"Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3": review

L to R: Vin Diesel (Groot), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Dave Bautista (Drax), Zoe Saldaña (Gamora), Bradley Cooper (Rocket), Chris Pratt (Peter), Pom Klementieff (Mantis), Sean Gunn (Kraglin)

[WARNING: spoilers.]

Despite an ending-credits promise that Star-Lord will return, 2023's "Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3" is supposed to be the Guardians' swan song as director James Gunn transitions from Marvel to DC. The movie stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Will Poulter, Sean Gunn, Chukwudi Iwuji, Linda Cardellini, Nathan Fillion, and Sylvester Stallone.

The story's main focus is on Rocket (Cooper), a raccoon who has undergone genetic and cybernetic modifications. With the Guardians now based on Knowhere, the giant skull of a dead Celestial, the crew does little more than putter around. Meanwhile, Peter Quill (Pratt), sulking after the death of the Gamora he knew (Saldaña) and frustrated by the way the "new" Gamora (from an alternate timeline) treats him with indifference and prefers the company of the Ravagers—a group that Quill used to be a part of*—has taken to drinking. This situation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Adam Warlock (Poulter), a super-being created by a prickly, easily insulted race called the Sovereign, encountered in the previous film. He is apparently after Rocket. The Guardians spring into action, with Nebula (Gillan) finally able to stab Warlock through the torso. Warlock flees, but Rocket has been severely injured in the attack. When Quill tries to use a standard medipack to resuscitate Rocket, Nebula warns that that won't work: built into Rocket's cybernetic components is a "kill switch" placed there to ensure that Rocket's inner workings would remain proprietary technology. Quill gets the idea of finding out who the people are who built Rocket in the hopes of discovering the kill switch's override. All signs point to a group called OrgoCorp, whose leader is a monomaniacal scientist called the High Evolutionary (Iwuji). With the help of the Ravagers led by Stakar Ogord (Stallone), the Guardians find and infiltrate OrgoCorp, but despite retrieving the data pertaining to Rocket, they discover some of the code is missing, and their best bet in collecting the missing data is to visit a planet created by the High Evolutionary called Counter-Earth, which turns out to be a replica of Earth except with "Animen"—humanoid animals—instead of humans as its primary population. These are more creations of the High Evolutionary, who is intent on "perfecting" species and creating a utopian society.

Along with this plot is a parallel story, seen in flashback: Rocket recalls his past, starting off as one of many scared little raccoons captured by the High Evolutionary and irrevocably altered via gene therapy and cybernetics into the sapient creature he is now. The High Evolutionary's methods are ruthless and cruel; he is not above wiping out whole "batches" of experiments—even whole planets—if his experiments don't pan out. Rocket undergoes excruciating agony, and he's not alone: in the animal pens where he is locked are other altered beasts: a walrus named Teefs (Asim Chaudhry), a rabbit named Floor (Mikaela Hoover), and an otter named Lylla (Cardellini). Teefs gets around on wheels; Floor has had most of her natural face removed and replaced by a metal plate, and she walks with metallic spider legs; Lylla's front legs have been replaced by awkward metal limbs. All have been enhanced to the point where they can communicate with each other in English and engage in higher-order cognition with Rocket being the strongest one, intellectually speaking. The High Evolutionary notices that Rocket's cognitive abilities are beginning to outstrip his own, and and he is desperate to find out how and why the creation is coming to surpass the creator. When Rocket offers a possible solution to the problem of why the initial batches of Animen are turning violent, the High Evolutionary elects to harvest Rocket's brain. Rocket and his pals, meanwhile, are faced with the brutal reality that, despite promises to live free on Counter-Earth, they are going to be killed. With his engineering know-how, Rocket jury-rigs a device that allows him and his friends to escape their pens, but the High Evolutionary has anticipated this moment, and he shoots Lylla the otter. In a rage, Rocket attacks the High Evolutionary, first mangling the scientist's face, then engaging in a gun battle with the Evolutionary's minions. Rocket kills them all, but when the smoke clears, he sees that Teefs and Floor have been killed in the firefight. The rest of the movie involves the Guardians' bumbling attempts to rescue each other while trying to get the override code back to Rocket so as to be able to use a medipack and repair Rocket's internal damage.

Director James Gunn brings his trademark humor and loopy aesthetic sensibility to the proceedings. Nathan Fillion, a Gunn regular, plays an Orgosentry named Master Karja, a man eternally frustrated by that one stupid underling. Some of the more ridiculous-looking aliens, like the fanged, tentacled Abilisks from the previous movie, play a significant role in the film's third reel, becoming compliant after Mantis (Klementieff) works her empathic magic on them. The OrgoCorp facility, made entirely of "bio-grown" organic material, looks like an enormous asshole floating in space. The facility's interior, with its weird, jellied haptic interfaces, looks like a Mac Store gone horribly wrong, and the Orgosentries guarding the place resemble puffy, flesh-pink Michelin Men. The Guardians are still their typical, bickering selves, with complaints flying about how Drax (Bautista) is an idiot, Nebula is a bitch, and Gamora—who hails from an alternate timeline—is a dick. Groot (Diesel), now fully an adult, gets a few comic moments, like then he goes into "kaiju mode" during one fight. And I have to wonder whether the film was making an "Among Us" reference in the scene where the Guardians are infiltrating OrgoCorp while wearing different-colored spacesuits. There's also a long-running joke in the film about the tension between Kraglin (Sean Gunn) and Cosmo the Russian Golden Retriever (Maria Bakalova): early in the film, Kraglin says the one thing no dog wants to hear—that Cosmo is a bad dog. Cosmo, who is telepathic and gifted with telekinetic powers, spends most of the rest of the movie demanding that Kraglin take back his gibe. He does, eventually, and at just the right moment.

I ended up having the same complaints about the Adam Warlock character that other critics did: Warlock felt shoehorned into the plot, which probably could have done without him. It turns out that his function was similar to that of a bounty hunter: he was supposed to fly into Knowhere, grab Rocket, then fly the raccoon back to the High Evolutionary. This was partly motivated by a threat from the High Evolutionary that he would destroy the Sovereign if they failed to accomplish this mission. As the plot thickens, Warlock and his "mother" Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) pursue the Guardians to Counter-Earth. Ayesha perishes there when the High Evolutionary decides to destroy the planet, and when Warlock ends up powerless and helpless at one point, he gets rescued by the Guardians and begins to reconsider his own motivations and allegiances. And even though I don't know much about the comic-book version of Adam Warlock, I know he was originally fitted with an Infinity Stone in his forehead. He had godlike powers, and he was not simply a punching bag for comic moments. The movie version, by contrast, is hard to read. What exactly are his power levels? He seems at times to be on a par with Captain Marvel; at other times, he can be stabbed and knocked out, making him seem rather weak. It's a bothersome inconsistency.

Chukwudi Iwuji steps up to play the High Evolutionary as a mad scientist extraordinaire who seems to have a thing for animal cruelty. He's like Thanos to the extent that he believes what he's doing is right. According to him, he's perfecting nature. When someone mentions God in his presence, he shouts that there is no God, which is why he stepped into the role. As a villain, he works on a Shakespearean level, and given what he does to the helpless animals in his thrall, he's an easy character to hate.

The movie does suffer from a good measure of sequelitis and other problems. It's overstuffed with characters and convoluted in its several subplots. Along with the two main plot lines I described above, there are questions about what will become of the Guardians at the end of this adventure and what Adam Warlock will do next since he now seems free of the Sovereigns' control. Kraglin also has his own minor subplot as he continues to try to master the deadly, whistle-guided arrow he inherited from Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker, seen in a vision). Rather late in the film, we suddenly discover that the High Evolutionary has been holding a mass of children along with animals. These kids appear late in the game, and we never see them undergo any cruel experiments, so it was hard for me to dredge up much emotion on their behalf although it was fun to discover that Drax could speak their language. I also felt that the destruction of Counter-Earth was given short shrift: we see the ground exploding, but I don't think we ever get a wide shot of the entire planet disintegrating. That could have been made a lot more impactful.

Rocket's recollections of his past are some of the best parts of the movie. James Gunn can be accused of being a blatant manipulator of emotions, but dammit, he made me care about Lylla, Teefs, and Floor. As I watched, I regressed back to my childhood, specifically to that old animated Christmas special about Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys—an image that pulled at my heartstrings even way back then. I was practically in tears every time these poor animals appeared on screen, wearing their pain in the form of the ugly metal attachments they'd all been forced to adopt. You had to know, from early on, that these friends weren't going to survive to the end: that should've been obvious since they're not around in the present day. Still, watching them die was a gutting experience, and it was even worse when Rocket had a metaphysical moment later in the movie, in which he appeared to be in a heaven-like space where he encountered his friends one more time and tearfully told them how sorry he was to have gotten them all killed. This entire Rocket-and-friends subplot was easily the emotional core of the movie, and whatever the story's larger flaws, this core made it easy for me to forgive much.

Maybe that heaven-like space represents a kind of assurance that the experience of that final encounter was real: we've seen the Ancestral Plane in "Black Panther" and the Soul Realm—province of the Soul Stone—in "Avengers: Infinity War." So Marvel has established that there are places where a consciousness can go after death, and maybe Rocket found himself in such a place, which means that, when the end finally comes, he can meet his friends again.

All in all, "Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3" isn't perfect. In fact, it's a bit of a mess despite having an explicitly anti-utopian message that will appeal to conservatives. But it's also a powerfully emotional roller-coaster ride, and I don't regret having seen this movie at all. So if you're one of the ten people on the planet not to have seen "Guardians" yet, please go and do so with my blessing. It gets some things wrong, but it gets a lot right.

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*The Guardians wear Ravager uniforms, with the Ravager symbol, for much of the movie, but it's never made clear to what extent all of the Guardians are Ravagers.