I went into Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 without knowing much about it. I've kept up with the MCU, and the first Guardians film is amongst my favourite Marvel offerings, but in general, I knew very little. Most Marvel flicks these days are setting up a cataclysmic event in one way or another, so they have to tease all of the important plot elements that you couldn't possibly miss. With Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania, for example, we knew it would be a load-bearing movie that explained the time skip further and the arrival of Kang, who technically already arrived in Loki. With Guardians, nothing. We knew James Gunn was leaving the MCU and so the Guardians as we knew them were over, and all I had learned outside of that was that this movie belonged to Rocket. Watching it, I realised how much it belonged to Nebula too.
Billing this as Rocket's movie is not misplaced - I wrote earlier that the most impactful thing the movie does is care, about both its characters and its audience, and it's through Rocket that we see this most vividly. Flashbacks to Rocket's creation are peppered throughout the movie, not just to give us information and exposition, but to explore this character in depth. To know what happened in a ten minute scene. To feel it, we must explore it at length as the movie does. But of all the other Guardians, it is Nebula who shoulders the most weight.
Spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 follow.
The movie begins with Adam Warlock attacking Knowhere, specifically Rocket, while the Guardians attempt to fight Warlock off. Rocket is injured, though Nebula eventually defeats Warlock (at least for now). Quill tries to revive Rocket with a medpack, but it only injures him further. Closer inspection of Rocket reveals he has a killswitch in his heart, which will kill him if they try to operate on his chest. Conversely, because of his injuries, if they don't operate he will die anyway. This sets in motion the central plot - tracking down Rocket's original tormentors in order to disconnect the killswitch and revive him.
It's Rocket's movie. It's about saving Rocket by exploring Rocket's origins, and a huge chunk of screen time is dedicated to Rocket's backstory. But this backstory is delivered via flashbacks, and when we're in the present day, Rocket is strapped to a medical bed in a coma. The movie is motivated by him, but someone else needs to take point. That someone is Nebula.
The other Guardians all have some part to play too. We see Mantis frustrated at not being taken seriously by the group, while Drax goes unappreciated and often looked down on. Star-Lord is reeling after Gamora's death, made more painful by the fact an alternate version of Gamora is alive and nothing like how he remembered - in turn, she struggles with not having a place with the Guardians while being constantly reminded that she once did. But Nebula has the most interesting arc amongst this.
A lot of Nebula's development has happened off screen. In Endgame, she is trapped in space with Tony Stark, and up until this point has been more of an antagonist to the Guardians than anything else, fighting against her sister Gamora and working for her father Thanos' approval. However, with Tony she makes more of a connection, letting her guard down more, wanting to be part of something greater. When she returns to Earth, she reunites with Rocket, the only Guardian to survive the Snap, and spends the next five years being a Guardian with him. The other Guardians don't have much time to process her rapid character development when they return, and she's not a major player in Endgame, so neither do we. She next appears with the Guardians in Thor: Love & Thunder, but they're an inconvenience the movie quickly wants rid of, only really dealing with Star-Lord and giving him none of the trauma Volume 3 has him work through.
Nebula has gone through the biggest change of any MCU character barring possibly Loki, and it all happens off screen or in the background, with no film until now particularly caring about highlighting her. Here, we see how such a tough warrior, battle hardened, and the group's enforcer even with Drax in their ranks, can also be part of the family. She loves Rocket dearly, is disappointed that her own violence is reflected in this version of her sister, and wants what's best for Quill. She is a woman of few words, but she means every one of them, and keeps the group together. The reason she ends up stranded in space with Drax and Mantis in the movie's third act is because she puts saving Quill and Groot ahead of saving herself.
Nebula has only ever been a major character in Guardians movies, and while it's true that they can't all be the stars of Avengers flicks, to put her through so much then cast her aside seems like recklessly negligent character work, and the recent turgid wheel-spinning of the MCU might be due to its inability to care about characters that aren't vital to the plot in the moment, or have their own spin-offs and crossover sequels planned out. Guardians is so touching because it's interested in what its characters are going through, not what future adventures it needs to set up or which slice of nostalgia to fall back on. Nebula has the most interesting arc, so she gets the spotlight over characters who sell more action figures. I hadn't realised until now how disrespected she had been lately, but I'm glad it has finally been put right.