By Joshua Knopp/entertainment editor
Finally, we get to see what would happen if the Third Reich consisted of barn owls.
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, based on the children’s book series The Owls of Ga’Hoole, is a story about Soren (Jim Sturgess) and his adventures through a world seemingly dominated by owls.
The story begins with his and his brother’s (Ryan Kwanten) kidnapping by two long-eared owls. They are brought to the territories of an evil living legend, Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton) and made to either serve him as a soldier or as a picker of “flecks,” magnetic pieces of metal found in some owl pellets.
Soren determines to escape and report these abuses to other living legends, the distant Guardians of Ga’Hoole.
This movie is so aggressively predictable that director Zack Snyder didn’t think it unwise to let everyone know that the good guys win in his commercials. The ending of not only the conflict but of each character is easily deciphered within five minutes of their introduction.
The bad guys are particularly generic. Their leader, Metalbeak, is a veteran of a previous war against the Guardians, and they base their actions in racial purity, casting owls of the Tyto genus as soldiers and interning everyone else.
The only way to make the reference more obvious would be to actually write “Work will set you free,” which adorned the entry of several Nazi concentration camps, on the entry to their evil lair.
The suspension of disbelief also needs adjustment. Owls fighting each other can be accepted as part of the premise, but owls using a snake as a nanny? Owls becoming brainwashed by sleeping under a full moon? These are only the highlights of the absurdity in Guardians.
Then, the only reason anyone would see this movie is for its sensory stimulation. Advertised to have a lot of beautiful slow-motion shots, good music and Gothic imagery in the “pure ones,” the film simply fails to deliver.
The production had all the personnel for this film to succeed. Geoffrey Rush, Helen Mirren and Hugo Weaving were cast in supporting roles, and Snyder has already developed a mythos about his obsession with slow motion.
But if you don’t have a story worth telling, none of this matters — the film will still be terrible.
Someone thought that telling the same, tired fantasy story again would be unique if humans were replaced with owls. They were wrong.
