Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a good film with a great film buried inside it

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a farewell that spends most of its 150 minutes earning the right to say goodbye, and then can’t quite decide who it’s saying goodbye to. James Gunn wrote and directed it, his third and final pass at the team he built for Marvel Studios, and the film carries the tagline “Once more with feeling.” The feeling is genuine. The shape around it is not always.

Trailer, via Marvel Entertainment.

Rocket, Lylla, Teefs and Floor

The plot is a rescue. Adam Warlock, a Sovereign warrior created by High Priestess Ayesha, attacks the Guardians at their new headquarters on Knowhere and critically wounds Rocket. Adam is stabbed by Nebula and flees. The Guardians’ med-packs can’t heal Rocket because of a kill switch embedded in him by Orgocorp, so the team goes to Orgocorp’s headquarters for the override code.

That chase is the spine. The heart is elsewhere. As Rocket lies dying, he remembers his past: found and experimented on as a baby raccoon by the High Evolutionary, leader of Orgocorp, who wanted to enhance and anthropomorphize animal life into “Humanimals” for an ideal society called Counter-Earth. Rocket’s fellow Batch 89 subjects were the otter Lylla, the walrus Teefs and the rabbit Floor. The High Evolutionary planned to harvest Rocket’s brain and incinerate all of Batch 89. He killed Lylla and mocked Rocket’s grief. Rocket attacked him, escaped in a spaceship, and the henchmen killed Teefs and Floor in the chaos.

Bradley Cooper voices Rocket. Chukwudi Iwuji plays the High Evolutionary, and he is a small, petty villain rather than a cosmic one. He is angry that one of his creations solved a problem he could not. That is the whole character, and Iwuji plays it without a shred of grandeur.

A Team That Has Already Left

The present-tense plot keeps running into the same wall. The Guardians are a group in the process of disbanding, and the film knows it. Peter Quill, played by Chris Pratt, is in what the production describes as a “state of depression” after the appearance of a variant of his dead lover Gamora who does not share the affection the older version had for him. That depression affects his leadership.

Zoe Saldaña returns as Gamora, the alternate version who arrived in the present in Avengers: Endgame and now runs with the Ravagers. Saldaña has said Vol. 3 would be the last time she plays the role. She originally signed for one film and played Gamora far longer.

Dave Bautista has said the same about Drax, calling the end of his run a “relief” given the hours in makeup, and saying he wants more dramatic roles. Because of that, Gunn left Drax out of the post-credits scene. Karen Gillan’s Nebula, Pom Klementieff’s Mantis, Vin Diesel’s Groot and Sean Gunn’s Kraglin fill out the roster. Will Poulter’s Adam Warlock is underused. Maria Bakalova voices Cosmo. Elizabeth Debicki plays Ayesha.

What the 6.4 Score Measures

The published critical score sits at 6.4 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 64 out of 100. That lands where the film lands: competent, occasionally excellent, never transcendent.

The runtime is the tell. At 150 minutes, this is the longest Guardians film, and the extra time goes to flashbacks rather than to the team. Rocket’s origin is the best material in the film. It is also the material that most clearly belongs to a different, smaller movie.

The Firing, the Return, and What It Cost

The production history is not trivia. Gunn had ideas for a third film by November 2014, and in April 2017 he announced his return to write and direct ahead of Vol. 2’s release. Disney fired him in July 2018 after controversial jokes he made on Twitter resurfaced. Cast members backed him. The studio reversed course that October, and his return was revealed publicly in March 2019. He restarted work after finishing The Suicide Squad and the first season of the show that followed it.

That history hangs over the film. A director who was fired and rehired makes a movie about a family that keeps getting torn apart and reassembled, and Vol. 3 wears that on its sleeve. It is not subtle about it. It is also not wrong to be.

Where the Film Actually Stands

Here is the verdict. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a good film with a great film buried inside it, and the great film is the one about Rocket. The Batch 89 material — Lylla, Teefs, Floor, the brain harvest, the escape — is the most emotionally direct work in the entire trilogy. It earns its grief. It does not need the rest of the movie to justify it.

What surrounds it is thinner. The Orgocorp infiltration, the trip to Counter-Earth, the hunt for the override code: these are errands. They move characters from one set to the next and they are staged with competence rather than invention. Adam Warlock in particular is a promise the film never cashes. He is created to destroy the Guardians, he wounds Rocket in the opening, he gets stabbed by Nebula, and then he drifts through the rest of the runtime without a real arc. Will Poulter is fine. The part is not there.

The Gamora thread is the film’s other real idea, and it mostly works. This Gamora does not love Quill. She has no memory of the life that made her love him. Saldaña plays that distance well, and the film is honest that some losses do not get repaired by a variant walking through the door. Quill’s depression is not cured. It is just survived.

So the 6.4 is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason: the film’s best thirty minutes are the strongest stretch in the trilogy, and its other two hours are a competent goodbye tour. Gunn got to end his trilogy on his own terms, which is more than most franchise directors get. He used that freedom on the right character. He just didn’t have enough story to fill the frame around him.

The Numbers

• Title: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
• Director/writer: James Gunn
• Runtime: 150 minutes
• Genres: Science Fiction, Adventure, Action
• Tagline: “Once more with feeling.”
• Critical score: 6.4/10
• Metacritic: 64/100
• MCU position: 32nd film
• Studio: Marvel Studios, distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Score: 6.4 of 10.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 · James Gunn · Marvel Studios · MCU Phase 5 · movie review · Rocket Raccoon