“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” Reviewed: Who’s Restraining Whom?

The eternal battle at the heart of modern movies gets a vigorous workout in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”: the battle between text and image. Spoiler alert: text wins, and it isn’t even close. In that Pyrrhic victory of a clever script over inspired direction, the loser isn’t just the audience for this particular film. It’s the art of movies over all and its claim to distinctiveness and importance in the face of its prime rival, television. The interlocking serial form of the Marvel cycle (to which the “Guardians” trilogy belongs) imposes a television-like rigidity of continuities and connections, which turn directing into the secondary craft of spoon-feeding them to viewers. In the “Guardian” series, the director, James Gunn (who is now also a co-chairman and co-C.E.O. of DC Studios), is also the screenwriter (in the first film, co-writer, with Nicole Perlman), but the unity of his vision doesn’t help, because it’s only metaphorically a vision—“Vol. 3” offers hardly any points of visual interest.

The film is centered on two characters, the half-human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), a.k.a. Star-Lord, and a raccoon named Rocket (a C.G.I. creation, voiced by Bradley Cooper). In the ramshackle, nearly steampunk, futuristic town of Knowhere, the Guardians are living peacefully and jibing jovially when they come under sudden attack by Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a synthetic humanoid of devastating power (signified by a metal lozenge implanted in his forehead, only one of the many head-embedded gizmos that are a hallmark of the film’s design). Though the marauder is ultimately repelled, he leaves Rocket gravely wounded—and when the Guardians attempt to administer their brand of high-tech medicine, they stop in the nick of time, discovering that Rocket is maliciously equipped with a kill switch that prevents any tinkering with his internal mechanisms. The intrepid Peter insists that the group head to infiltrate that system’s creators, an intergalactic biotech company called Orgocorp, and steal the override code in order to save the life of Rocket, whom Peter repeatedly calls his best friend. (The hulking Drax, played by Dave Bautista, repeatedly retorts, “Second best.”)

The action turns on friendship as a prime motive to undertake a dangerous mission, which quickly builds another sentimental strut into the action: in order to get inside Orgocorp, the Guardians need the help of one of their former number, Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), who turns out to be a simulated duplicate of her former self. At the end of “Vol. 2,” she and Peter became a couple; now, Gamora has no memory of their relationship. (Needless to say, the film gets a built-in romantic plotline, woefully undeveloped, involving the rebuilding of what was lost.) But the trip to the realm of Orgocorp is only part of the struggle. The Guardians’ real adversary in the fight to save Rocket is an arch-villain called the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who created Rocket’s superintelligence and needs to recapture it in order to fulfill his madly destructive and tyrannical scheme.

Gunn fills “Vol. 3” with some conflicts that are meant to spice up the proceedings. Gamora is in an adopted-sibling rivalry with the blue-tinted, robotic Guardian named Nebula (Karen Gillan), whose main function is to seem to have a crush on Peter and thereby snipe, in a low-pitched snarl, whenever Gamora gets near him. This time around, there’s a Guardian dog, Cosmo, a veteran of the Soviet space program, which left her with superpowers that include speech (she’s voiced by Maria Bakalova). There’s also Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel, played on set by Austin Freeman), a creature made of a tree trunk and branches, who’s also endowed with an incoherently wide array of superpowers but hardly speaks. (He recurrently says, “I am Groot,” an incantation that his cohorts translate to a variety of meanings.)

The artificial heart of the movie is a drama of identity: it begins with a batch of baby raccoons and a human (or human-like) hand reaching in to pluck one out—a foreshadowing of Rocket’s extensive backstory—and, early on, shows the grownup Rocket grousing in Knowhere, “I’m not a damn raccoon.” The implanted high-tech gizmos that regulate his body lend his claim some credibility, but, obviously, the psychological turn of the film, such as it is, involves Rocket’s proud embrace of his natural identity and its social implications. His backstory—which emerges in the form of flashbacks, memories that he himself is having while unconscious—shows his earlier days, in the cruel custody of the High Evolutionary, whose experiments on animals leave others, including three who are his friends—the rabbit Floor (voiced by Mikaela Hoover), the walrus Teefs (Asim Chaudhry), and the otter Lylla (Linda Cardellini)—mutilated. (Much has been made of the ostensible darkness of the animal-abuse subplot; its darkness is mainly literal, with the lighting kept dim to make sure that nobody misses the point.) The experiments, however, have endowed Rocket with mental superpowers that are the crux of his role in the “Guardians” series and that make him the central figure, albeit largely a passive one, of “Vol. 3.”

There’s also enormous destruction in the movie, more than one quasi-apocalyptic onslaught that the Guardians have to contend with—notably, when the High Evolutionary becomes unhappy with the populace that he’s created to fill the towns of so-called Counter-Earth—but the chaos, too, is so conspicuous in its conventional C.G.I. simulations that it has all the emotional impact of putting a computer to sleep. Seemingly city-size space vehicles, with their clashes and crashes, deliver all the awe of a cell-phone video, not because they’re poorly realized but because they’re poorly imagined, merely tossed into the action for thrills rather than being developed as part of a world.

“Vol. 3,” like its predecessors, is a comedy of sorts; it’s filled with humoroid dialogue, whether Drax’s insistence on the friendship pecking order or the vain assertions of an Orgocorp sentry (Nathan Fillion) that he’s saddled with a nepo assistant; whether Peter introducing himself as Patrick Swayze when faux flirting with a miniskirted, go-go-booted Orgocorp file clerk (Daniela Melchior) or Cosmo bickering with another Guardian, Kraglin (Sean Gunn, the director’s brother), when he calls her a bad dog. But the comedy is more like comedy simulation, merely standing for humor rather than providing it. (I noticed only one titter in the crowded neighborhood theatre where I saw it, in response to the Guardians’ rapid-fire debate over which color buttons to push on their space suits.) Comedy is disruptive, and there’s nothing approaching visual humor in the movie, let alone dialogue of any actual outrageousness or sharp targeting; here, the comic allusions serve mainly as garnish on the big-movie plate, space-fillers in the two-and-a-half-hour span.

The essence of “Vol. 3” is simulation: the simulation of a romantic relationship, of the power of identity, of high-stakes pursuits, of the danger of battle. The violence of the movie is, for the most part, absurd, inasmuch as the rules of bodies and the powers of superheroes remain undefined and infinitely malleable to fit the demands of a given plot point. Why does one impact devastate Rocket, while a run-through by a sword or a fall to the ground from thousands of feet in the air means nearly nothing? A character gets hacked to oblivion and comes back at full strength, with the ability to multiply limbs and weaponry in a blink. There’s no meaningful sense of who can survive what, who is vulnerable to what, with the result that viewers are solely at the mercy of the script’s willful necessities. There’s even a throwaway line of dialogue regarding the absurdity with which those killed at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War” have been brought back to life, yet “Vol. 3” replicates the same absurdity far more casually.

The only authentic inspiration is found in the movie’s production design, by Beth Mickle; such touches as the biomorphic squish of Orgosphere’s terrain, Orgocorp’s huge wall of stored balls of biomaterial, and the suburb imitations of Counter-Earth hint at a decorative realm of futuristic fascinations that Gunn’s direction skims over. The movie is grandiose but not impressive, elaborate but not eye-catching; its most poignant simulation is the effort to make it feel like a movie for adults, with grownup concerns, which remain dramatically undeveloped but are delivered with a thudding earnestness. (As if to flaunt its mature substance, Gunn adorns the script with the word “fucking,” just once, and, of course, as an epithet, unrelated to sex.) The texture and the tone of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” are unified and homogeneous to the vanishing point. The film is coherent to the point of numbness, straining after respectability through consistency of feel and clarity of purpose—and that very effortfulness blocks the way to the sort of pleasures that superhero movies have, at the height of free-spirited and playful imagination, delivered. Even Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers” and Scott Derrickson’s “Doctor Strange,” despite their heavy-handed corporate overproduction, convey an ingenuous sense of surprise and wonder at the sensational and spectacular cinematic superpowers of the infinitely pliable realm of computer graphics.

There are as many kinds of good images as there are good images, but what they have in common is mystery—the need to turn one’s head, shift one’s eyes, to look outside or behind them for their many meanings and implications. The ones in “Vol. 3” mean just one thing, each by each, with a uniformity of plotting and messaging that reeks of unfreedom, of lockstep constraint. The fact that Gunn himself, as writer and director, has an unusual degree of authority, and thereby seems to be largely constraining himself, renders the narrow results all the more oppressive. ♦