An animal that was cut apart and rebuilt into something that can talk, who deals with it by being the loudest and most heavily armed person in any room.
Rocket is a raccoon who was experimented on until he could speak, and he is furious about it in a way the first two films never explain and the third one does. The comedy in the character is real and it is also load-bearing: he is funniest when he most needs somebody to stop asking questions.
He is the Guardians’ engineer and their best pilot, and the thing he actually provides is competence. When a plan works in these films, it is usually because Rocket built the part that had to work.
The performance is worth knowing about because it is three people. Bradley Cooper voices him, Sean Gunn provided the on-set movement, and a raccoon called Oreo was the reference for how the body moves.
Show detailsDo not call him that
Every film in the run has somebody call him a raccoon, a rodent, a trash panda or a fox, and every time it lands badly. It reads as a running joke for two films.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 goes back and shows what the word is actually attached to, and the joke stops being a joke retroactively, across three films that were already finished.