Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 wraps up the story of James Gunn’s Guardians team as he moves forward with DC projects. But to help them move forward, it also delves into their past. While bits and pieces of the story are clear in the trailer, some viewers might find it better to know a few things beforehand, such as the fact that the movie features extended, intense, and graphic moments where animals appear. cruelty.
As annoying as that sounds, Guardians 3 never plays off his animal cruelty as anything other than tragedy, and it represents an important emotional core to the story. But it’s still the kind of thing that will deeply affect a lot of people and may particularly bother younger viewers, and moviegoers might not expect it from a silly old Marvel. film full of chatter, insulting comedy and explosions.
If a warning was all you needed, and you want to go into the rest of the movie completely unspoiled (or wait for a streaming version), you can stop right here.
But for people who want a more specific overview of ideas and images of animal cruelty they come across Guardians 3below is a description with the lightest possible spoilers while explaining what to expect when you hit the theaters.
[Ed. note: This story contains light spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.]
Image: Marvel Studios
As the trailer teases, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 spends a lot of time on Rocket Raccoon’s backstory, and as Rocket herself has suggested, it’s not very pleasant. While discovering how surgical experiments turned Rocket into a talking raccoon, we meet other animals that can also talk, feel and scream like humans. This storyline sets the stage for the film’s most gruesome animal-related scenes, which include torture, mutilation, and mutilation of creatures that resemble animals and have human-like intelligence. (The characters are all CGI creations, so no real animals were harmed.)
Since this is a PG-13 rated Guardians of the Galaxy movie, most of this doesn’t happen onscreen. Actual surgical scenes are shown with audio or by viewing the results afterwards. While this choice keeps the film from turning into a gory horror show, viewers still see and hear some cruel experiments. A significant group of characters in the film are laboratory animals that have been mutilated, with body parts missing or replaced with metal equivalents. A few scenes feature fresh, graphic animal wounds. Even with some of the violence happening off-screen, there’s still quite a bit of animal gore to contend with.
For those looking for more specific descriptions, here’s a broad overview of some of the potentially disturbing events involving animals and anthropomorphic animal humans in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. While this list doesn’t detail any specific scene, it could be seen as more of a spoiler than the broad overview above. For those looking for specific trigger warnings, this movie includes:
- A long series of terrorized baby animals that cower in front of an attendant
- Animals whose limbs or other body parts have been amputated and replaced with metal versions
- Large animal characters with vivid, persistent sores, irritation or wounds caused by these grafts
- Characters with metal objects permanently embedded through their skin and bones
- A baby animal immediately after surgery, with exposed skull and other raw, open wounds, trembling and protesting vocally in a child’s voice about the pain
- Characters listening to a graphic audio recording of an anthropomorphic animal screaming in pain during surgery, with the surgeons complaining that it moves too much
- An animal that is painfully and almost instantly mutated through a technological process and then immediately burned to death
- Animals that are dragged around by body parts and thrown against hard surfaces
- The bloody on-screen death of multiple animal characters and the extensive destruction of an entire animal civilization
- The graphic mutilation of a human being by an animal
- Hundreds of animals confined in small, filthy, cramped pens
- Gaslighting, emotional abuse, and abuse of anthropomorphic animals by parental figures
- Extensive character grief, emotional trauma and PTSD caused by all of the above
While this all sounds like a lot, and it certainly is, nothing is to say that the movie doesn’t deserve or put these moments to good use. They play an important role in the story and in the lives and journeys of the Guardians of the Galaxy team members. But they hit hard and are almost objectively terrifying, especially for younger viewers. In an era where games are becoming increasingly expansive to allow players to tailor their experiences around phobias and other personal needsfeels worthy of the graphic drama Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 feels worthy of a heads-up.