It's been a while since I've posted anything here - but with the latest and supposedly final film of what is far and away my favorite franchise out, I have to share my excessively detailed thoughts somewhere, right?

Let's start by putting it out there: I really, really love Rocket, who is basically me but a little bit more anthropomorphic and a million times more badass (he is not my character but is the character I wish I was). My absolute adoration of the first GotG was largely driven by his central role in virtually every scene (often upstaging the rest of the cast), plus endearingly sarcastic and flippant attitude. Similarly, my mild disappointment in the second movie came down almost entirely to the fact that the plot does reduce him to a sidekick or antagonist role most of the time and even takes a couple of cheap shots at him for laughs, even though it quietly developed his character at the margins.

So it was bound to be the case that my opinions of Volume 3 were going to come down almost entirely to what happens with Rocket. And a lot happens with Rocket in this movie, because from beginning to end the film is entirely about him. Everything the characters do is driven by the events surrounding Rocket, his backstory is revealed in painstaking detail, and the end of the movie completes his character arc. Indeed, his role is so pivotal and the circumstances surrounding him so serious that seeing this movie was an intense emotional experience for me in a way that I didn't ever expect a film (much less a comic book film) could produce.

Warning: Extensive spoilers (and Rocket obsession) ahead!


The good: Rocket's origins revealed

Before I get to that, though, I'll start with the discussion of Rocket's backstory, which up until now has been a mystery, hinted at only via a few casual remarks in the previous two movies. This was what I was originally worried the third film might mess up - the franchise very deliberately scrubbed the "Raccoon" from Rocket's pre-MCU name and in one of his first scenes in the original GotG he doesn't even know what a raccoon is. At the same time, his character design was made as raccoon-like as possible to an incredible degree of detail, and (in that very same early scene) he also makes clear he knows of no entity like himself in the universe, so it seems unlikely that he was an alien race, either. Is he a raccoon, or isn't he? In my headcanon he obviously was, but if his origins turned out differently I had worried I'd end up wishing the sequels away such that we could go back to a time when one could fill in his origins as one liked.

Fortunately that won't be necessary, because I have to say that the film absolutely nails Rocket's origins in a way that not only explains why he looks the way he does but also why he acts the way he does. The second question is really the more important one but the first is important to me so I'll discuss that first - and trivial or not, the movie resolves this question beyond my wildest dreams, placing his realization and acceptance of the fact that he absolutely is a raccoon as the climactic moment of the whole movie (and by extension the whole trilogy)! Never in my life did I imagine that there would be a high-budget, massively-popular movie franchise that culminates when the main character, a talking raccoon, walks into a room, sees a sign with the word "Procyon" on it above a raccoon enclosure, then proudly announces to the audience that he's a raccoon before blasting the villain across the screen. The scene is completely ridiculous but I wanted to pump my fist in the air in glee.

So that was incredible. The origin of his other physical characteristics (intelligence, strength, etc.) could largely be surmised from the hints dropped in previous films, but here they're made explicit during the various flashbacks to his youth: he was a lab experiment, created and toyed with as a vehicle to test various bio-technologies to later be perfected on others (but not as a means to any particular end in and of himself, as one might have naively guessed). While designed to be sentient, the extent of his genius was accidental and a mystery even to his creators - a fact that ends up driving the plot of the film. While not entirely surprising or original, the details make the backstory more interesting than it could have been and was also well-handled.

And now we get to what is by far the most difficult and important aspect of his backstory, which is the origin of his personality. The Rocket of the previous movies is a total jerk - not only consistently selfish (occasional obligatory Galaxy-saving heroic act aside), but almost going out of his way to behave in a way that pushes people away from him. Yondu surmises in Vol.2 that this originates from a tortured upbringing that makes him fearful of friendship, but in volume 3 we learn exactly what happened that led to this - and while even thinking about it makes me cry uncontrollably, it completes his character so well that it makes me love and appreciate him even more.

We learn the Rocket of his youth was a kind and gentle creature. This, despite being kept in a dingy cage, being routinely pulled out to be subjected to some new experimental torture. Indeed, he harbors no obvious initial resentment towards his tormentors and even helps them out at one point by identifying the key flaw in their latest experiment. He is playful, living with a group of beloved (if rather stupid) cybernetic-animal cellmate friends with whom he daydreams and plays games with.

And then The Scene happens. Having learned that he had been lied to for his entire life and that he was nothing more than an experimental creation to be tossed away when no longer useful (his creator twists the knife by calling him a "collection of mistakes" and "hideous"), he activates an escape plan and frees himself and his cellmates. But then he's caught in the act, and his friends are murdered right in front of him, his best friend shot dead in his arms. This was emotionally devastating to watch the first time and it was even worse the second and third times. I cry immediately if I even think about it. It's rough. I suppose it hits me personally not just because I've sort of imprinted myself upon the character and thus everything that happens to Rocket affects me as well, but because it so vividly portrays the nightmare of losing all one's friends in an instant and being cast into an unforgiving world all alone.

But in this sadness it explains him perfectly. It explains why he seems to hate humanoid creatures specifically and why up until the start of the Guardians, his only "friend" is a tree creature who cannot talk and who is virtually impossible to kill. It explains his constant obnoxious behavior towards his teammates, calibrated to push people away and make himself hated out of fear for becoming emotionally connected to anyone again, lest he lose everything a second time. (Even Groot is subject to constant verbal abuse in the first movie.) None of it is because he was born or even raised that way, it's all a manifestation of his own childhood emotional trauma - behind his antisocial nature is an inner sadness and vulnerability that has been there all along. It makes me even more enamored with the character.

So, all in all it's an undoubted A++ to Rocket's backstory, which is a difficult one but very much needed to be told, and it's hard to see how it could have been done much better (my only real complaint is that it would have been appropriate to acknowledge that his friends were also suffering - they all seem just a bit too happy in their cages, and it is a little curious how Rocket is not warped more by the physical trauma he endures.) But this story is really just a series of short flashbacks, with the main part of the movie taking place in the present day, and this is where the going gets even more difficult.


The difficult: Rocket's injury and the primary plot vehicle

The vehicle for these flashbacks - and indeed, the primary plot driver for the first two-thirds of the movie - is the fact that Rocket is mortally wounded just a few minutes into the movie (impaled through the chest, basically) and thus reduced to a helpless state in a medical bed while the others try to save him. As a result, he is suffering horribly not just in the past but also in the present, and this makes for some really tough viewing. Ultimately, the reason I love the Guardians movies is because it shows Rocket doing awesome badass stuff, but in this movie we instead mostly see him bleeding, electrocuted, coughing, convulsing, being tossed around like a ragdoll... and again, this is on top of those very difficult flashbacks! So it's just incredibly tough to watch, especially the first time where I was almost in a state of shock about the turn the movie had taken.

I'm not sure if this is a criticism, per se - it gives a solid reason to portray the very important flashbacks the way they are without it feeling like an unnecessary interruption to the main plot narrative, and the incredible lengths to which the other Guardians go to save him has an important message of its own, as it shows how beloved and valued a friend he is to the rest of the group even in spite of his at-times deplorable behavior. But... wow, it is just difficult to watch in a way that creates a completely different experience to the antics of the previous two movies (the trademark humor of the series is also much more difficult to appreciate in this movie, with these circumstances hanging in the background). It also means that even though the story is literally entirely about Rocket, he really doesn't do much for most of the movie, being largely a hapless bystander to the plot that unfolds around him.


The not so good: the plot

And said plot is, unfortunately, a bit of a mess - careening through three major settings (the Orgoscope, Counter-Earth, and the Arête), all of which have pretty significant problems. The Guardians series has never worried too much about letting a few plot holes get in the way of a fun story and it generally comes out better for it, but the inconsistencies in this one are just so ubiquitous that it does get distracting and it's occasionally hard to take the movie as seriously as it otherwise deserves.

Why is Gamora? - First of all we have the peculiar decision of the Guardians to add Gamora to their ranks again, even though she has basically no connection to the team whatsoever in this timeline nor any real reason to be there (the best they can come up with is she's being paid a fee in order to be vaguely useful by finding the Orgoscope records room, somehow). Now, the reasons why the plot-writers wanted her in was obvious: she's one of the O.G. (Original Guardians) and it would be weird to have a movie without her, and Quill's grappling with her death/reapparance is a key part of his own character development in this story. (The inverted dynamic between still-kinda-bad Gamora and fully-reformed Nebula is also kind of fun.) But plot-wise, there is really no compelling reason for her to be present at any point and I wonder if the movie would have been better if she had been left out or given a more minor role.

Man or God? - The big baddie in both the past and the present is the High Evolutionary. In the past he is Rocket's creator, tutor, and ultimately tormentor; in the present he calls the shots behind the conflict as part of his obsessive need to get his standout creation back for further study. But the movie really can't decide what exactly he is. As portrayed on-screen, he is basically a mad scientist: driven by his passion project (to create a perfect race) at all costs, intelligent but not able to solve every problem and occasionally highly emotional and even irrational. He leads a corporation set up to fund his experiments, suggesting limited resources. He can be physically injured and killed like any human and the best he can do after young-Rocket tears his face off is to replace it with a plastic mask. His ship is easily ambushed and boarded. But at the same time, he has godlike powers to create and then snuff out entire planet-spanning civilizations virtually at a whim, having done so "many times before" - not even Thanos could do that. Speaking of which:

Not so Soverign - Perhaps a minor issue, but it annoyed me that Vol.3 took such an about-face regarding the Soverign, who are one of the main antagonists in Vol.2. Back then, they were portrayed as an extremely advanced civilization, with its own unique values and even its own military - one of the more interesting aspects of that movie. Here, they are recast totally as a plaything of the High Evolutionary and their leader bullied and extorted as he pleases.

Animental - As artificial civilizations go, though, the one that really stands out (and not in a good way) is that of the Animen of Counter-Earth, a world that looks like a clone of Earth but inhabited by... well, anthro animals, who are the culmination of the experiments that the High Evolutionary was working on during Rocket's childhood. Almost nothing about this place makes any sense: it has an Earthlike culture yet no one there can be more than a few decades old (apparently the adults just sprung into existence?), there is no rational reason why it's populated by dozens of different anthro species, the movie does not bother to explain why everything there uses 1980's Earth technology, and so on. Its uncanny and incomprehensible inhabitants draw little interest or sympathy; a lot of time is devoted to a sequence where the Guardians visit the house of one of them, but it's only to learn something that they could surely have figured out on their own (that the bad guys live in the giant futuristic pyramid), giving the sense that the whole place exists basically for gags even though on paper it plays an important role in Rocket's story. Ultimately the High Evolutionary decides to just glass the whole planet, a mass atrocity with few comparable analogues in the whole MCU - and one with no emotional impact at all, since the audience is not primed to care and none of the characters (good or bad) give it a second thought.

Boarding party - The plot contrivances continue in the next segment. Rocket is finally rescued (yay!) but a reason to keep the plot going is needed other than vengeance, so we have Drax and Mantis (along with Nebula) literally hopping aboard a launching rocket (having abandoned capital-R Rocket earlier for reasons Drax can't even explain) and getting imprisoned. Rocket & co. come to the rescue, but it turns out that Drax/Mantis/Nebula have largely rescued themselves in the meantime following another incomprehensible sequence where our godlike villain decides to dispose of them by lowering them into an abilisk pit but Mantis domesticates the monsters instead. (This is another aspect of Vol.2 that Vol.3 trivializes: previously it took the whole Guardians team to take down one such "interdimensional monster"; here we have three kept for the villain's amusement who are then easily tamed.) Drax can inexplicably speak the language of the Star-Children but no one else can, and yet he doesn't think to do so for minutes after they meet. And so on. This segment sets up the incredible central moment where Rocket discovers and accepts his origins, but all the rest of it feels kind of like slapped-together chaos.

Does any of this matter? In a sense not really; the standard for plot consistency in a comic book movie is low and things don't have to make sense for the movie to succeed. If forced between telling Rocket's story the way I wanted to see it and making a coherent plot I would definitely take the former over the latter. But that doesn't mean a story couldn't have been written that accomplished both, and the plot flaws stand in the way of turning what was merely an important movie for me personally into a great movie (or even just a very good movie) to recommend whole-heartedly to everyone, which it simply isn't.


Dog Days are Over: Rocket's future

Back to the positives (and to Rocket.) I tried very hard to avoid spoiling myself before the film came out but while looking for an image to post online the day before release Google decided to suggest autocompleting "rocket raccoon" with "rocket raccoon death", which made me extremely worried that the film was going to kill him off in the end. So I was steeling myself for that to happen.

As with my concerns about his backstory, I needn't have worried. Not only is Rocket alive and well at the close of the film, he becomes the undisputed leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy after Quill steps away to reconnect with his biological family. The final scene of the movie is another emotional one that made me cry a bit, this time in a good way: Quill has gifted Rocket his precious Zune (the stand-in for the Walkman that was his primary tether to Earth and which was destroyed in Vol.2) which Rocket uses to put on a good-bye party of sorts for the whole team. He's shown dancing, cheering, and genuinely happy in a way which he's never been seen before. After the torment he endures throughout the film (and indeed the whole series, as we now know that his entire personality is a manifestation of deep emotional trauma) this is a fitting way to close and one which I found extremely touching.

The question is now what happens next. Rocket's story arc is closed and the Guardians as we knew them disbanded, but in the end-credits we already see a new Guardians (led by Rocket). So we could see a Volume 4, or even just them appearing in key roles in other MCU stories. I would of course love this, and particularly if Volume 3 does well in cinemas it doesn't seem unlikely. The MCU canon has become so convoluted that setting future epics on Earth is messy, whereas the Cosmic side of the Marvel universe (where the Guardians are the real Avengers) offers the ability to tell cleaner stories not weighed down by prior events - much as was the case in this movie.

Rocket will be a different and (in a sense) less interesting character now with his story resolved and trauma surpassed and I'm not sure if any director will show him the same respect that Gunn did (Vol.2 gags aside...) but it would be amazing to see him reappear on the big screen a few more times in the coming years/decades, regardless. Even better than further sequels would be a prequel showcasing his time in between his escape and joining the Guardians (which could be combined with the origin story of the one O.G. character whose origins still remain untold, Groot), although as he wasn't much more than a small-time thief and bounty hunter at the time that's probably unlikely. But a raccoon can dream...