Preamble

Not for the first time this year, I’ve felt daunted about returning to blog. This is mostly down to feeling like I had hit my peak. However, I’ve come to realize that not every brick that you use to build a house is perfect. The same could be said for the blog posts that I put up here. In fact, it’s often funny the difference in self perception of what’s your best post versus what readers and onlookers think etc. Anyway, I could not think of a better way to return then my brief thoughts on James Gunn’s final Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Have you seen it? Or did you just catch up with it via Disney Plus. Let me know in the comments below.

Brief Consideration

With its mixture of sentimentality and irreverence, the Guardians of the Galaxy corner of the MCU has often left me at arm’s length (emotionally speaking). However, James Gunn’s third entry mostly breaks the spell for me due to its touching poignancy. The Search for Spock-inspired threequel depicts the Guardians attempting to save their fallen friend, Rocket Raccoon (performed by Sean Gunn and voiced by Bradley Cooper), by breaking into Orgocorp to retrieve the override code for his inbuilt kill switch. Their journey results in them crossing paths with Rocket’s creator, The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji).

For better or worse, Vol 3 feels like the most uncompromised film of Gunn’s Guardians trilogy. This is mostly due to the film being earnest in exploring the elements that the writer/director has previously tiptoed around. This comes in the form of the expanded storyline for Rocket Raccoon, whose origin is shown via piecemeal flashbacks throughout. The brutal depiction and exploration of animal cruelty that calls back to H.G. Wells’s “The Island of Dr Moreau” is a raw illustration of the self-loathing that Rocket develops about his species (built upon the foundation of guilt for failing to save his friends). It also neatly juxtaposes the messy nature of the faux family unit the Guardians created with the High Evolutionary’s pursuit of forming the perfect society based on traits he can harvest from many animals.

Vol 3 is at its best when it depicts its characters gaining perspective on their plights, whether it’s an alternative universe Gamora (Zoe Saldana) acknowledging a version of herself who was happy with Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) or Mantis (Pom Klementieff) realizing how she can grow as a person (when not in service to others). These moments have an emotional weight and truth in how they illustrate how we can never truly get over our baggage, but only seek to gain perspective on them in the fullness of time, so they become easier to live with. It was a refreshing emotional maturity from Gunn’s screenplay.

Although the screenplay’s constant one-note jokes about various characters’ intelligence felt obnoxious at best and oddly reactionary at worst. The fact that Gunn (after two movies and a Holiday Special) goes to great lengths to justify the existence of characters like Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis ends up highlighting a problem that’s plagued his Guardians films, namely that some of the crew members end up sounding the same in their world views and senses of humour.