They made us for nothing. Just stupid experiments to be thrown away.
There are the hands that made us and then there are the hands that guide their hands. My beloved raccoon.
I’ve been, overall, a fan of the Guardians movies. I really loved the first one especially; I understand the complaints about Ronan the Accuser being a weak villain, but Lee Pace was at least fully committed and he looked cool, so I was okay with that. I’ve somewhat cooled on the second one as time has passed, but I liked the character work. But I think the team has gotten the trilogy capper they deserved because this is, by a not insubstantial margin, the best of the Guardian films in my opinion.
It's a pleasure to have these characters back in the hands of James Gunn. I’ve talked before about how no one but Gunn really writes these characters correctly, balancing their status as actual living beings with the silliness and making sure the humor flows out of character and that the character hasn’t been flattened too much. Markus & McFeely did a mostly good job in Infinity War, but there were hiccups (like the entire invisibility gag) and I thought Taika Waititi really didn’t get them right at all in Love & Thunder. You’re not ten minutes into this movie before it just feels like the characters are back to being normal again, the characters you actually fell in love with back in that first movie. And I think the character work here is quite strong and the performances are uniformly excellent as well, mostly better than in the other two films. The more somber and personal storyline (more on that in a second) allows everyone to find nuances in their characters they haven’t explored before. There are more notes in the performances here, often really sad ones, and everyone is fantastic. It was a lot of those notes that I felt like I hadn’t seen before that impressed me: Pom Klementieff finding a restlessness and sadness in Mantis, Dave Bautista nailing a couple of really small and minimal moments of sadness, Karen Gillan’s Nebula experiencing a moment of pure joy, Zoe Saldana’s Gamora having an explosively angry meltdown. And I think this is actually Chris Pratt’s best film performance to date (one always has to say “film” because there’s no surpassing Andy Dwyer as I think we all know). There’s an element of frustrated loss to the character of Quill this time around; he keeps finding himself in situations where he's out of his depth, but unable to just BS his way out of them: the confusion of his feelings for Gamora, his inability to save Rocket as he’s slowly dying right in front of him. Kudos to everyone who brings Rocket Raccoon to life here; as we explore his backstory, the “performance” of his character is really excellent as well, involving Cooper’s great voice work and the best animation we’ve yet seen of the character. The nuanced emotions that the animators are able to depict are really just next level here.
The story here is just so much more personal and emotional than either of the previous Guardians films. And I don’t want to downplay just how much fun those other movies were as if being fun isn’t important. But this movie manages to be very funny, if less funny than the first movie at least, while also telling some serious character based drama. Going into the background of Rocket is the perfect decision for this movie and the flashbacks we get to his creation at the hands of the High Evolutionary are often really hard to watch and incredibly sad. I know some people found them to go too far but they worked for me and I was a real mess emotionally by the end of this movie. I’ve found a lot of the MCU films to be emotionally satisfying, but I don’t think I’ve ever cried at one before, but there’s a scene late in the film where I was just weeping, tears running freely down my face. The High Evolutionary is a phenomenally good villain, worthy of going up there with Loki, Thanos and Killmonger among the MCU pantheon of great villains. Chukwudi Iwuji, an actor that’s new to me, just gives a full-throttle performance as a purely evil mastermind; he’s vicious, cruel, narcissistic and vindictive and he’s loving every minute of it. There’s a moment at one point where Rocket begins crying in agony and the High Evolutionary begins MOCKING his sobs and it’s been a long time since I’ve been that upset by a moment in a movie. The movie really makes you feel the vulnerability of Rocket, both in the flashbacks and in the present day storyline. In some ways the movie gives you that sense of vulnerability with everyone. I’ve seen people complain about the level of violence in the movie, but I have to say that Gunn established right in that very opening scene that the violence actually has some weight to it, real pain. That opening action scene is a stunner; we get to see all of the Guardians doing their particular thing. We get to see the particular skills that each of them brings to the table and then we get to see them all get their respective asses kicked and the violence of that opening scene literally hangs over the entire film. The physical trauma of that action scene isn’t recovered from until the end of the film and, man, that felt refreshing in a genre where the action is almost always cartoonish and weightless.
While talking about that opening action scene, it’s worth mentioning the movie’s main flaw which is the character of Adam Warlock, teased all those years ago in the post-credits of GotG Vol. 2. He feels very shoe-horned in here and while Will Poulter does a good job, the movie doesn’t really have anything for him to do in between kicking things off with that bravura action sequence and then being a literal deus ex machina two hours later. It feels like there are places to with this character and I think he’d make a fantastic villain down the road, but his presence here doesn’t feel organic or as weighty as it should. It very much feels as if Gunn was kind of locked into using him because of the GotG Vol. 2 tease, but wasn’t particularly excited about it. As good as the rest of this movie is, that’s a fairly minor complaint as far as I’m concerned.
I also really liked the ending and the way that the trilogy actually wrapped up some of the big character arcs. I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to bumping into some of these characters again down the line, but this movie really does make you feel that they’ve all kind of finally reached their respective angles of respose. They get endings that don’t necessarily lend themselves to servicing the larger franchises, but are more about who they actually are as people, as individuals, and I found that incredibly refreshing and moving. This is the first movie where Peter Quill has appeared but not donned his Starlord mask; to some people that might seem like a small aesthetic choice, but I think it’s representative of the back to basics humanity of this movie’s approach. I liked that the film had an unabashedly happy ending; some probably found that last big scene cheesy, but I think the film earned it by going as dark as it did. The film’s first credits scene is a pretty typical MCU credits scene. But the second one isn’t and I found myself suffused with a strange feeling of peace while watching it. At the end of the day, basically every character in the Guardians has been searching for something approximating home; and maybe, at the end of THIS day, they’ve finally found it. 4 stars.
tl;dr – most emotionally powerful and overall best of the Guardians trilogy, this film is character based and deeply sad, but it’s ultimately a hopeful story of finding peace in a fractured galaxy. 4 stars.