I Feel Weird About Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

It should go without saying, but: what follows will contain spoilers for the most recent Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

For starters, the movie is great. I enjoyed many parts of it. There’s a lot of fun to be had with these characters, and honestly, if I could include needle drops throughout all aspects of my life, I absolutely would. The diagetic aspect of music in all of these movies has been one of my favorite things, especially as someone who grew up with a fondness for movie soundtracks.

However.

I was not prepared for a certain aspect of this movie, like… at all. I think, because Rocket kept telling us he wasn’t a raccoon, I sort of became blind to the idea that animals would be involved in his backstory. I think I watched one trailer for the movie? For me, the MCU films don’t need much in the way of previews to get my butt into a seat. I knew we were going to be looking into Rocket’s history, but literally nothing I saw (in the trailers) prepared me for the actual story.

In retrospect, when we meet Rocket for the first time, and see the very obvious body modifications he’s had done, and that they aren’t pretty, it says a lot. There’s weird bits of metal all over him, and he really doesn’t want to talk about it, which… fair. And then he’s this gruff, pushy, sometimes annoying character who somehow manages to do a bunch of cool stuff, so it becomes really easy to forget about the high probability he underwent some extreme trials earlier in his life.

The thing I didn’t expect was for us to be fully present for all of those trials. At most, I figured they would be alluded to, and that would be it. But we’re right next to him for everything. And everything he’s gone through is pretty fucking terrible.

We see Rocket chosen from a nursery with a bunch of other kits, and then see flashes of the literal torture he undergoes, before he’s tossed into a cage. We meet his first friends, and if Rocket’s modifications aren’t pretty, theirs are honestly pretty horrifying. They’re meant to be scary looking. There’s Rocket’s cellmate, Floor, a spiderized white rabbit with a voice box for a mouth; she can talk but seems to be very innocent and child-like. Teefs, a walrus with wheels added for his mobility, his eyes also appear to be permanently sewn open; he seems to have a little more coherent thought. And there’s Lylla, an otter whose arms have been replaced with spindly robot arms, but otherwise it seems like maybe they had perfected some of their brain surgery techniques by the time they started modifying her. Rocket is sort of the positive culmination of a lot of the techniques used on them.

The moment we saw a bunch of baby raccoons happily tumbling all over each other in a cage, this sinking feeling started in my stomach, and I think it was around the time everyone chose their names (Floor literally chooses her name because she’s laying on the floor… and Teefs! such a good name for a Walrus), that the feeling blossomed into some very serious dread. I knew something bad was coming, but I wasn’t prepared for how bad it would be. It turns out, they’re all part of an experiment to evolve animals into something more humanoid. It starts as rudimentary body modifications, and eventually becomes this sped up evolution process, that genuinely looks like torture for any creature going through it, whether it turns out positively, or as it does at first where they’re just filled with rage and then immediately incinerated because of their imperfection. Of course Floor, Lylla, Teefs, and Rocket are not going to be included among the evolved creatures on this new planet being created. Instead, Rocket is going to have his brain dissected, because the High Evolutionary is so insecure about how something he “created” thought of something he didn’t, and the rest of them are going to be destroyed because they are just experiments.

As someone who practically runs to Does the Dog Die every time I see an animal on screen in a scary movie, this was its own kind of torture. Honestly, if I hadn’t been sitting in a theatre with a bunch of other people, I probably would have howled right along with Rocket when his friend is killed right in front of him. First he loses Lylla, and then Floor totally panics because they are supposed to be escaping, and just keeps saying something like “Rocket, Teefs, Floor go now” over and over again, and then she and Teefs are shot off screen so when Rocket turns around and sees they’re dead too… its just screams.

At first, I couldn’t figure out why Floor’s feelings were somehow the worst ones to experience, but it just occurred to me that I’ve spent the past 3 years following various pets on social media, whose owners got them buttons they could press to “talk.” Floor sort of felt like the next step from that, with her somewhat disjointed sentences still conveying something beyond asking for a human to meet her basic needs. She chose her name, they all did, and they were going to fly away together, Rocket was going to set them free and they were going to be a weird little animal family in space together, and it was going to be awesome. And then someone had to destroy it.

I wasn’t prepared to feel this terrible about having seen this movie. These weren’t even the only animals to experience pain and suffering! There were all of the evolved creatures on Counter-Earth who basically think they’re getting invaded by aliens, only for the High Evolutionary to decide “we need to start over again” and he just destroys the whole planet! There’s Blurp, an ADORABLE alien pet-type-creature (a furry F’saki) whose life just repeatedly gets threatened because the Sovereign priestess clearly doesn’t feel joy. And the dog Cosmo, who is told she is a “bad dog” at the beginning of the movie, which I recognize had to be a running gag, but on top of everything else happening felt like someone pouring lemon juice in a paper cut every time it came up, until she was finally told she’s a “good dog” at the end. At least they didn’t leave all of the animals who hadn’t been experimented on to die on the High Evolutionary’s ship. Did it need to happen in the story? Probably not, but I needed it as a viewer because there was no way I was capable of handling any more suffering on the part of a bunch of creatures who never asked to be put in that situation in the first place.

It’s going to be weeks before I can calmly discuss this movie without getting teary, or choked up, which I guess bravo for art making me feel things. But I wasn’t prepared to feel THESE things.

Also, I feel like I have to put it on record that I think Groot saying “I love you guys” was a 4th wall break, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself because nothing is ever going to hit as hard as “We are Groot” did in the first movie. But, maybe if you survive the trauma of this movie, you’re rewarded by “learning” Grootish.