Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has big disaffected early-middle age energy

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Warning: This article may contain plot details that some consider spoilers.

Hunting for elevated themes in a Marvel blockbuster is almost certainly an exercise in making much ado about nothing. That’s despite the countless fervent fan reviews and memes that recount all the times when something happened to some Avenger or other that made them weep in the theater. I get that — the focus groups employed by the Marvel cinema-industrial machine have well nigh perfected the pathos-bathos whipsaw, toying with audiences’ emotions even as the narrative structure of every MCU film can be reduced to “big movie go boom.”

This is not to say the formula is ineffective (I’ve found myself misting up amid the objective silliness of “Infinity Stones,” teleporting warlocks and giant green scientists). Nor is it to say that it isn’t entertaining. And, for my money, the most pleasing entries in the sprawling MCU have been the trio of films in the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise.

The third installment of Guardians released to theaters in early May and, since then, has pulled in more than $770 million at the box office. Audiences clearly love it, with a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, an 89% rating from Google users, 8/10 on IMDb and even 3/4 stars on rogerebert.com. Some other critics, however, have observed that this Guardians rendition is curiously devoid of humor, much less humanity. I’m one of those critics.

Courtesy art.

That’s probably by design — the human-to-non-human ratio of core characters is 2-8, and of those, two of the most beloved are 100% computer-generated non-humans (those being the half-psychotic gun-slinging Rocket Raccoon and the sentient tree thing Groot, voiced by Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, respectively).  

Regardless, the first two Guardians films were filled with sight gags, pithy banter, rollicking ’70s and ’80s rock soundtracks, and blazing aesthetics that went beyond the stock-in-trade Earth-bound cinemascapes to encompass the eerie beauty of a chaotic galaxy full of color and light. 

Through all that big-budget razzmatazz, director James Gunn wove in relationships formed, broken and sometimes mended that felt authentic — at least compared to the surface-level broham hero posturing that imbues so much of the rest of the MCU complex.

Much of that is missing from Vol. 3 in the trilogy. Our protagonists, led by Peter “Star Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt), are still roguish, but they’re no longer outsiders and certainly not underdogs. They also have much grimmer feelings about, well, everything. 

Quill opens Vol. 3 in a depressed, drunken heap, mourning that his former green-skinned love interest Gamora (Zoe Saldana) has no recollection of him nor their erstwhile comrades after her dad — the godlike warlord Thanos — threw her off a cliff and she came back to life from an alternate timeline in which she never joined the Guardians. (That happened in another MCU movie, so you’ve got to be up on your canon.)

Anyway, Rocket sets the tone in the first scenes, sad-vibing in his headphones to Radiohead’s iconic song “Creep,” with the obvious implication being that he feels like a “weirdo”; a living pastiche of organic and inorganic parts and pieces, cobbled together by an evil scientist.

Drunk Quill and emo Rocket both give off strong disaffected early-middle age energy. What Gen X/Millennial-cusper hasn’t sat around listening to “Creep” and thinking Thom Yorke is singing about them, specifically? That’s a cliched experience and a boring one, but matches the weariness that lays over Guardians Vol. 3 like a cloud of unspoken disappointments. 

Evidence: Gone (for the most part) are the classic rock bangers from Quill’s famous mixtapes, replaced with the digitized music of the ’90s, bringing with it all the grungy, grim, wistful downbeat tenor that implies.

The usual vim of these films is short-circuited at the very outset by a devastating attack that leaves Rocket clinging to life. The gang tries to stitch him up, but soon discovers Rocket’s sadistic fabricator installed a “kill switch” into his body that will trigger if tampered with. The Guardians must of course then saddle up on a MacGuffin hunt to disable the device and therefore save their buddy. Naturally, this brings them into conflict with Rocket’s creator — the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who is basically Dr. Moreau in space, with an obsession to jump-start animal evolution in pursuit of a perfect society on an alternate Earth.

Seriously, that’s not an homage. It is literally the plot to Island of Dr. Moreau, with all the hideousness that implies.

Lacking the will they/won’t they dynamic of Quill and Gamora, and with Rocket out of commission, most of the fun of these films is drained away, leaving Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), teenage Groot, the empathic Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Gamora-sister/reformed assassin Nebula (Karen Gillan) to carry the narrative weight. Drax does Drax, providing his usual tone-deaf comic relief in a vaguely platonic friend-crush with Mantis, the latter spending much of the film being annoyed with the rest of the team for their emotional immaturity. For that matter, Nebula also navigates the storyline seeming more than a little exasperated that she’s the only one who knows what they’re doing. 

Quill, though ostensibly the leader, is too wrapped up in his own trauma over losing Gamora and, potentially, his best frenemey that he fairly plays second or even third fiddle to his crew.

Meanwhile, running parallel with the mission to overthrow the High Evolutionary and save Rocket’s life is Rocket’s own backstory, reeled out in a series of very long flashbacks (we’re meant to take this as his own memories flashing before his inner eye while in a coma), that really should have prompted some indication that audiences, many of them likely bringing kids to the theater, would be treated to extended sequences of CGI animal torture and experimentation, as well as many, many unsettling images of animal-machine hybrids.

Between the essential flabbiness of the main quest and the ancillary, often gratuitous-feeling brutality of Rocket’s origins, Guardians Vol. 3 seeps a distinct chill that simply can’t be dispelled by any of the heartfelt bluffness or fun-loving swashbuckling that made the first two films (to varying degrees) such welcome additions to the MCU.

Catch it in theaters, or wait until it inevitably shows up for streaming on Disney+.