Alright team, it is movie review time as I saw Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 yesterday. Now, I know it is important when providing feedback on things to start by pointing out the positives. But I can’t. At least I am struggling to think of anything good in this 2.5 hour train-wreck of film. Well, I enjoyed the popcorn, so there is that. 

What was wrong with Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 – everything. From the lack of plot to the terrible acting to the extraordinary length, this film was a slog. 

Let’s start with the story, which is really what the developers should have done. Ostensibly, this is the backstory of Rocket. Normally I like first movies because they cover this information. I quite like a good backstory. Unfortunately this movie did not add any additional information that we hadn’t already learned from meeting Rocket in other movies. We always knew he was a racoon that had been cruelly experimented on. We already knew he was smart. We already knew he had trust issues, but was still capable of forming friendship bonds – he was tightly tied to Groot. Sure this story added some more experimented animals to befriend Rocket when he was young, then killed them tragically. But this did not expand on our understanding of Rocket’s character. 

As many people have pointed out, a good superhero movie is defined and supported by its villain. There is nothing like a really good villain to unite the audience into rooting for the good guys. Unfortunately, this was not a good villain. In fact, I can’t remember their name and I refuse to bother searching it up. The villain was a mess. Their goal was to create the perfect Utopian society. But why? The villain’s motivations were not explained. He was just some random bio-engineer designed to make us afraid of genetic manipulations? Despite being a dictator-like leader, he still had a plethora of followers. I suppose most of them had been the results of previous, undefined experiments. 

So, with no interesting plot and a forgettable villain I might have passed this movie with ambivalence and boredom. But then they had a scene that had the villain doing evil science by rapidly “evolving” Earth animals into “higher” life forms. I am puzzled and frustrated that the evolved forms were always humanoid in appearance. This is a self-indulgent, arrogant and completely erroneous way to look at or discuss evolution. It annoyed me. And if this was done to save on budget, then I am still annoyed at the creatively lazy approach to story development. 

The characters seemed flat compared to the last time I saw them in their own movie. Their dialogue was filled with what should have been playful banter and amusing quips. I confess I do like a good amount of banter and one-line quips. This dialogue was just irritating. It was like listening to a class of grade 8 students – the epitome of annoying. They were not funny. They were not informative. They did not evolve as characters. 

Also, this movie threw in characters that I don’t remember seeing before with nearly zero introduction. Honestly, who was the talking, telekinetic dog? Which brings me to the other frustration I had with the storytelling – constant references (without explanation) to past events. I have seen all three Guardian movies, but there were things mentioned that I didn’t know what they were talking about. I also saw all the Avenger movies and I was still baffled. Half explanations and “hey do you remember when” moments did not alleviate my sense of confusion. Yes, these movies are connected in a series and a larger world, but they need to work harder to make new viewers (or forgetful old ones) feel welcomed into the story. This movie failed and mostly made me feel like I was missing a lot of story. 

Bloated with bum-numbingly long fight scenes, music I could not connect with and really obvious stupid moments, I actively did not like this movie. The plot should have been scrapped from the beginning – there was nothing fun or adventuresome about the checklist of scenes weakly tied together. I mean the characters had to regularly remind themselves of their own mission goals – which accounted for 70% of the dialogue. In conclusion, I would give this film 0 (zero) stars out of 5. It annoyed me and was not worth the 2.5 hours of my life when I could have been doing anything else, like cleaning the house.