The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. (2023) May 15th, 2023

I’ve been Marvel-shy since last year’s tragic Thor: Love and Thunder release. I skipped Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and can’t say I’m too excited for any of their upcoming films. We watched The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special in preparation for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. but other than that my viewing diet has been Marvel-Lite for a long time. Good thing I saved room for dessert.

When was the last time you cried during a movie? When was the last time you cried multiple times during a movie? When was the last time you balled like six or seven times during a movie? My answer to all three is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. I can’t remember being moved as much by a movie since watching Littlefoot’s parents die in The Land Before Time. On the ride home my wife shared that she too had been moved to tears just as many times and we spent the next hour or two digesting the unprocessed feelings Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. stirred up in us.

If you’re wondering how a superhero movie, written and directed by the guy (James Gunn) who wrote Tromeo and Julite, could reduce two adults to publicly sobbing puddles in reclining theater seats then you haven’t seen Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. For us, growing up in the 90s meant teachers, daycares, and babysitters reflexively pacifying us with movies like Milo and Otis, Homeward Bound, and Black Beauty. These movies are all about the same thing, experiencing pain through the eyes of animals! Unbeknownst to our neglectful caregivers, constant exposure to those films manifested subconscious emotional time bombs in our hearts. This long ignored emotional dynamite (IED) condensed under the heat and pressure of the transition from adolescence to adulthood and eventually sweated out easily combustible emotional nitroglycerine crystals in our memories. Now that we have pets of our own, a lightly jostled flashback to Shadow barely making it back to Peter could trigger a chain reaction strong enough to decimate our hearts. And here comes James Gunn with a lit cigar in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. is the Rocket Raccoon origin story we’ve been waiting for. Forcibly evolved at the hands of the High Evolutionary, a cosmic being obsessed with engineering organic perfection, Rocket’s childhood was full of torture and tragedy. Rocket’s unconscious for the first half of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3., we experience his trauma through intermittent flashbacks. These horrors, too visceral to share here, were enough to dredge up traumatic experiences I’d thought myself tough enough to brush off. I’ll share one with you.

Rocket’s memories are a mix of wonderfully innocent playtimes with the High Evolutionary’s other cyborg animal creations and the horrifically violent pet POV experience of anesthesia-less surgery. This broke me. All I could think about was my own experience of getting my puppy spayed. The non-profit I adopted her from insisted on funding her spay on pain of repossessing the dog. If I had known how little oversight this particular shit hole was doing on their adoptions I probably would’ve taken my chances and skipped the horror-show. They gave me instructions to drive my dog to an address in the industrial district of town with the gravel pits and warehouse spaces. When I arrived a ratty portable veterinary truck that looked cartoonishly rusted and rundown like it was straight out of a Men in Black rough draft was parked outside a loading dock. I knocked on the door and a woman in scrubs answered and invited me inside. The walls were lined with cages full of two types of pets, loudly objecting dogs and cats and the unconscious survivors sleeping off their anesthesia. I was overwhelmed and felt a deep sense of obligation, and judging by the sheer quantity of patients this back-alley spay was clearly somewhat official. Unsettled but feeling helpless I left my puppy there, in Jigsaw’s Veterinarium, to endure a painful and frightening torture she couldn’t comprehend or escape. Armed only with the knowledge that I, her protector, left her there to suffer.

I didn’t realize I hadn’t processed this experience before watching Rocket’s flashbacks in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. and I balled through my grief every time another heartbreaking memory sequence began. My dog is fine, she survived and is happy and healthy, but James Gunns masterful storytelling and audience manipulation hit a bullseye with my wife and I. I won’t hold it against you if my review doesn’t send you running to the theater, clamoring to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. but despite all of that gut wrenching pain I relived through those sequences, it still managed to be entertaining and fun.

I wish I had it in me to write another, more analytical Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. review but I’m just drained. Please trust me that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. is full of nuance, wonderful humor, and exciting action with stakes that feel real. And you don’t need a cybernetic prosthetic eye to see the High Evolutionary’s quest to replicate Rocket’s unique imagination as allegorical to James Gunn’s experience working for Marvel after Guardians of the Galaxy‘s success. James deserves better, hopefully he’ll continue to thrill us and make all our dreams come true like Maxwell Lord over in DC.