“The sky is beautiful and forever.”
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 is a 2023 Marvel Studios film written and directed by James Gunn who helmed the two earlier installments of this trilogy, 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 in ’17. Vol. 3 stars Zoe Saldaña, Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, David Bautista, Karen Gillan, Sean Gunn, and Elizabeth Debicki returning in their previous roles. They are joined by Will Poulter and Chukwudi Iwuji with cameos by Sylvester Stallone, Nathan Fillion, and Michael Rooker. Bradley Cooper provides the voice of Rocket and Vin Diesel vocalizes Groot.
The antagonist of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 is a character called the High Evolutionary, who made his comic book debut in the pages of The Mighty Thor #134 in 1966. He is a once-normal human by the name of Herbert Wyndham. Wyndham is incredibly intelligent, narcissistic, and obsessed with genetics and evolution. He is usually depicted clad in his characteristic red-trimmed silver armor crafted to ward off the werewolves that frequented the heights of Wundagore Mountain, where Wyndham has built his Citadel of Science, a secure location for him to carry out his experiments. Over the years, he has attained tremendous powers and knowledge. He has been both friend and foe to several Marvel Comics characters over the years and has a special relationship with another character introduced in this feature, the anti-hero and occasional Champion of Life, Adam Warlock.
Warlock was introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four #66 in 1967 as a perfect, artificial life form then only known as “Him”. The scientists who spawned Him were part of an authoritarian, utopian organization called the Enclave, who wished to use Him to further their own nefarious designs but he spurns them, wishing to have no part in their plans. He destroys their laboratory complex known as the Beehive on the way out. Him was lacking guidance or purpose and had a child’s impulse control. He saw a beautiful woman he liked. He desired her and kidnapped her. The woman turned out to be Sif, the Asgardian goddess, and partner of the Mighty Thor, who was not pleased.
Thus, after a serious beat-down, he who would become Adam Warlock would first learn humility and the first inklings of wisdom. He decides to ruminate, consider this and reflect upon his actions. He leaves the Earth, traveling into the cold void of space where he would meet the High Evolutionary. In stories crafted by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane starting in 1972, the Evolutionary’s work has grown far beyond Wundagore Mountain. Like the Enclave, he has crafted his own version of life. Unlike that cabal of authoritarian criminals, he has evolved earth-animals into higher, more humanoid life forms, most of who becomes his Knights of Wundagore and populated a planet on the exact opposite side of the Sun from the Earth called Counter-Earth with his humans.
Unfortunately, like Lucifer descending, one of the Evolutionary’s own has gone down to Counter-Earth to create havoc, sow discord and cause destruction. The serpent in this particular garden is called the Man-Beast, an evolved wolf with incredible mental manipulation and energy abilities. Wyndham can’t handle the Beast on his own and has many other tasks to be mindful of. Spotting the curious cocoon Him had spun around his body from the Evolutionary’s personal satellite, Wyndham wakes Him from his contemplative slumber. Asking for Him’s help, the Evolutionary bestows upon Him the proper name of Adam Warlock and gives Warlock the Soul Gem, one of the six Infinity Gems of unimaginable power. Using the eldritch energies of the jade jewel on his brow to battle the Man-Beast, the pair fought to the death. Unfortunately, it was Warlock’s.
Adam Warlock dies a lot. Oddly, it’s one of his more endearing traits. Emerging from his newly-formed cocoon three days later, he rid Counter-Earth of the evil that was the Man-Beast and then made his way through the universe. In 1975, Jim Starlin would take up the mantle and continue Warlock’s adventures in Strange Tales #178. Adam’s subsequent stories would see the introduction of his partners, Pip the Troll and Gamora, the deadliest woman in space as well as tie into Starlin’s previous plots featuring the Mad Titan, Thanos, Drax the Destroyer, the Avengers, and the Kree Captain Mar-Vell.
Since the events of the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, the team is settling into their roles as the sole proprietors of the massive spaceport Knowhere, carved out of the depths of a Brobdingnagian, severed head of a long-dead Celestial. The transition from buccaneers to businessmen has been a tricky one, but the team is trying to take their new responsibilities seriously. All save Peter Quill (Pratt), the self-proclaimed Star-Lord, who still pines for the loss of Gamora (Saldaña). Gamora was murdered by her adoptive father, Thanos in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War before the Snap and wasn’t subsequently revived. A time-displaced version of Gamora survived 2019’s Avengers: Endgame but doesn’t have any of the experiences of her future self and therefore doesn’t know any of her erstwhile teammates or understand the depths of the love she shared with Quill.
Gamora’s denial and rejection has Star-Lord in a self-destructive spiral, getting stupid drunk night after night and day after day. Following a particularly fulsome bender that finds Quill inconsolable and practically insensate, Nebula (Gillan) and Rocket (Cooper) debate what can be done with him. Before a proper plan of action can be decided on, Rocket’s past predilection for purloining and perfidy catches up with him in a most painful manner.
Still smarting from the Sovereign’s encounter with the Guardians, when Rocket absconded with several of their awesome Anulax batteries, Ayesha (Debicki), High Priestess of the Sovereign, thirsts for revenge. She learns that a tremendously powerful individual called the High Evolutionary (Iwuji) is searching for Rocket at all costs. Ayesha decides to send her agent, an artificial being also of great power, known as Adam Warlock (Poulter), to kill Rocket and destroy the Guardians instead. The golden-skinned sentient flashes through the vastness of space on his mission of revenge, crashing through the decks of Knowhere and leaving chaos in his wake as he inexorably, inevitably makes his way towards Rocket’s quarters.
None of the Guardians can stand in his way. Groot (Diesel) and the formidable Drax the Destroyer (Bautista) barely slow him down. Clawing for momentary sobriety, Quill can’t quite reach it and is useless; Mantis (Klementieff ) can’t check his advance. Warlock is only brought down from behind by Nebula (Gillan), who is sporting enhancements to her upgraded, artificial limbs crafted by Rocket.
Groot is burned but begins to regrow immediately. Mantis and Drax are hurt, but medpacks make short work of their wounds. Rocket has much more serious injuries but when they try a similar treatment, there is a problem: like Nebula, Rocket is also a cyborg albeit with proprietary parts and an incompatible operating system with specialized, anti-tamper, security software. The advanced medical suites on Knowhere and the Guardians’ ship, the Bowie can’t do anything for their stricken friend.
Peter and the crew have two choices: they can accept that their friend is going to die and try to make him comfortable in his final hours or go off half-cocked on a mission to find a way to hack that OS and get Rocket the care he needs. Obviously, they choose to go off half-cocked. They learn that the key to Rocket’s operating system is kept in the archives of the Orgo-corp, in Orgo’s heavily-guarded, well-defended, organic space station.
Nebula knows a way in, but they’re going to need help. She turns to the last person anyone would expect; her time-tossed sibling, Gamora, the deadliest woman in space.
Can the Guardians assimilate this new/old version of Gamora into their midst? Can Quill recognize that Gamora isn’t the woman he knew and accept her for who she is? Can Drax stop being such an idiot for a second and let Mantis breathe? Can Kraglin discover the link between Yondu’s arrow and his heart? Can Nebula finally step out from behind her sister’s shadow and make her own way in the universe? Can the Guardians save their friend, Rocket, and put the kibosh on the High Evolutionary’s plans for Counter- Earth before it’s too late? Will Rocket stop having flashbacks long enough to give the High Evolutionary the what-for? Will Cosmo finally be told that she IS a good dog? Will Adam Warlock realize he’s being played, put his big-boy pants on and make a difference? Take the time to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol.3 to find out.
“Be not as you are, but as you should be.”
***minor spoilers to follow***
Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord is stuck in mud. He’s relegated to reliving his past instead of embracing the future. Where he is at the start of this film doesn’t comport with where he was emotionally after the events of the Holiday Special. He was at peace with his decisions, at peace with his life in space, at peace with his found family and his newly discovered sister, Mantis. Vol. 3 does away with all of that. There is a lot of hard banter with Gamora that verges on adolescent arguments and it gets tedious after a while. As shown especially in Avengers: Infinity War, it’s in Peter Quill’s character to be a stubborn lunkhead, but Pratt really amps up that aspect of his personality.
Zoe Saldaña has a similar issue. Her character gets to go backwards in personality, removing any progress she might have made in the last several films. There is a peculiar problem encountered when romantic leads in television shows get together. The whole charm of the will-they/won’t-they dynamic sometimes falls apart when they DO get together, because now what? Call it the curse of Moonlighting. David and Maddie got together, the show stopped working. Enter Mark Harmon and a Hail Mary to keep the couple apart and create some new dramatic tension. Saldaña has a Maddie Hayes problem and it’s not good. Gunn rolled back her relationships, her personality, and her character’s maturity. In addition to Pratt’s Quill, her interactions with every other character on the team suffer from it.
There’s a bit more of a bite to Pom Klementieff’s Mantis. It’s almost as if Drax’s antics during the Holiday Special left a bad taste in her mouth. She’s much less naïve, far more impatient, and gets to display quite a bit more competence. Like the others, she’s involved in a classic, MCU-style, full-team action scene, but in one of her best moments, she’s such a boss that she kicks no ass because she doesn’t have to.
David Bautista has also moved Drax forward. Many of the jokes still spin around his character’s axis, but he’s no longer the butt of the joke. There is comic relief, such as it is, but it’s not at his expense in this film. In a poignant moment, he reminds us that the Destroyer used to be a dad. He gets to display a good degree of ass-kicking later on in the movie as well, which is a welcome change to how he was portrayed previously, getting thrown around and losing just about every fight he’s been in after dominating the brawl during the prison break sequence in the first GotG.
Karen Gillan looks to be having a lot of fun playing Nebula in this outing. Nebula’s comic book origin and appearance is light-years away from the way she is portrayed in the MCU and Gillan is running with the contradiction. After her full-on, sullen goth-girl dance during the Holiday Special, it appears that she’s embraced the absurdity of her role with a wink and a nod. In Vol. 3, she gets many of the best lines and is front and center for many of the best moments.
Sean Gunn pulls double duty as the former Ravager Kraglin and as the motion capture body double for Rocket. Gunn’s Kraglin wants desperately to master Yondu’s arrow and prove his worth to the team, and he mirrors his self-doubt with the projected disdain in which he treats Cosmo the psychic space dog, who just wants to know she’s a good dog. Kraglin kind of does, too.
As High Priestess of the Sovereign, Elizabeth Debicki doesn’t have much to do in this movie other than scream at Warlock while deferring demurely to the power displayed by the High Evolutionary. Unfortunately, her groveling doesn’t serve her well, nor is it very successful.
There’s a very telling moment early on in Chukwudi Iwuji’s performance as the High Evolutionary. He is reaching into his specimen cages to withdraw the test subject that will become Rocket. The bars are dirty and pitted with rust. It’s the first indication that all of his paeans about the purity and enlightenment of science, a better mankind and a better tomorrow are all bullshit. His self-serving rationalizations follow as fast as the lies he tells others and the lies he tells himself. Iwuji has created a two-tone character. His Evolutionary is either all whispered platitudes that his test subjects swallow up because they don’t know any better, or frothing narcissistic rage as he bellows at and berates those around him. His High Evolutionary is not a benevolent deity.
Will Poulter’s character is called Adam Warlock, he almost looks like Adam Warlock (complete with a faux Soul Gem), but Poulter isn’t playing Adam Warlock. He’s playing Him, especially in the way the character completely lacks impulse control and is woefully immature. Following Roy Thomas’ interpretation of Warlock-as-space-Jesus, Jim Starlin’s incarnation would take a very different tack. Starlin’s Warlock regularly liberates, annihilates, hallucinates, mediates, devastates, defies his fate, dies and comes back from the dead frequently.
After Warlock’s first death during Thomas’ Counter-Earth run, Starlin crafted the brilliant Church of Universal Truth epic in which Warlock meets his future self, the malevolent and nigh-omnipotent Magus. He loses his mind but finds perspective. He kills himself, dying a second time to prevent the fascist future of his counterpart from coming into being. It is in that amazing adventure that he first encounters the Mad Titan, Thanos who he would be coupled with in a symbiotic relationship in the Marvel cosmology as agents of Life and Death respectively over the following years. Warlock, as written by Starlin, is a complex and cerebral character with a good grasp of tactics and deep sense of strategy, not the derpy frat boy Poulter portrays on screen.
There are many similarities between the MCU Vision and Adam Warlock. Both are artificial beings grown in pods by creators with delusions of grandeur, both meant to be perfect beings. Vizh came out of his pod fully formed and a font of wisdom, whereas MCU Warlock is a moron. It probably would’ve strained credulity and be a bit derivative to have Adam emerge right out of the box as wise, as smart, and as serene as the Vision but really, anything would’ve been better than the goofy doofus shown on screen.
Making him less of an idiot and giving Warlock more agency would’ve made the character a much better foil for the High Evolutionary when it came time for the big throw-down at the end. As it is, Adam Warlock’s MCU debut is largely wasted.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol.3 is a Marvel movie misstep. This is not a good film. It’s a mean, ultraviolent mess replete with great gobs of graphic animal torture. As the end of a trilogy, it is a terrible send-off and it may not be the best movie for little kids. If this is James Gunn’s last work with the MCU, it’s very disappointing. Some of the jokes hit, many more land flat. Lots of things don’t live in the land of logic. Counter-Earth as depicted in the MCU makes absolutely no sense and isn’t explained in the slightest. It’s just there. It feels like some of the connective tissue that this film desperately needs is missing and many things that DO make it to the screen probably should’ve been cut shorter.
James Gunn’s directorial debut was 2005’s vulgar, silly, gory splat-fest, Slither, starring Michael Rooker and Nathan Fillion. At times, Vol. 3 feels more like a straight-up horror film with a few jokes than it does an MCU entry. Rocket’s backstory and origin is lampshaded, but the emotional explosions still hit like artillery shells. Shown in interspersed flashbacks, the gut-wrenching story of Rocket and his friends in Batch # 89, Floor the rabbit, Layla the otter and Teefs the walrus has the vibe of a Hostel-style torture porn. It’s excessive, it was hard to watch and this reviewer wonders how many Floor plushies they think will sell.
There are several emotional beats that are straight-up re-treads of earlier moments in Guardians films, which is hit-or-miss, depending on your poison. Unfortunately, some of the stupidest moments come when things clearly depicted in earlier entries go missing; they all get standardized uniforms. They SHOULD all have standardized gear. What happened to the gear they used to have? There is a minute when this reviewer just wanted to know where’s Quill’s helmet, or his space jet-boots, or one of those pocket EVA forcefield pods shown repeatedly in Vol 2.
At the conclusion, several characters walk away to discover their own path. One goes home. One actor breaks character, and that moment did not work for this reviewer at all. In the end, the adventure will continue, but in different hands, written and directed by different people. Perhaps that’s for the best.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens in theatres May 5th.
Star-Lord was created by Steve Englehart and Steve Gan.
Groot and the High Evolutionary were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Gamora and Drax the Destroyer were created by Jim Starlin.
Rocket Racoon was created by Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen.
Mantis was created by Steve Englehart and Don Heck.
Nebula was created by Roger Stern and Jon Buscema.
Yondu Udonta was created by Stan Lee and Arnold Drake.
Adam Warlock was created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane as an evolution of the character, Him, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher