The Guardians of the Galaxy Made the MCU’s First Real Trilogy, and Maybe Its Last, Too

In 2023, nearly 15 years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe project, one of the beloved franchise’s many sub-series has become the first to complete a home-studio trilogy under the same director, with a capper featuring strange creatures and cosmic-looking new worlds. That trilogy, unfortunately, is Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man series, which recently concluded with a notably baffling splat in the form of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. There isn’t a moment where Ant-Man 3 feels like any kind of finale; to the contrary, it was trumpeted (and then disappointed) as a kick-off to Marvel’s next big Phase, one more cog in the perpetual motion machine. If anything, it made the Ant-Man movies feel flimsier and less cohesive than ever.

The second entry in Marvel’s newest Phase Whatever, though, also manages the same-director trifecta, and more clearly has closure on its mind. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens this week, and it’s not a spoiler to confirm what its trailers, press, and reviews have already said: It feels like the end of this series in this form. Characters may pop up again – Marvel characters so often do – but writer-director James Gunn is heading out to run DC, and the collective story of Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Groot (Vin Diesel), Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) seems to be completed. (Is now the time to lobby for The Nebula Adventures?)

This isn’t the first Marvel mini-series to reach the vaunted trilogy mark – as mentioned, it’s not even the first one this year. But it does seem to represent the best shot at what the MCU seemed to initially promise: a series of movies that exist within a broader cinematic universe while satisfying their own wants and needs as a distinctive set. Iron Man came close, by virtue of the first two Iron Man movies coming out before Thor or Captain America had been assembled. But Tony Stark’s character (or, more accurately, his popularity) required more arcs, including some that seemed to at least partially undo what actually happens in Iron Man 3. (We call this an arc reactor.) Something similar happened when Captain America: Civil War wrapped up the series by turning into a de facto Avengers sequel (heavily featuring, not coincidentally, Tony Stark), and when Spider-Man: No Way Home, a coproduction with Sony, brought in ringers from past Spider-Man movies for a multiverse crossover extravaganza. Thor has been touch and go over four entries, while Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel haven’t yet made it to three, in part because of all the big-picture sidetracking.

That leaves Guardians as the last ones standing – or, as Rocket grouses in the first film, “a bunch of jackasses, standing in a circle.” Though 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy seems likely to remain the most beloved of the trilogy for its capacity to surprise audiences. In retrospect, it’s remarkable how many MCU touchstones this supposed outlier hits: Its color scheme, while more detailed than a lot of later Marvel movies, is often low-contrast and murky; its action sequences, especially toward the end, are senseless sprays of CG oriented around a gigantic (and generic) airship; some of its humor is more clunky sarcasm than actual zingers; and a substantial portion of the plot concerns the pursuit of a magical stone that will become more important later on.

Still, the characters are distinctive enough to build a series around; the squabbling team-up takes Gunn about 40 minutes to assemble, a feat the larger MCU needed years and multiple origin stories to pull off. And with a bunch of tedious Thanos bullshit out of the way in that first movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 makes a case for the Guardians exerting control over their own destiny. While the first Guardians drew the expected Star Wars comparisons – much of the movie does play as if some random denizens of the Mos Eisley cantina received that Joseph Campbell call to adventure rather than a farmboy — Vol. 2 doesn’t much resemble that beloved film series. Instead, it establishes Gunn’s baby as kind of a ragged, semi-foulmouthed Star Trek, full of loopy sights and unsustainable, unstable planets. The fact that Vol. 2, which spends a lot of time exploring the parentage of its least essential member (Pratt’s Star-Lord), meanders a bit in the self-created extension-of-self planet created by Star-Lord’s dad Ego (Kurt Russell) only makes it a headier, weirder, more eccentric movie. It’s one of the few MCU projects that could be credibly accused of noodling.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 does a more serious form of noodling, and in doing so runs in even closer parallel to Star Trek, merging personal strife with exploratory whimsy. The movie sprawls into Rocket’s backstory, depicted in full flashback scenes rather than an expositional prologue; meanwhile, in the present-day rush to retrieve a McGuffin that will save Rocket’s life, the Guardians visit a squishily organic corporate headquarter as well as Counter-Earth, a planet serving as a desaturated copy of the original, repopulated by genetic experiments. These are Trek planets all the way, weird and conceptual rather than practical (or imitative of Star Wars). The Guardians have made their headquarters in Knowhere, a gigantic space station located in the skull of an ancient godlike being; it’s a more nomadic version of Trek, where none of these misfits have a traditional home base, reinforced by the way these strange new worlds offer more gimmickry than comfort.

Maybe that’s why, despite teasing certain characters and plot points in previous installments, the Guardians sequels never feel like they’re showing the audience stuff to whet their appetites for some later adventure. The places they visit aren’t designed to be returned to over and over; even Knowhere, first seen back in the 2014 film, makes for a pretty hodge-podge status quo. Saldaña’s Gamora, by virtue of being replaced by her own time-travel duplicate with no memories of her previous adventures with the gang, spends much of the film heading for an entirely different homebase, largely unfamiliar to the characters and audience members alike. I joke about a Nebula spinoff, and would love to see it, but it doesn’t seem like any of the Guardians have been earmarked for their own movies or shows, apart from the presumed obligatory appearances in whatever every-character multiverse mess gets assembled for the next Avengers movie.

The Avengers movies, minus maybe an hour of Endgame, have bloated past a simple super-team-up of six or seven heroes; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 essentially assumes that responsibility, and its sense of all-inclusive epic is gnarlier, as well as more awkwardly emo. The Avengers’ loss in Infinity War was part novelty act, part Empire Strikes Back knockoff. Despite Star-Lord’s cheesy reverence for ’80s pop culture, the sense of loss pervading the Guardians characters is far more genuine: Star-Lord lost his mother early in his life. Drax is a warrior hiding the pain of losing his family. Rocket, we learn, has been separated from childhood friends. Gamora doesn’t experience her alternate self’s lost lifetime, but her friends do; Star-Lord spends Vol. 3 struggling to accept this alternate version of the woman he loved (who does not love or even especially like him). Reset continuity isn’t a get-back-to-business-as-usual free card; it’s genuinely melancholy, rather than paving the way for Guardians Vol. Infinity.

This doesn’t mean the Guardians movies are completely immune to funnybook bullshit. Even as the second and third entries achieve escape velocity from broader MCU lore, the trilogy is still beholden to plenty of MCU clichés: That Gamora-Peter relationship, much-mourned by Peter himself, is kind of an early-adolescent void. (Look back at the other movies: Did they ever really seem like they were together? Maybe for part of Infinity War? As usual with Marvel, workplace flirtations turn every clinch into affairs of the HR, rather than heart.) The whole trilogy is addicted to fake-out deaths, and when a character does actually die – specifically, Yondu in Vol. 2 – Gunn milks the moment shamelessly and near-endlessly, as if audiences otherwise wouldn’t believe such a genre-masher would also be a big softie underneath. Vol. 3 comes by its pathos a little more honestly; it would have to, after three movies with these characters, even if its drawn-out goodbyes may try the patience of the less fervent believers in the church of Marvel.

The excess is more permissible because it also helps Guardians exceed the MCU’s average level of interest in genuine mortality; you occasionally believe these characters could bite it, even if they might yet live to fight another day. Beneath their testy camaraderie and found-family affection is the nagging feeling that the good times, however hard-won, can’t last. That limited time is often true in a larger series that produces lots of movies, sure, but it’s due in large part to an unwieldy master plot that keeps moving even when the characters should be allowed to rest. Rocket, Groot, and the rest sometimes appear to be actively fighting against the kind of universe-traversing destiny that’s supposed to keep their universe humming.

It’s not unusual to sense filmmakers chafing at the Marvel parameters for their mega-productions, but Gunn may be the only director who works that pushback into his trilogy’s overall sensibility. (In the first Black Panther, Ryan Coogler rose above it; in the second Doctor Strange, Sam Raimi joyfully worked around it.) Much of what hampers Vol. 3 as a film seems to vex the characters to some degree, too: The fact that Gunn’s Guardians – and no, he didn’t create them whole-cloth, but he’s certainly responsible for this most popular and recognizable incarnation of them – have to keep living without him in between entries. Six off-screen years have elapsed between the second and third movies, during which the characters have appeared in three other entries. Most notably, Gamora’s whole story in Vol. 3, and therefore much of Star-Lord’s, comes from Avengers movies Gunn had no real say in. But he has to deal with it nonetheless.

There’s some appeal to this exquisite-corpse style of sequelizing, where filmmakers are dealt a particular hand (and accompanying constraints) that they must either play, or work around. At the same time, it’s frustrating that Gunn could make perhaps the most wholly filmmaker-driven series within the MCU, and the larger corporate machinations still find ways to steal away bits and pieces. The Guardians trilogy comes closest to its brethren with the feeling that it’s wrapping up without much in the way of a non-origin, non-backstory, just-plain-adventure installment or two – movies that could further strengthen its Star Trek connection. (TV might seem like the solution, as it’s often been for Trek, but the Guardians holiday special felt extraordinarily half-assed on just about every level, especially considering it was supposedly filmed alongside Vol. 3.) Gamora is supposed to be the love of Peter Quill’s life, and they barely have time to hold hands. Rocket is referred to as his best friend, but how much time do we actually see them enjoying each other’s company?

Again, the excesses of Vol. 3 come in handy: It’s plenty of movie, despite being susceptible to the MCU’s hurry-up-and-wait style, and Gunn’s dedication to that muchness powers through the obstacles that have derailed so many other Marvel heroes. He rolls those inconveniences and limitations right into the story, and comes up with a protracted, messy goodbye that feels entirely justified in its messiness – even in the moments where it’s overstaying its welcome or overplaying its emotional hands. The Guardians trilogy isn’t any less shameless than other Marvel series; arguably, it’s moreso. (Black Panther wrings more authentic emotion without jamming on the buttons quite so hard.) Yet at the moment, it’s hard to picture anything else in this universe so craftily creating its own niche without ever quite tipping over into outright mutiny. Maybe that’s something else receiving Gunn’s fond farewell, too: The fleeting notion of superheroic ownership.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.