This article contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 does something I thought was impossible at this point: it looks really good. Not 'good for an MCU movie,' straight-up good, with expressive use of color, great CGI work, interesting production design, and blocking that makes it look like the characters are navigating a real space. It's a credit to director James Gunn — who was, at one point, fired from the project — that he's managed to make a movie that feels like the work of an artist more than the product of a factory line.
Marvel has a history of pre-vizing action scenes far in advance, sometimes before a director is even attached to the project. In Guardians 3, and in his other MCU movies, Gunn seems to have avoided that burden. He has written and directed every MCU project he's worked on, which gives him greater creative control over the movie from beginning to end. He also weaves jokes throughout the entirety of the film — in dialogue scenes, but also in the big fights and CGI set pieces — which seems to give him more freedom than, say, Lucrecia Martel would have enjoyed had she agreed to let Marvel "worry about" the action scenes and signed on to direct Black Widow.
This feels like a Gunn project through and through, and the film has some very cool locations that feel utterly distinct from anything else in the MCU. The highlight is Orgosphere, a fleshy space station where the exterior is an oozing mass, and every control panel has a membranous quality. The use of color in the Orgosphere is also pronounced, with primary colored furnishings contrasting sharply against stark white backgrounds.
The one time that Guardians 3 suffers is in the Marvel standard battle that serves as the movie’s climax. Here, the color palette descends into the murky gray gutter where many MCU outings live for most of their runtime. Even then, though, the set-up of the battle is more interesting than most, with the members of the gang piloting Knowhere, the Celestial's head where the Guardians have taken up residence, to the High Evolutionary’s ship, to rescue a group of children imprisoned there. The battle climaxes with Rocket orchestrating a mass exodus of experimented upon animals as a Noah’s ark menagerie stampedes out of the ship.
Those animals are another major point in the film’s favor. Much of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’s story is told through flashbacks to Rocket’s time as an imprisoned test subject of the High Evolutionary, and in these scenes the young anthropomorphic raccoon is often talking exclusively to other CG animals. All of these creatures look good, with realistic fur and believable movement. Marvel’s visual effects have come under fire in recent years, as VFX artists have crunched to complete all the work in the studio’s clogged pipeline, resulting in some movies (Thor: Love and Thunder) and series (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law) looking noticeably subpar. That isn't the case here, and I'm not sure how Gunn and co. pulled it off given what we know about the working conditions behind Marvel's VFX. The movie had roughly the same amount of time for post-production as Thor 4, but looks immeasurably better.
A lot of it may come down to Gunn using plain, old-fashioned good filmmaking techniques. He had originally planned to use StageCraft (a soundstage with high-resolution screens that display backdrops and other visual effects), as Taika Waititi did on Love and Thunder, but backed out of the decision. There's a lot of CGI in the film, but Gunn told The Hollywood Reporter that the Guardians' ship, the Bowie, was a four-story set. Even then, the spaces that are definitely CGI still look more physical than anything Marvel has produced in years.
And, who knows if Marvel will be able to pull this off again. This is Gunn's last film for the studio, having ascended to co-CEO of DC Studios. The next superhero movie that looks this good may well be Superman: Legacy.