Australian Penthouse

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Director: Zack Snyder
Stars: Jim Sturgess, Ryan Kwanten, Hugo Weaving, Helen Mirren, David Wenham, Sam Neill, Joel Edgerton, Geoffrey Rush, Anthony Lapaglia
Warner Bros.

FROM visionary director Zack Snyder, the man who gave us the entertaining Dawn of the Dead remake, 300, and the  underappreciated Watchmen, comes a children’s movie that is confusingly disjointed as its title is long.

The computer-animated film seemingly gets caught trying to juggle too many big things at once, making it difficult to relate to and even harder to enjoy.

The story starts with owl brothers Soren and Kludd playing happy family. Soren is a dreamer, obsessed with the legend of the guardian owls that protect their kind from apparently evil owls.  His brother, Kludd, is more grounded and eager to hunt.  They are kidnapped and dropped into a world of brainwashed orphan owls of all shapes and sizes. Before Kludd can hoot “30 pieces of silver” he throws in his lot with the evil owls, turning against his kin with Anakin Skywalker-like logic.

What follows is Soren’s escape and collection of an interesting, albeit unentertaining, group of other birds who together seek out the not-so-mythical Owls of Ga’hoole in the hopes of freeing the oppressed orphans from their sinister overlords.  As a children’s film, the plot is far from complex, but the blistering pace of seemingly trivialised major events and confusing name slinging makes it difficult to want to root for any particular character’s plight.

The genre-standard humour is more miss than hit, offering cheap shots that are designed to make kids laugh at their obviousness more-so than entertain adults with their layered subtlety; Shrek or Toy Story this film is not.

Although the visuals are often interesting and the cinematography is, at times, breathtaking, the so-called 3D is essentially moot and only really noticeable when the occasional object flies at or close to the screen.  Hollywood’s obsession with 3D in this post-Avatar world hammers home the point that this sort of technology is really only effective as an immersion-increasing tool when applied to live-action films (and only those that are shot in stereoscopic 3D, not converted afterwards).

With every minor action scene you can bet that you’ll see Snyder’s now cliché slow-motion shots, and by the end of the film there’s more slow-mo than you could throw a Spartan at.

Despite the presence of many talented and familiar voices, even the upper-echelon actors seem to struggle to breathe life into their characters.  What could have been an exciting multi-book adaptation for audiences of all ages turns into a genre-confused mess that pales in comparison to even the lesser Pixar films.  At times a fluffy comedy, at others a dark parable, The Owls of Ga’Hoole attempts to walk a difficult line but ultimately underwhelms, despite the collective talent across the board.

Review: Nathan Lawrence

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is in cinemas now