6 / 10
Official trailer
Rocket’s Turn
The film opens with Rocket, alone, listening to Radiohead’s Creep on an old Zune. It’s a quiet, sad little scene, and it tells you where the film is going. This is Rocket’s.
Early on, Adam Warlock, a golden, overpowered being sent to capture Rocket, attacks the Guardians’ home base, and in the fight, Rocket is badly wounded.
The team can’t save him, because his body is full of implanted technology with a kill switch built in by the man who made him. To save Rocket, they have to find his creator. That means going back into the past Rocket has spent his life refusing to talk about.
It’s a strong premise for a finale. The Guardians have always been a family of broken people, and this is the story of the most broken of them all.
My gut reaction is split right down the middle. I like these misfits, and I like that Gunn wanted to give Rocket the send-off.
I also came away feeling manipulated, as if the film had decided I owed it my tears and went door to door collecting them. That tug of war is why I give it a 6.
The Flashbacks
While the others race to save him, Rocket drifts in and out of consciousness, remembering his childhood as a baby raccoon in a laboratory run by the High Evolutionary, a scientist obsessed with creating the perfect species. There, Rocket befriended three other experimental animals: Lylla, an otter with mechanical arms; Teefs, a walrus; and Floor, a rabbit. They dreamed of escaping together to see the sky.
The flashbacks are harrowing. The animals are caged, cut open, rebuilt and treated as disposable, and the film doesn’t shy away from any of it. When the High Evolutionary decides his experiment is finished, what happens to Rocket’s friends is devastating, and Gunn lingers on it.
Some viewers found these scenes the most moving thing in the whole Marvel franchise.
I found them effective and manipulative in equal measure. The film uses animal suffering like a lever, and it keeps pulling it, long after you’ve understood. By the third flashback, it feels less like storytelling and more like a hand on the back of your neck.
For Writers
Rocket’s flashbacks reveal why he’s always been so angry, and they reframe every joke he’s made across three films. Backstory, delivered at the right moment, changes how the audience sees a character’s whole history.
Holding a character’s origin back until late in a series can be powerful, because the reader has already formed an impression they can now revise. Rocket’s rudeness and bravado suddenly look like armour, and every earlier scene deepens in retrospect. The danger, and this film falls into it, is going back to the well too often. One devastating flashback works. Four of them start to feel like the writer pressing on a bruise. Use the painful memory once, fully, and trust the reader to hold onto it.
The High Evolutionary
Chukwudi Iwuji plays the High Evolutionary, a vain, genocidal scientist with a face that isn’t quite his own, and he gives it everything. Unfortunately, everything means screaming. He shrieks, rants and throws tantrums in almost every scene, and after a while, he stops being frightening and starts being exhausting.
Iwuji’s volume wore me down. I kept waiting for one quiet scene where he smiles, means it, and scares me, and the film never gives him one. There’s a good villain buried in there, a man who thinks he’s God and resents every creation that doesn’t meet his standards. He wipes out an entire planet because it’s not perfect enough. But the film never gives him any depth beyond cruelty and rage, and his final showdown is a noisy mess.
For Writers
The High Evolutionary screams through most of his scenes, and his rage stops being frightening long before the end.
A villain who’s angry in every scene has nowhere to go. Rage works best when it’s rare and surprising, breaking through a calm surface. If your antagonist is always at maximum volume, the reader tunes them out, the same way people tune out a car alarm that never stops.
Gunn’s villain would have been far scarier if he’d spent most of the film calm, courteous and pleased with himself, and exploded only once, when a creation defied him. Menace lives in restraint. The reader has to wonder when the explosion will come, and the waiting is worse than any tantrum.
The Team
The rest of the Guardians get their goodbyes, and most of them land. Karen Gillan’s Nebula has grown from a bitter killer into the team’s reluctant leader, and she’s funny and fierce. Dave Bautista’s Drax and Pom Klementieff’s Mantis bicker like siblings, and their subplot, about Drax being a better father figure than anybody expected, is sweet.
Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill spends most of the film drunk and grieving for Gamora, who died in Infinity War. The Gamora who’s around now, played by Zoe Saldaña, is a version from an earlier timeline, who doesn’t remember loving him and doesn’t much like him. The situation is awkward, and Gunn handles it squarely, refusing to give Peter the romantic reunion he wants.
Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel, finally gets a few surprising lines, and Kraglin and Cosmo the space dog get their moments. The film is crowded, and not everybody gets enough room.
Adam Warlock
Will Poulter plays Adam Warlock, a powerful golden warrior created by a race of gold-skinned aliens, and he’s been teased since the second Guardians film. In the comics, he’s a major cosmic figure. Here, he’s a clumsy, childish man-baby who crashes into things and doesn’t understand the world.
Poulter is fine, and some of his scenes are funny, but it’s hard not to feel the character was wasted. He has no real arc beyond learning a small lesson, and he’s mostly a plot device to get Rocket hurt and the team moving.
The Hallway
The film’s best sequence comes near the end. The Guardians fight their way down a long corridor through the High Evolutionary’s soldiers, in what looks like a single continuous take, set to the Beastie Boys’ No Sleep till Brooklyn. Everybody gets a moment, everybody uses their own style of fighting, and the camera swoops and circles around them as they work together.
It’s thrilling, funny and joyful, and it’s the purest expression of what made the Guardians fun in the first place: misfits who’ve learned to fight as a family. If the rest of the film had this energy, it’d be a much better movie.
That corridor is the reason this isn’t a 5. I grinned through all of it. It’s the one stretch where Gunn stops pressing on the bruise and remembers these people are fun to watch together.
For Writers
The hallway fight works because every character fights in their own style, and the continuous camera shows them working together. It’s character, expressed as action.
Group action scenes are hard to write, because it’s easy to lose track of who’s doing what. The fix is to give each character a signature move that reflects their personality, and to show how their efforts connect. The reader should be able to tell who’s fighting just from how they fight.
Done well, a group action scene can show the reader everything about a team in a couple of pages: who protects whom, who takes risks, who’s funny under pressure and who’s grown. That’s a lot of characterization to get out of a fight, and it’s why the hallway scene works. Action Writers’ Phrase Book covers this well.
The Zune Replaces the Walkman
The music has always been half the fun of these films. Peter’s Walkman and his mother’s mixtapes defined the first two, full of seventies and eighties pop. This time, the soundtrack comes from a Zune Peter picked up at the end of the second film, and the songs shift into the nineties and beyond: Radiohead, the Beastie Boys, Florence and the Machine and more.
The songs are well chosen, and several scenes are built around them, but the needle drops don’t feel as joyful as they used to. The opening with Creep sets a sadder, heavier tone, and the music mostly follows the film into melancholy. That suits the story Gunn is telling. It also means the soundtrack doesn’t give the film the lift the earlier ones did.
Too Long
The film runs roughly 150 minutes, and you feel every one. There are too many subplots, too many locations and too many emotional climaxes. Counter-Earth, a planet of genetically engineered humanoid animals, is a big set piece that eats a long stretch of screen time, and then gets abandoned.
Gunn also can’t resist ending every sequence with a big emotional beat. People cry, hug, give speeches and say goodbye, over and over. Any one of those moments would land. Stack a dozen of them together and they start to cancel each other out.
All those goodbyes lose me. I’d have taken the scissors to Counter-Earth first and then to about half of them. A hundred and fifty minutes of farewells turns grief into a chore, and by the last hug I wanted the credits.
James Gunn’s Goodbye
Disney fired Gunn in 2018 over old tweets and rehired him a year later. He went off to make The Suicide Squad for Warner Bros. before coming back to finish this trilogy. He’s since become the head of DC Studios, and this is his farewell to Marvel.
You can feel how much he loves these characters. The film is personal, heartfelt and full of his quirks: the needle-drop soundtrack, the weird creatures, the tenderness underneath the jokes. It gives every Guardian an ending, and the final scenes, as the team breaks up and each of them goes their own way, are warm and fitting.
Peter goes home to Earth to see his grandfather. Rocket takes over as captain. The last dance, to Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over, is corny and lovely.
Respect Without Enjoyment
The Guardians films always balanced silliness and sadness. The first one tipped toward fun, the second toward sentiment, and this one goes much further, into cruelty. The animal torture scenes are well made and hard to shake, and they also overwhelm the rest of the film.
There’s a lot to like here: the hallway fight, the final goodbyes, Nebula’s growth and Rocket himself. There’s also a shrieking villain, a wasted Adam Warlock and a running time that sags badly in the middle. I respect it more than I enjoy it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 hangs a trilogy’s farewell on the backstory of its most guarded character. That’s a smart choice. The film then repeats that backstory’s pain so often that the emotion starts to feel engineered.
Emotional climaxes lose power when they’re stacked too close together. Each needs room around it to breathe, or the reader goes numb.
Map the big emotional peaks in your story, and make sure there’s a stretch of lower intensity between each of them.
A Goodbye That Runs Too Long
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a 6: heartfelt, occasionally thrilling and very personal, with a great hallway fight and a fitting send-off for its misfit family, dragged down by a shrieking villain, a bloated running time and flashbacks that lean too hard on animal suffering. Fans will cry. I just wanted it to be shorter.
