The first stop on the Guardians' rescue mission, the gooey HQ of a biotech bureaucracy known as Orgocorp, could have been designed by Willy Wonka if he'd passed through a space-time rip. True to the series' form, the film is filled with odd and distinctive design details, with spacecraft blasting through rainbow nebula vistas that would be at home in 70s fantasy sci-fi art, and all manner of gnarly life – think Star Wars spliced with Mœbius – sprawled out across the margins of the galaxy.

(Not incidentally, the quota of eye-rolling 80s pop culture references has been dialled all the way down.) Loading. Gunn gets all the ingredients just right this time: The comedy is genuinely funny rather than merely mean-spirited for its own sake, with the prior films' noisy, occasionally witless bickering elevated by looser, more idiosyncratic writing infused with big emotional stakes. Saldaña's newly mean green queen, who's been hanging out with Stakar Ogord's (Sylvester Stallone) Ravager crew since the events of Avengers: Endgame, has little patience for the Guardians' flip banter, and her gung-ho zest sparks some fiery exchanges with her ex, the now lovelorn, newly Flaming Lips-smitten Star-Lord.

“What does set apart as a director, certainly for these types of movies, is his love of comic books,” Pratt told The Screen Show. To save him, Rocket's mercenary pals – Star-Lord, Drax (Dave Bautista), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) – set out on a mission to retrieve the passkey that will override his genetic kill switch, with the memory-impaired, alternate timeline Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) reluctantly tagging along for the ride. His Highness dispatches one of his many minions, jet-powered golden boy Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) to capture Rocket, resulting in a city-levelling brawl that leaves the raccoon on his deathbed, gasping for life. Little does Rocket know that the mad scientist who created him, a gene-tampering tyrant known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, nailing the mix of megalomania and pathos), is on the hunt to retrieve genetic code contained in the furry critter's super brain. (The series' signature 70s FM rock soundtrack has been augmented by a slew of 80s, 90s and 00s hits and banging deep cuts, thanks to this most anachronistic of portable device relics.) When the film opens, the ill-tempered trash panda is moping around the Guardians' home base on Knowhere, mumbling along to an acoustic version of Radiohead's Creep – Jackson Maine would be proud – playing on the Microsoft Zune gifted to Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), toward the end of the previous episode. He doesn't feel like he belongs, like there's anything else like him in the galaxy,' Gunn told The Screen Show.

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