Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 - Review Thread

Lmao, that's a good one.

I thought it was excellent

I can assure you there's one guy who didn't even know who the fuck Adam Warlock was before Vol. 2, and his name is PhantomKnight.

It's safe to say that my thoughts on this movie right now are complicated.

Movie was pretty good, but that Oppenheimer trailer? Hot damn!

James Gunn was making Godfather II when he should have been making Kill Bill Vol 1. A great little sequence, O-Ren style, with a badass needle drop, would have gotten the same point across and made the movie flow a lot better in the process.




Gamora’s arc is Peter’s arc.

As I said earlier, the biggest issue with this movie is that it fell victim to James Gunn’s firing. This movie should have come out in 2019. Like the two Spider-Man sequels that followed Endgame, this movie serves as an epilogue to the Infinity Saga. Peter had to learn to move on. And Gamora destroys the notion that the multiverse removes stakes in the MCU. This very much isn’t the same Gamora from before and her role in the franchise is no longer the same. That can happen to any character. In a blink of an eye, Tony Stark can turn into Tom Cruise.





I need to rewatch the first two, but yeah, Vol. 2 is certainly the more memorable one.

I enjoyed it. The focus on afterlife and the David and g baby allusion kinda threw me off and made me rather annoyed at Disney as a whole but... Those were my only real problems.

With the animal abuse angle the stakes were sufficiently raised though, you don't have to wipe an entire planet off the map (even tho they kinda do that in this too) to feel the stakes of the movie - and being able to bring back the high evolutionary is a smart move.

I liked the ending, thought it was handled well, sufficiently sappy and nostalgic while keeping the doors firmly open - only rolled my eyes a few times during the dog days are over dance scene.

Still contemplating but I'll give it a 6.5/10 on the sliding MCU scale.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3(5/5/2023)
In the May of 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 opened up to predictable acclaim and profits. It was early in “phase three,” which in retrospect was probably a high point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it was perhaps easy to take their victories for granted at the time. I thought that sequel was fine but felt like it was kind of just more of the same from what James Gunn gave us in the first Guardians movie, but that movie was also solid so that was fine. I fully expected a third volume to show up on schedule in the next three years and would close out the trilogy with even more of the same but that didn’t exactly happen. Instead thanks to some behind the scenes drama I don’t have time to get into it took six years for this final sequel to show up, which doesn’t sound like that much more but a whole lot has happened since then in the real world and even more has happened with the MCU. Consider for example that the first of the rebooted MCU Spider-Man movies came out two months after that second Guardians film and yet we’ve already finished out that trilogy well before the climactic Guardians film finally came out. Additionally the characters of Guardians of the Galaxy were major parts of two Avengers movies which led to major changes for the entire team that James Gunn would need to address. Beyond that though the whole momentum of the MCU has changed a lot, as have the careers of the entire cast and crew, including Gunn who I have to suspect is a little bitter about the aforementioned behind the scenes drama. So with this new installment we’re given a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel that may in many ways feel like more of the same on the surface but has a noticeably different tone and feel at its core.

The film begins shortly after the “Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special” that released on Disney+ last year and sees our heroes set up on Knowhere. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is still in something of a depressed stupor following the death of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in Avengers: Infinity War and the fact that a time displaced version of her came back in Avengers: Endgame only complicates those feelings. That doppelganger is off doing her own thing but most of the rest of “the gang” is there on knowhere and need to go into action when they are unexpectedly attacked by a gold skinned flying villain named Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), who is a bit dim but clearly has major combat ability. He eventually retreats after receiving an injury from Nebula (Karen Gillan), but not before grievously injuring Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and it becomes apparent to the crew that healing him will be impossible until they can deactivate a kill switch that has been implanted on the ring tailed mercenary’s heart. To save him the aforementioned Guardians along with Drax (Dave Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), and Groot (Vin Diesel) decide to go on a mission that will eventually pit them against the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a megalomaniacal eugenicist who may have been entwined with Rocket’s past.

When the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 dropped something stood out to me right away: it was accompanied by the song “In the Meantime” by Spacehog, a song that was recorded and released in 1996. That’s probably still an “oldie” by the standards of a lot of people but it’s still a good twenty years more current than the songs that populated the first two movies in the franchise. Sure enough that signals that the music in this movie features music from a wider range of time periods than the exclusively 60s and 70s stuff that set the tone for those first two movies. This shift was of course something that was foreshadowed late in Volume 2 when Peter Quill was gifted a Zoom, but it still feels like a somewhat daring willingness to mess with the formula a bit in this third film and I think that attitude carries over to other aspects of this film. I would not say that the film is radically different than the first two movies but there is subtle but noticeable change here that may throw some people. The film kind of lives in the shadow of traumatic events that happened over the course of the Avengers films the characters participated in and between that and Rocket’s dark backstory that makes the film a bit darker and a bit less of a romp than the first two volumes. This isn’t to say that there isn’t still humor in the movie, there certainly is, but at times it feels like these characters just joke to keep themselves from crying.

At the film’s center are a series of flashbacks to Rocket’s origins that appear to have been pretty well received but which I’m a bit cooler on. There’s nothing “wrong” with them exactly but it’s pretty clear from the beginning where that story thread is going and I feel like we could have maybe stood to cut to it a little less often and there’s also a walrus creature in it that’s very poorly rendered in CGI. The storyline also involves animals getting tinkered on by a sort of intergalactic Dr. Moreau, which I’ve heard some people describe as “disturbing,” which I can’t say I can relate to terribly well given how steeped in gory horror movies I am and how little affection I tend to have with animals. I’d also say that the villain in question, while not bad as a character necessarily, is a bit stock. His motives related to genetic tinkering are potentially interesting but he mostly just comes off as your standard megalomaniac and his tactics are just kind of flamboyantly eeeeeviiiilll. But he looks cool, and that’s probably good enough for the purposes of this movie that has a lot of other things to deal with during its running time. On the plus side, if you’re kind of sick of Marvel films being too devoted to setting up other Marvel films this is mostly a step back from that. You certainly need to do the prerequisite viewing (including both recent Avengers films and the holiday special) and I do have some suspicions that Adam Warlock is mostly here to be used again at some point in the future but aside from that there isn’t much spinoff baiting here and even the post credit scenes mostly serve to further the story you’ve been watching rather than to tease another one.

If I have a particular complaint about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 it’s just that it’s maybe lacking in any real surprises. In the lead-up to the film there was a lot of speculation about it doing something really wild and climactic to bring closure to this branch of the MCU but it really doesn’t, there’s not much to spoil even if I wanted to and while the central team is left in a different state than how it started the movie definitely does leave a lot of room for further sequels. Aside from that I think what feels a bit “off” about it is just timing. A lot of momentum seems to have been lost in the six years it took to make it both behind the scenes and in terms of what the public is looking for and the sub-franchise that so perfectly hit the zeitgeist in 2014 might be a bit behind the times in 2023. But I don’t want to come off as too negative hear because I think the sum of this movie’s parts are actually very strong. It’s probably the MCU’s best movie since Avengers: Endgame give or take a Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. In fact it’s because so much of it objectively executes so well that I’m left to theorize why the movie didn’t give me that joyful feeling I’m usually left with when the MCU is operating at the top of its game. Maybe it’s just a “me” problem?
***1/2 out of Five