Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (2023)

Summary: The Guardians who are now Peter Quill, Drax the Destroyer, Nebula the cyborg, Mantis the empath, Groot the tree and Rocket the Racoon are attacked at their home base by Adam Warlock, an entity produced by the Sovereign, and in the resulting fire fight the racoon is injured. Normally in this universe people are quickly repaired by in his case his body has been genetically coded to prevent recovery, requiring them all to trace him back to his past and to invade the strange world of the High Evolutionary whose objective is to replace humanity with other improved life forms. It turns out that Rocket is a successful experiment which the mad scientist has been unable to replicate. In their search for the answers the Guardians are assisted by a version of Gamora now one of the Ravagers, the original having been killed elsewhere.

Content: No sex or nudity, but a bit of drinking. In the present the Guardians progress from one firefight to another and over time Rocket’s origins are revealed. He and three other animals live in adjacent cages and become friends, the other three being physically and well as mentally modified, and their stories are told in flashback. For those familiar with “The Island of Dr Moreau” the High Evolutionary is him on steroids. So, as time goes on, the Guardians end up on “Counter-Earth” where there are a people who appear to have bat DNA in them, and there are other even more wild characters. All the action is accompanied by modern pop songs. Apparently Peter Quill entered this universe with an IPod.

A View: The numbers say it all. The film was released in a number of countries on 5th May and by 7th May it had grossed $282 million. The young Rocket story is extremely touching, even though the animal modifications lack logic. The rest of it just barrels along, just a bit too noisily for comfort, but this seems to be the way of today’s action films.  There is just one downside, it seemed to me that things had happened to the characters elsewhere and they had, at least some of them were in the Avengers stuff, which I have not bothered to follow.

Just picking an actor out of the cast at random, what else might you see Dave Bautista in: You could try Glass Onion, Blade Runner 2049 or the latest Dune.