[Spoilers] Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [Analysis & Easter Eggs]
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Japanese title: “Guardians of the Galaxy: VOLUME 3”) opened on Wednesday 3 May 2023, and this one is nothing but spoilers! A rundown of the film, plus analysis, Easter eggs and predictions for what comes next.
Quick notes on what stood out on a first viewing and the Easter eggs, and then the analysis.
Spoilers ahead
Episode-by-episode reviews of the shows that aired earlier are behind the images below — click through!
Contents
Recent hobby
Started shooting all sorts of things for fun lately. The camera is an α7 IV, shooting RAW and editing in Lightroom.
Easter eggs, trivia and analysis
The culmination of Guardians of the Galaxy
A wonderful film
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has wonderful music running through every minute of it, and it is the coolest film going! New songs get thrown into the mix as well, and the way the final track is staged makes you never want it to end — superb!
Director James Gunn carried out one last mission in the superhero galaxy before taking charge of the DC Universe, and made a joyful finale to the trilogy. There are moving scenes and sad ones in here, and the whole thing is beautifully made! The first Guardians is apparently held up as one of Marvel’s finest, and Vol. 3 is every bit as good!
The Guardians are the team Star-Lord leads. He seems to spend every single day drinking himself into the ground on Knowhere. He lost Gamora, the woman he loved, in Avengers, and ever since finding out that the same woman is alive on a different timeline he seems to have been dragging it around badly.
The theme
The theme this time is not heartbreak. The real lead was Rocket, that strong-willed raccoon! The film’s villain, the High Evolutionary, spent years running experiments on living things and matter in order to build a perfect species. Rocket was one of his test subjects, taken away by the man himself. Then the golden-skinned superbeing Adam Warlock appears, the furry warrior Rocket is badly wounded in the attack, and the Guardians set out to save him.
Alongside Star-Lord there are the original Guardians, Drax and Groot, former enemy Nebula, Vol. 2 newcomer Mantis and the (terrifying) Gamora 2.0. Every one of them a distinct, appealing character.
When they learn Rocket has been snatched, they head for the space station the High Evolutionary controls to get him back. There Rocket comes face to face again with the scientist who once used him as a lab animal, and has to confront his own past. At the same time the Guardians have to deal with Adam Warlock, and with whatever the High Evolutionary is planning.
Every character here accepts themselves and the people around them, and then walks a new road — that consistency runs right through the film and it works beautifully!
An exciting ride
The story is thrilling and exciting all the way through, and what it draws is how the Guardians grow, the bonds between them, and the bond they share as a family. And, just like the previous film, the music does the work of giving the story its emotional depth!
In the end the Guardians rescue Rocket and manage to stop the High Evolutionary’s plan. Along the way they deepen those family bonds all over again, and come away holding on to hope for a new adventure. The last stretch of the film is a genuinely moving epilogue!
And in the end not one of the main characters dies, thank goodness. I cried. Going forward it looks like Star-Lord, Groot, Rocket, Kraglin, Adam Warlock and Cosmo are the ones who’ll be turning up! That look on Drax and Mantis’ faces as they finally understand each other and go their separate ways — so sad…
Gamora, Drax, Mantis and Nebula are not dead, but going by the cast’s contracts they probably won’t be getting anything showy for a while…
About Rocket
Rocket’s origin story is a past in which he was experimented on and rebuilt as a living weapon. What that left him with was violent physical pain and psychological pain…
At the same time, every exchange with Lylla, Floor and Teefs makes him feel his own loneliness all the harder, precisely because they look so happy. And yet moving through it all with them seems to have given him the feeling that he had found a new family.
Rocket also accepts that he is a raccoon and starts calling himself Rocket Raccoon. His species doesn’t count for much out in the galaxy, and he takes pride in where he came from regardless. Maybe he could accept it because he had already admitted his own flaws and accepted those first.
There’s a stretch where the fear that Rocket might die takes over completely, and in the end he survives. The lesson he took from that brutal past is that living things are precious, and it will shape how he chooses to live from here.
End credits: what comes next for Chris
In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 the lead, Star-Lord, is carrying a deep wound from Gamora’s death, and by the back end of the story he is shown shaking a little of it off. After that Star-Lord goes home to Earth and goes to see the grandfather he had been turning away from. The reunion is a moving one, and Star-Lord decides to take it easy on Earth for a while!
New encounters look to be waiting for Star-Lord while he’s on Earth. He has dealt with plenty of aliens in the past, but mixing with people from Earth will be a first. Everything he has been through has taught him how much friendship and love across races and species matter, so there’s every reason to hope those new encounters lead somewhere!
And Star-Lord made it to the end of the story without being written out…!! The bonds with his family and his crew matter enormously to him, and he grew all the way through the film. Not being written out this time might mean there is still plenty more growing to come.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the story of Star-Lord growing through new encounters and deepening the bonds with his family and his crew. How he grows from the next encounters, and how those bonds get drawn from here — the anticipation just keeps building.
By the way, the grandfather appears in the second film too.
Post-credits: the new Guardians
From the next Guardians of the Galaxy onwards, Rocket becomes the team’s new leader and the focus moves to what they get up to next. The line-up is Kraglin, Groot, Adam Warlock and the children the High Evolutionary created, each with their own distinctive powers. Groot in particular grows to an enormous size, so scenes of him fighting with overwhelming force look like a safe bet.
And in this scene the team look to have arrived to save a village in the desert. What kind of trouble they get pulled into and what kind of fight they end up in — the films to come are looking better and better. And I want to keep watching over their adventures from here on!
The High Evolutionary
The High Evolutionary, the most evil villain in the history of the MCU!
His background in the comics:
The High Evolutionary is a character from Marvel Comics, a biologist obsessed with evolution. He evolved himself into a hyper-evolved human, created the half-beast, half-human “New Men”, and wears silver armour with regenerative properties. His abilities are many: advanced knowledge, clairvoyance, perception on a cosmic scale, astral projection, and stealth against telepaths. He also built “Counter-Earth”, a second Earth travelling in the same orbit as our own. He originally took Wanda and Pietro into his protection, then gave them powers and made them mutants.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/1342.html
The High Evolutionary who appears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was one of the most evil enemies in MCU history. He murders Lylla, Floor, Teefs and the people of Counter-Earth, and those illegal experiments are painful to watch and impossible to forgive… That said, his idea that a creature without a spark of inspiration has almost no value — that one landed a little.
The High Evo wears a face because Rocket tore his real one to pieces — what a thing to find out!
Good touch, too, that some of the High Evolutionary’s subordinates actually think straight.
At the end of the story it’s never made clear whether the High Evolutionary is alive or dead, and not knowing whether he is still out there is unsettling.
