Does ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ go too far with its animal cruelty?

As it is impossible to answer this question without going into detail, this article does contain mild spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Additionally, there are direct references to animal cruelty that may disturb some. Please read with care.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 may be a Marvel movie (and by extension a Disney movie) but it is anything but your family-friendly MCU romp. And it isn’t for the faint of heart. 

This time around, the stakes are higher. Vol. 3 is the end of the road for our band of ragtag superheroes, so writer and director James Gunn has the added pressure of closing out each character’s storylines. There is no guarantee everyone will make it out alive.

When the Guardians are blindsided by an attack from Sovereign elite Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) at their home base in Knowhere, a near-fatal blast puts Rocket’s life in peril. Immediate attempts to heal him prove futile as the Guardians discover the machinery in his body has been hardwired to reject medical assistance. From here, we launch into a two-hour quest to retrieve Rocket’s medical file, use the key within it to overwrite his internal mainframe, and save his life. Along the way, we are granted flashbacks to his cruel upbringing, and discover exactly how he wound up becoming the hot-headed, condescending, hardened-heart genius he is today. 

We always knew Rocket had a rough past. Glimpses of his backside in previous films indicated his body had undergone some serious forms of experimental mutation. However, only through the flashbacks do we discover just how barbaric and inhumane those experiments really were. And we almost wish we hadn’t. 

I left the theater with a knot in my stomach and a lump in my throat

The movie’s first glimpse of animal cruelty is perhaps the worst, and it happens within the first few minutes, subsequently setting the tone for the remainder of the film. 

We open on the scene of a group of baby raccoons enclosed inside a tiny cage. They are in a dark room void of any windows. One of them is Rocket, although at that point he doesn’t have a name yet. The large hand of The High Evolutionary (a mad geneticist hellbent on creating the perfect species out of lower life forms) reaches into the cage, and we are shown the terrified, doe-eyed gaze of Rocket’s miniature face before the scene quickly changes to him being brutally operated on while strapped onto a medical surgical chair; the surgeries leave him blooded and a tattoo with the letters 89P13 on his body, his new name. 

Surgery complete, baby Rocket is thrown (literally) into yet another cage, this one containing his soon-to-be friends and fellow animals, Lylla, Teefs, and Floor, who are an otter, walrus, and rabbit, respectively. Still reeling from being snatched from his raccoon family and tortured, baby Rocket’s body convulsively shakes while tears stream down his furry face. Trying to console him, Lylla assures Rocket everything will be okay (it won’t), but all baby Rocket can manage to say is “hurts,” as he whimpers with pain. That is his first word.

This is just one of many stomach-churning iterations of abuse Rocket endures at the hands of the High Evolutionary and his accomplices. Several more times throughout the movie he is kicked, shoved, and thrown across rooms and into cages. The High Evolutionary even grabs his head on multiple occasions with both hands as if to imply the fragility of its structure; should he desire, he could pop it like a grape. 

Rocket’s abuse isn’t the only form of animal abuse, however. At one point the High Evolutionary takes a small turtle and places it in a tall, oblong glass chamber, and initiates a gaseous smoke to fill its confines. This is a rapid evolutionary process that leaves the turtle squealing and squirming, convulsing and contorted into grotesque positions until eventually, it stands on two legs as a humanoid species. The High Evolutionary does this several more times throughout the movie with various other animals, and we, along with young Rocket, are forced to watch. 

The senseless death of these innocent, unnamed animals is cruel enough as it is, but we get our largest dose of the High Evolutionary’s cruelty when he eventually kills Lylla, Teefs, and Floor right in front of Rocket’s eyes. At this point, the needle in our shock meeter has already exceeded its limit. Their deaths are hard to watch — both sad, devastating, and emotional, yes— but by this point we are so exhausted by all the cruelty that came before it we are almost numb. Not entirely, but almost.

The Verdict…

It goes without saying that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is unlike any Marvel movie that came before it. At times you have to wonder whether James Gunn comprehended the amount of animal cruelty he included in the film, or if like me, he grew momentarily desensitized and forgot the severity of its impact. 

Indeed, it’s hard to know for sure whether the knee-jerk aversion to Vol. 3’s animal cruelty has to do with its content or the fact that it came from Marvel. Walking out of the movie theater, I was left feeling depleted and in serious need of a hug from my golden retriever waiting for me at home. I, like most moviegoers, don’t go into a superhero film expecting to be thrown on an emotional rollercoaster. Maybe an action-packed adventurous one, but not one that’s rooted in so much reality. And that, I think, was the point.

If you ask me, I don’t think Gunn went too far. Despite feeling overcome with vicarious grief, disgusted with rage, and depleted with exhaustion, I still think Gunn was right to include everything he did. Cinema (and stories as a whole) are not meant to sanitize the harsh realities of humanity’s underbelly — it’s meant to shine a light on it. Shying away from that, however easier it is to digest, defeats the purpose and lessens the impact. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 had an opportunity to do what most movies can’t, at least not on as large of a scale, which was getting inside the head of a talking raccoon and his fellow animal friends to let us know exactly how it feels when humans savagely mistreat them; something that real-life human beings regularly do, even if not with the same severity as the High Evolutionary. 

I would argue that there is a benefit to the curtain Gunn pulled back, even if animal lovers around the world prefer such soulless atrocities were not documented. The memory of Rocket and his conversations with Lylla, Teefs, and Floor just might be enough to prevent people from actively condoning the animal cruelty that regularly occurs both within and outside our purview. At the end of the day, Gunn didn’t glorify the High Evolutionary’s abuse toward Rocket, he condemned it, and that, I think, was where he got it right. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is now playing in theaters.