Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole


3/4

Starring (voices): Jim Sturgess, Helen Mirren, Ryan Kwanten, Joel Edgerton, Geoffrey Rush

“Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” is an epic adventure filled with all the things that make this sort of movie great: dastardly villains, an intrepid hero, awesome battles, and a grand storyline.  I love this sort of thing.

So what’s the problem?  The running time is barely 90 minutes.  For a simple story, this is an okay thing, but for a movie like this, it’s far too short.  Epics need their long running lengths; it gives them time to breathe and allow the audience to fully get wrapped up in the story and its characters.  By keeping the running length so short, director Zack Snyder forces the story to move at such a breakneck pace that the audience can barely keep up the plot, much less care about anyone in it.

Soren (Sturgess in a role he was born to play) is a dreamer.  He is enraptured with the stories his father tells him about the Guardians of Ga’Hoole; legendary warriors who risk everything to vanquish evil and save the innocent.  One day, he and his brother, Kludd (Kwanten), are kidnapped by a pair of owls and taken to St. Aggie’s, an orphanage where owlets are brainwashed into becoming warriors for a pair of megalomaniacal owls, Nyra (Mirren) and Metalbeak (Edgerton).  Soren escapes, and he sets out to find the Guardians and ask them for their help.  But no one knows for sure if they really exist, or if they are just a myth.

The voice acting is wonderful, but no one except Sturgess is able to do anything with their characters.  Sturgess is perfectly cast as the determined Soren.  True, he’s a stock character, but Sturgess imbues him with such enthusiasm and earnestness that it’s impossible not to rally behind him.  Mirren has fun playing a villain (although I was surprised to find out that it was her who voiced the beautiful but deadly Nyra).  Ryan Kwanten is solid as Kludd, who thinks that dreams are for the weak.  And Geoffrey Rush is at his weird best as an owl who shows Soren that there’s a big difference between stories and the truth that they come from.

Zack Snyder is a master of visual effects and generating exciting action sequences.  “300” is a perfect example of this, although it’s a far cry from this family oriented film (which is perfect for even the young ones).  But his attempts to create a family film work against the story.  We all know that children have short attention spans, even for the best movies, but the materials are all there for a great movie.  With an extra ten or twenty minutes to expand on it, Snyder could have made a masterpiece for the whole family to enjoy.

For what it is, “Legends of the Guardians” is a good movie, and I don’t hesitate to recommend it.  But I can’t help but wonder what it could have been…

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