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popculturebuffet · 8 months

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Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole Review (Comission for Rewandemontay)

Hello all you happy owlet's and it's a happy day as I got another new comission person. Welcome Rewandemontay, sorry this took so long as a back injury, stomach issues and other things have taken a hammer to my productivity. Thankfully we're finally here for another look at a creator I think is talented with a fanbase I think is

It's Zack Snyder's Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hool

Guardians comes to us from Animal Logic, a studio I haven't talked about yet. Their a big time effects studio, first hitting it big with babe, who eventually branched into animation, mostly focusing on photorealistic stuff with the occasinal branch out like the lego movie (which still fit to a degree since they wanted it close to stop motion as possible). As you can see by the ENTIRELY ill fitting poster's tagline, this came on the heels of Happy Feet: that film had been a massive success for Warner Bros and they wanted more, aquiring the ya book series legend of the guardians.

Now picking these books.. wasn't a bad idea. I didn't get a chance to read them before this review, so sadly I can't fully evaluate how this works as an adaptation apart from what I could glean from tv tropes and wikipedia, but the basic concept, an epic fantasy story in an owlcentric world that has the owls still function like owls, use owl terms, and fight like them that dosen't sugarcoat the violence.. is an awesome concept. It was also a noble stab to try and make a film that was just straight up an epic fantasy in animation. There's comedy here and a few bits we'll get to that REALLY smack of 2000's animation, but as far as I can remember it'd been a while since someone had done a full on attempt at an epic fantasy story.

Even Zack Snyder was a good choice. As I said in my watchmen review last year he's not a bad director.. he was just a very bad fit for the DCEU, where he just flat out didn't give a shit about the source material. Here while he changed a lot of shit like dc, it's clear that he at least liked the core idea and really showed some reverance to it.

So why didn't we get an epic lord of the rings style trilogy but with owls? Well simple really: from what I can gleam just from an image search and my own memories.. the film was marketed terribly. Besides the very misleading posters for a film that's main plot kicks off with a child kidnapping and quickly gets into child slavery, facisim, race suprmacists, indocrination, the realities and cost of war and death. There are a lot of deaths.

Advertising wise I remember, as I watched all the cartoon channels back then, it being just kind vauge "It's magical, it has owls and some shit, it's from the people who made happy feet". And as someone who really never liked happy feet, I stayed far away.

So the film didn't do great and while a sequel was hinted at in the film and by Animal Logic, it never happened. What's left is a curious piece of a director's filmography and what might of been a hit with better marketing. So come fly with me under the cut as we swoop in and see what this film is.

The film STARTS well. In a land of owls, and a few other critters, a father tells his children Soren, a kind owl and your standard "hero who dreams of something grand" type, played by Jim Sturgess who also did well with a deconscrution of this sort of roll in across the universe, his jealous , bitter and angry brother Kludd played by Ryan Kwanten and his sweet baby sister Eglatine, of the guardians, great protectors who long ago fought a war against the "Ice Claws", who are never really elaborated on but who the guardians beat. But by this time the guardians are a myth: Soren and his dad (played by HUGO FREAKING WEAVING), believie as does his sister.. but Kludd is steadfast it's not true.

Really the family interplay in this first 15 minutes is well done: Noctus soren's dad is fair, kind and patient with soren and kludd. But we also see WHY Kludd is so resentful: Soren naturally takes to flight better and gets his dad's praise.. while Kludd gets gentle reremands for his overconfidence. His dad means well but in Kludd's eye's he's non supportive and his brother being a natural only widens the gap between the two brothers and sets the stage for the tragedy to come. It's also a nice deconstruction of our main hero having natural talent: ti's great and doe shappen and Soren's inexperince and navitie keep him from being TOO sueish, but to someone who struggles to do the same thing it's easy to resent them even if they did nothing wrong. Soren even tries to help Kludd by using a visulasation trick (I.e. thinking of where your going to land. )

The boys lives are changed forever when they acccidently fall out of their tree and nearly die at some wild animals before being saved/kidnapped by Jatt and Jutt, our standard comic relief villians.. who work a little for me. Their banter is fun, yet it dosen't undercut their menance: in fact the fact they are so goofy while being genuinely threatning and kidnapping children makes them more unsettling. The problem is they just don't really fit into the orginzation their in, the Pure Ones. The Pure Ones are our main antagonists, an owl supremacist group who seek to conquer the world and gladly kidnap children to either indocrinate into soldiers or brainwash into soldiers by "Moonblinking" them (forcing them to stare at the moon till their mind blanks out), which trust me is way more horrific than it sounds. The dead eyes it leaves.. truly haunting.

The Pure Ones were the main antagonists of the books, but are given elments of St Aurelious, another villian faction and the ones who kidnapped Soren and had the whole child kidnapping ring int he book. Honestly this change at least makes sense. If it's a good one I can't say but it seems like st auarelious eventually gets overtaken by the pure ones anyway and the children are never rescued. Combining them if your going to try and make three books into one narrative just makes sense.

IT also allows for them to do the other big change and the one I truly love. Again I can't PURLEY judge it as I haven't read the books but apparentlyt here while eventually the big bad, more on that later, Kludd is also just.. evil. He started evil, he sold soren out to the pure ones outright, he's just bad. THat's it. And that's.. boring. You CAN have a character whose just pure evil, but in this context it's just "okay this guy was just always an asshole. "

Here... we actually see Kludd transform from Raph from the tmnt, angry and feeling his father has favioritism but not being a bad sort, to a throughly loyal solider of a facist and racist movement. The film does a really good job showing HOW these movements slowly indoctrinate people: It starts slowly with them encouraging him to not throw his lot in with Soren with soren bravely defends a fellow prisoner.. and gets sent to pick pelets. They then pit the recurits for the pure ones against each other, both feeding into the pure one's apocalypse-esque survivial of the fittest philosphy and into how these sorts of movements breed obidence rather than unity. The focus is on impressing the leader rather than helping each other. The praise gives him what he wanted, while leaving him blind to the fact he's being brainwashed. It's far more compelling ot see clud slowly slide into an all too familiar sort of trap than just be bad

On the opposite ends the owls dig in pellet. Pellets are one of the few things the film goes out of it's way to explain about owls, the rest left to context clues which can be a touch disorenting at first but honestly the film does such a good job using those clues over time you get what this thing is. With pellet's it'd be a bit harder to do that but they simply had Soren and Klud's sister have her first. For the record their basically hard things owls cough up consiting of the exoskeltons and what have you of whatever they ate. It's as gross ass it sounds. And these pellets contain little magnetic bits, which are used for a giant magnet pit that's used for.. something. What that something is I either miss or simply isn't explained in the film version. It IS used for a trap later, but otherwise there's no clear reason for it. THey just have a spooky magical magnetic vortex.

They use moonblinking as mentioned before, but SOren is able to resist simply by closing his eyes when the guards aren't looking. He helps his new friend, the owl he stood up for, Gylfie (Emily Barclay) also avoid it and promises to break them out.

The two eventually get help from Grimble, one of the guards.. who turns out is working with the pure ones under duress. Their allegedly holding his family hostage but they subtly hint he knows by this point their likely dead or brainwashed, and the pure ones are lying to him. So he helps the two young owls learn to fly so they can escape.

This leads to the climax of our first act: Nyra the queen of the pure ones and their real leader (Her husband Metal Beak, while fierce and horrifying, comes off more as a figure head and battle commander while Nyra does all the actual day to day work), played by of all people HELEN FUCKING MEREN. Who does a phnemominal job, of course she does but in a cast that's mostly mid 2000's stars or unknowns, it's weird to see such a huge name plopped in their. Nyra catches them so Grimble bravely holds her and her soldiers off while the kids escape.. and in a heartbreaking momement Soren and Kludd come to a parting of ways as Kludd refuses to leave with him. It's a tense scene that really pays off all the expert build off: Soren is free and can go get help .. but has lost his brother while Kludd's actions prove him to Nyra.. and she manipulates him into falling futher, pointing out his sister to them. What I like though is while what Kludd's doing at this point is horrible.. in his mind.. he thinks it's a GOOD thing. That his sister will be able to grow stronger find the purpose he did... that he dosen't even realize he's handing his baby sister to a CULT.

So our heroes barely escape and soon meet your usual misfits TM , Digger and Twilight, two rapscalions. They also reunite soren with his nursemade whose also a snake, Mrs. Pthiler.. she sure is in this film. Seroiusly she has no real purpose in the plot after this. She facilitates a chase when some ravens snatch her and waste a good two minutes of film but otherwise she contributes not a lot. And that's a problem the film picks up in the middle stretch: it just starts adding characters. I mean the first act had PLENTY sure, but each had a good purpose and reason for existing. After this point they just keep piling characters in like a clowncar who have little to do but fight some bitches later. Digger himself is more there to play off twilgiht's constant love of making songs by dreading it every time. It works. Twilight gets a pass since he DOES contribute. Also he's awesome, adding a lot of fun and helping the heroes simply because he and his friend are lonely and figure why not come along on a grand adventure.

But after a neat sequence of our heroes actually getting to the great tree of Ga'houl and finding the guardians are entirely real, the film just kinda.. stutters It's pacing isn't bad and there's a really good scene with klud after he took his sister, with her wanting their brothe rback.. and klud later being revealed to have moonblinked her in revenge and as bait.

And that stuttering is due to introducing a LOT of characters at once who were likely either filtered in better in the book or simply got introduced in big scenes like this but got fleshed out. It's a problem with the last act of the film: it tries to cram three books woth of stories (going by the outline) into the film and make it one coherent narrative. It dosen't TOTALLY fail at that, the film is still fun to watch.. but it's biggest weakness is one many adaptations before and after it have: it tries to cram in TOO much into one movie. The film would've worked better had it either been JUST the slave camp, which I admit is a hard sell so I get why, or they'd just adapted two books, having it focus on our heroes trying to get to the guaridans. You coudl've even had kludd and some other goons sent after them, so you stil lget that final battle, just with less clutter. You have to pace yourself.

For a contrast I've been reading Pirates: An adventure with scientests, the book that lead to the movie. And while this book is rather short, the movie simply .. worked with what it had: it shuffles things around a bit to give it a more coherent narrative then ADDS some stuff to make it stronger. You can ADD shit. Or you can take shit from later books and put it front and center. Instead it just feels rushed. Like a complete film but still like a film trying to do too much. As such the guardians leaders feel REALLY underedevleoped> Their a king and queen.. for reasons we never get to. Why are they hiding? Why are they just a myth despite existing in large numbers? It's never actualyl explained. The guardians just.. still exist. We also get sam neil wasted as allomere, a traitirous owl whose sent ot investigate soren's claims. And the scene of Soren presenting his case is really well done, and I like how he makes a good case why this isn't a lie: the guardians were a myth. There's also the fact four owls flew all this way to something they didn't know existed. If soren just wanted to join.. that alone would've been enough to get him enrolled as a trainee. He has no reason to concoct an elaborate, easily disproven lie. I mean he's also supposed to be a kid but he sounds like he's 20.

What also drags it is we just get a LOT of compression: we get a montage set to an owl city song which.. just dosen't work. I do like what i've heard of the band, when can I see you again worked great in wreck it ralph. But a pop song. .just.. dosen't fit into this films world at all. IT'd be like if the battle of helms deep suddenly had the simpsons go calypso kick in

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They also introduce a love intrest for soren. She sure does exist.

What keeps the film from falling apart and makes the bits at g'ahoul itself work is one man. My faviorite part of the film and a truly awesome character, Lyze, played maginifacantly by geoffery rush. Lyze is a beat up barn owl, our heroes mentor. We get the only real training bit of the film, again it's mostly done in montage, and one I really like. Shonen Anime quailty training exercise. Lyze takes the cadets (our heroes plus love intrest) flying in the rain. Besides building stamina, a good reason in of itself, it's also to help the cadets trust their gut and get used to flying in conditions where they can't see. We get a beautiful sequence where he has soren fly in a current and soren really makes it work. I tonly fails when he can't figure out wether to trust his gizard, a part of bird anatomy tha tI assume helps with flight and navigation, the latter due to later events, and Lyze explains he needs to trust it. We also find out Lyze, who'd been using another name i'm. .just not bothering with, is Soren's hero.. and Soren finds out from his writings the wars his dad told him as fairy tails were bloodier, rougher and less glorious. Lyze himself gives the best line of the film on the subject as he berates the boy for thinking it was that black and white.

"Well fancy it must be hard meeting your hero and seeing he's real and not a myth. What did you expect, some tyto owl with gleaming armor and battle claws with the moon behind him? Well this is what it looks like when you've actually fought in battle. It's not glorious, it's not beautiful, it's not even heroic. It's merely doing what's right and doing it again and again, even if you someday end up looking like this. " That speech. .is so fucking awesome. It's Lyze making it clear what the reality of Soren's dream is, what fighting the Pure Ones, who turn out to have been one of the guardians enemies, REALLY costs... and making sure the boys knows he has that sacrifice in him. Lyze is harsh with the boy sure.. but it's a harshness that's clearly simply to prevent a young idealistic owl from dying needlessly in battle trying to live up to a person who never existed. He has faith in Soren, he belivies in him, as shown with the training.. he's simply being honest. I also like how they explain why lyze has a diffrent name and why no one else needed this told to them: for the former he simply got tired of his old reputation, and for the latter.. everyone at the tree KNOWS who he is, or like Soren find out eventually. The people who NEED to know so he can add in his expertise or fight when needed know. Lyze is a truly awesome character and a large part of why I want to now read the books to see more of him. It's a shame such a great mentor character is packed into such a dense film but he makes the most of it.

So right after Traitor Mc traitorpants returns with two owletts, including Soren's sister. With the threat now clear and totally not a bad guy leading them back the guardians all head back. Soren WANTS to go to free his brother and get revenge but I like how Lyze handles it: he throws soren a weapon, a claw clove that both sides use as their weapon of choice, and not only does the boy not really manage to lift it but Lyze makes a VERY valid if , unsuprisingly, curt point: Soren is better off here watching his sister than dying needlessly as canon fodder.

Of course as I haven't remotely attempted to hide this is all a trap: an earlier scene showed ja'cuse leading two other owls and the other two were implicitly died at the end of that scene. Nyra just has him killed and the guardians are trapped in the magnet thing Thankfully Eglatine comes out of her moonblink int ime to tell the others she wasn't rescued.. they gave her to him, and our heroes head out. It's here where Twilight shows how awesome he is as , being the older and more experinced oneof the group he holds the fucking line while soren risks life and limb to save the guardians. IT's a really awesome sequence. Soren barely manages to save them, their gizzards fucked up by the machine thing but soon fine enough and our epic final battle ensues. I REALLY love how combat is done in this film: tense, brutal and entirely how an owl presumibly WOULD fight.

So while Lyze and Metal Beak scrap we get the REAL main event, the fight this whole film has built toward: Soren, on his way back from the trap vs an intercepting Klud. Soren is horrified to see what his brother's become and tries in vain to talk some sense into him leading to a tense heartbreaking battle that ends with Soren trying to save Klud's life.. only for Klud to pull a frieza (or anakin given all the fire and the fact that if the series had continued he'd likely be the new metal beak as he picked up the mantle in the books) and try to attack his brother rather than accept help and possible redemption. Klud falls into the flames, though given no body is found he's likely still out there.

Soren then joins the final battle, defeating metal beak in one of the weaker parts of the film. I mean thea ctual defeat, impaling the guy, is fucking horrifying and mostly accidental, and Soren's horror after as Lyze tries to assure him, knowing the boys first kill likely weighs on the poor kid despite being self defense, is well done. I just feel metal beak is only here in this film at all because they felt we needed a final boss.. depsite the fact Klud.. REALLY fits the bill better. We see metal beak once or twice scowling and grimacing and what not , but Kludd is the real emotinal throughline and his tragic turn from gruff owl teen to child soldier is fucking horrifying, while it was never in doubt Nyra was the true force behind both. Not having hER die or be truly defeated, as she retreats after her husband metal beak's death,makes sense as they wanted sequels. But you still coudl've had a final fight with her. I guess it's a reason fo rher to retreat but it just dosen't quite land for me. The ending dosen't either as it's all happy and joyful and I like PARTS OF IT, I like sorent elling his tale to new owlets, just as his father had done for him.. but it feels a bit .. happy given Soren just had to kill for the first time and his brother is either dead or out for his blood. HORAY WE'RE ALL SAFE NO WORRIES EVEN THOUGH EVIL IS OUT THERE AND SOREN JUST KILLED AN OWL. YAYYY.

Overall Legend of the Guardians.. is good. It's not amazing, it has the bits I mentioned holding it back, trying to do way too much in one film instead of pacing itself, which CAN work (see scott pilgrim vs the world which while not a perfecta daptation is still pretty great), it just dosen't for an epic fantasy like this where details are important and build up is key. But there's enough great character stuff, breathtaking animation and top notch voice acting to make the film still a joy to watch and an underated classic. It's the best Zack Snyder film i've seen, and while granted that's a small pool (I've seen watchmen, man of steel , batman v superman and the theatrical cut of justice league) where two of them are infamously terrible and one is just.. eh, it's still a really fantastic film that shows off the man's talent. It makes me optimstic for his film Rebel Moon this year.

For now thought his was a treat. Thanks for reading.

#zack snyder #legend of the guardians the owls of ga'houl #legend of the guardians #jim sturgess #helen mirren #animal logic #Geoffrey rush #sam neil

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