YNOT at the Movies

Marvel's superhero movies come out into the theaters robustly like popcorn coming out of a popcorn machine, they never seem to end and you can hardly tell them apart. One common characteristic they all share is the endless fighting. Imagine for a second, if there were no violent attacks on each other among these Marvel characters, none of these movies would have existed. The latest such popcorn is the director James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" (USA 2023 | 150 min.), which is the last installment of his Guardians trilogy. The film is no exception in being filled with intensive fights and loud explosions for almost the entire two and a half hours running time. It is so loud that my watch issued me warnings that the sound level was exceeding 90 decibels at the press screening.

As usual, the plot, if actually there is one, is almost irrelevant and hard to follow. The characters also all have strange names that you'll probably forget as soon as you walk out of the theater, if not before. This film is set in a place called Knowhere, somewhere in the Galaxy. If you have not seen the previous two movies in this trilogy, you'll probably feel perplexed about the group of misfits in this place, claiming themselves as the guardians of this spaceship-like structure.

Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is perhaps the only one who looks like a real human in the bunch. Rocket (voice by Bradley Cooper) is a raccoon with a good heart; Groot (voice by Vin Diesel) is a giant tree that can reshape and fight; Drax (Dave Bautista) is a hunky figure with little brain capacity; Mantis (Pom Klementieff) has two antennas on her head like a snail; Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) shows little emotion toward Peter because she doesn't remember the past from the previous movies; and Nebula (Karen Gillan) is a blue-faced cyborg who sometimes can heal herself from injury and sometimes cannot (so which one is true?).

At the film's opening, they are under attack from Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), and Rocket is badly injured. The team soon finds out that there is a chip in Rocket that prevents him from being treated. It turns out that Rocket is a lab product named Subject 89P13, by High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) who wants to design the perfect species on Counter-Earth. So the team travels over to High Evolutionary in order to obtain Rocket's file to save him.

Of course, the journey is full of fierce fights with all sorts of creatures in a bizarre environment.

Logic and law of physics usually don't exist in a Marvel film, unless it has merit to a scene. They can fly over between planets in one scene, yet they must rely on some vehicles for transportation in another scene. We can never figure out what these superheros are vulnerable to. Guns? Knives? Chemicals? Emotions? Even though some of these characters can heal themselves after getting a gunshot, they shoot at each other with heavy machinery anyway. No one knows what those bullets contain. The point is just to shoot and make noise, a lot of it.

Fighting and yelling at each other is basically what these characters are doing in this entire film. Occasionally, light humor is thrown in to ease the chaotic battles. One of the funniest moments is when Peter and Adam float in space while reaching out with their index fingers, referencing Michelangelo's painting The Creation of Adam.

Although this is the last film of the Guardians trilogy, it's unlikely Marvel's popcorn machine will stop making noises.

"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" opens on Friday, May 5, 2023.