Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and the MCU Just Have a Lot Going on Right Now
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, director James Gunn’s final bow before leaving to right a partially capsized DCEU, has a lot going on right now, man. Along with Gunn’s departure, there are plenty of other farewells—officially announced or implicit—from its cast, the requisite seeding of new faces, and the need to wrap up the most traditionally conceived trilogy on the sprawling slate of the MCU.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 also represents another chance to convince folks, “No, really, Phase 4 is right where we want it!”—an increasingly difficult argument to make. Granted, the box office success of the multiversally laden Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ensured studio execs could continue to rest their weary heads on pillows stuffed full of cash, but there is no shortage of reasons for why the post-Thanos MCU has felt a bit underwhelming.
Black Widow was a narrative anomaly unmoored by the pandemic that served more as a baton passing than the thrilling spy caper it imagined itself to be, Eternals was beautiful but boring, and both it and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings showed that transforming C-tier Marvel properties into box office juggernauts might be a tad harder than the success of the original Guardians of the Galaxy would have one believe.
The more familiar properties and characters have fared only marginally better. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was solid but indelibly marked by the onscreen dictates of the real-life passing of Chadwick Boseman, Thor: Love and Thunder suggested there might just be a limit to how much creative control one should yield to Taika Waititi before returns diminish, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—in many ways the closest kin to the Guardians franchise in tone and humor—jettisoned much of that charm in favor of CGI swarms and formulaic tumult.
In its stumbles, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 lands closest to Love and Thunder and Quantumania. In the case of the former, previously benign—and even expressly positive—directorial tendencies take on a detrimental shade, as Gunn’s signature pairing of musical hits of yore with onscreen sequences feels more intrusive and, worse, often superfluous. But it’s in a Quantumania-esque breach of ensemble charm where the movie suffers most. (The CGI swarms and formulaic tumult don’t help, either.)
Scoff at one-note, broad-strokes characters all you wish, but the first two Guardians films showed how the right notes, in the right sequence, can make for a pleasing, catchy melody. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 shows us that some of those notes—particularly the furry one—were more crucial than others.