From the studio the brought us ‘Happy Feet’ and the Director that brought us ‘300’ and ‘Watchmen’ comes the somewhat epic children’s movie based on the first three books in Kathryn Lasky’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole series. The film sure looks like a children’s movie, and a beautiful one at that, the world created is breathtaking and the animation is astoundingly brilliant. Parents should be warned though, Legend Of The Guardians is a very aggressively confronting movie possibly for the better but ultimately a little much for small children.
The story is centered in the Owl kingdom, where a War exists between the Pure and the Guardians, two factions that are hard to differentiate between except for the fact the good guys wear polished helmets and the bad guys wear black helmets. A young owl named Soren lives a simple existence playing make-believe day in day out about his heroes the Guardians,until one day when he and his brother are captured by the Pure and forced into the middle of the war.
As you might imagine three books provide a lot of content to cram into one children’s length film, but Zack Snyder does a commendable job of keeping the introductions brief and getting straight into the beef of the story, Legend Of the Guardians is paced remarkably well, but its intended epic feel doesn’t really translate to its audience as it never reaches the heights I think it was aiming for and a lot of the characters have little impact or miss the mark completely. Don’t get me wrong, Legend of The Guardians is a great movie, and the characters that matter are great, memorable and superbly voiced by some great names such as Helen Mirren, Geoffery Rush and Jim Sturgess.
Zach Snyder manages to create such large epic battles, and he pulls them off wonderfully, if not a little to violent and confronting. Children over 12 should love the experience and get excited for it’s sequel. The film is very intelligent and its impressive to see a film maker give children such benefit of the doubt to ‘get’ things without them being spelled out. It’s a risk, but this film takes a lot of those, its hyper violent, its Australian and it has no marketable characters to sell merchandise. In the end we have a great holiday movie that is unquestionably breath taking to look at, and at time heart racing to watch. With a great voice cast, serious confronting themes and mostly memorable characters Legend Of The Guardians is a unmissable film for the child in us all, but perhaps not for the real children in our lives.
Verdict: See this. With a great voice cast, serious confronting themes and mostly memorable characters Legend Of The Guardians is a unmissable film for the child in us all, but perhaps not for the real children in our lives.