posted years ago. The Walt Disney Corporation immediately canceled Gunn’s contract, saying that keeping him on would not be in line with their “family-friendly” image, whereupon Gunn signed with Warner Bros., keeper of the stables of the other major set of comic-book superheroes, DC. Gunn got assigned to write and direct a DC film called The Suicide Squad. In the meantime Disney, confronted by the refusal of the leading actors in the Guardians of the Galaxy series to make a third film unless Gunn were brought back to write and direct it, had to cut a deal with Warner Bros. to borrow Gunn back for this film. Gunn’s next movie will be an attempt to resuscitate DC’s most iconic hero, Superman, for a film called Superman: Legacy, and here’s hoping Gunn will cast as his lead actor someone taller and more robust than most humans. That’s how Superman was drawn in the comics and how the earliest live-action Supermen, Kirk Alyn, George Reeves and Christopher Reeve, were cast; but more recently the Supermen have been short, wiry guys like the most recent one, Henry Cavill, who despite the best efforts of Warner Bros.’ special-effects people never looked all that “super” to me.