Hammann 11/13 - Legend of the Guardians

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole is a 2010 CGI film based very loosely on the book series by Kathryn Lasky. It features owls, gorgeous animation, a lively soundtrack, and beautiful visuals... none of which can save it from its plotline, where the tiniest of details ruin seemingly everything.

Early in the film, the main character, Soren, and his brother, Kludd, are kidnapped from their family and taken to St. Aegolius, a canyon where young owlets are sorted into different areas and made to do different tasks. It's run by the Pure Ones, the film's main antagonists, whose goal is basically to rule the world. Their leader, Metal Beak, is a sort of mythological figure in that some characters aren't sure he's real.

The canyon of St. Aegolius is a sharp contrast to the forest home that Soren lived in previously, consistently portrayed as a dark and unwelcoming place. Nighttime is supposed to be usual for owls, but the darkness of the canyon makes it clear (or tries to) that it isn't a good place to be. He and the owlets near him are constantly under the watch of the guards, whose eyes are red for no apparent reason other than that they needed to look really evil.

Soren meets an elf owl named Gylfie, who explains that the strange, mindless owls he's been seeing wandering around have been moon-blinked, whatever that means. She doesn't explain this phenomenon until the two of them are led into an open-air chamber and told to sleep under the full moon; she says that if they do, they'll become equally as mindless.

Sure, Gylfie. Whatever you say.

Nobody knows how or why this is a thing that works. It just kind of is.

Instead of telling the other owlets that information, Soren and Gylfie stay awake the whole night (but they're owls, I mean why isn't anyone else staying up the - oh, never mind).

With some help from a minor character, they are able to escape; Soren meets Kludd again and offers for him to come with them, but Kludd refuses, instead staying where he is so he can be trained as a soldier. This is supposed to cement him as one of the "bad guys" or evil owls, but... well, it's up to viewer interpretation.

The story then largely follows Soren and Gylfie as they meet up with two owls (Digger and Twilight, a burrowing owl and a great gray) who could have been cut from the script entirely for all they contribute to the story. Together, they embark on a journey to Ga'Hoole, an island in the middle of the sea where the Guardians of Ga'Hoole are rumored to live, and whom the heroes intend to ask for help in stopping the Pure Ones.

No one explains how a tree grew in the middle of an ocean, but hey, at least it looks cool.

The Guardians agree, and send scouts to to canyon. One of them returns with a couple of moonblinked owlets rescued from the area; one of those owlets happens to be Soren's sister, Eglantine. While the rest of the Guardians are preparing for battle, Soren's mentor figure tells him that instead of trying to join the fight, he could actually do some good and stay behind to take care of his sister. The guy's right... up until the point at which Soren magically heals his sister just by talking to her about Ga'Hoole.

Nobody explains this, either.

His sister tells him that one of the Guardians sent to the canyon earlier is a traitor (well, she doesn't, but Soren assumes that's what she means), and instead of - I don't know, finding the nearest adult and telling them this information? - Soren grabs his friends and flies off to go save the day himself. Across an ocean they could barely cross before, into a canyon with plenty of guards with more fighting experience than they have - and oh, yeah, they don't have any weapons or armor or anything. But Soren doesn't need them because he's the protagonist, and the main character in this movie is never allowed to learn a lesson or fail at anything, ever.

Accepting the story as the movie presents it requires assuming that one brief training montage actually covered a lot of ground.

To be fair, it looked really, really cool, just like everything else.

Soren saves the endangered Guardians by flying straight into a forest fire three seconds after Gylfie told him, "Soren, you can't fly into fire!" and using a bit of the fire (couldn't he have just... found a torch to borrow?!) to burn up the contraption that was keeping them all hostage with magical flecks that - actually, the movie doesn't explain how that works, either.

After the Guardians are saved, they tell him to guard the remaining owlets with his friends, but Soren sees his brother and flies off faster than if someone had strapped a jetpack to his back and little rocket booties on his feet. Kludd does the smart thing and tries to fling his brother into the forest fire, where they end up fighting, or not so much fighting as Soren getting beat up because he never actually learned how to.

This could be a great moment for Soren to actually learn something where all the previous lessons failed to stick, but instead, Kludd gets a broken wing at a convenient moment and falls into the forest fire after Soren tries (but not really) and fails to save him. Soren then decides everything is the Pure Ones' fault and charges straight into the middle of the canyon to fight their leader, which he does, and he wins.

Somehow.

He returns to the Guardians' tree where the rest of his family, parents included, are waiting for him. None of them asks where Kludd is or what happened to him, though Soren tells the story of his journey to some of the owlets that were rescued, and says that Kludd was never found (with a sequel hook implying that Kludd might become the next leader of the Pure Ones, which doesn't really make sense, but it's been like five years so hopefully there won't be one).

His dramatization of Kludd's disappearance makes it seem like he got over his brother's death pretty quickly, which doesn't seem like a thing that the main character/protagonist/good guy of a movie should be doing, but at this point, it's hard to expect otherwise. It's easy to be annoyed with Soren; it's even easier to question if he's really the good guy after all, or at least, the one viewers are supposed to believe he is.

What's supposed to be an epic journey is really more of an epic fail (on the writers' part), and instead of a heartwarming story with a moral, the movie's idea is apparently "do anything you want because even if you make mistakes, they won't matter in the end and there are no bad consequences for your actions." It's really impossible to do the movie justice by summarizing it in a haphazard, snarky fashion, but as gorgeous as the visuals and everything else are, it's also impossible to blame someone for not wanting to watch it.

In his piece titled "Mighty Strange Birds," Andy Webster makes an interesting point in that "If only the premise weren’t so familiar and the female characterizations so tiresomely backward (Helen Mirren is an imperious harpy, while Soren’s friend Gylfie, played by Emily Barclay, is wide-eyed, fragile and helpless)." The movie has few female characters, only two of whom are important to the plot (Gylfie, Soren's friend, and Nyra, the Pure Ones' leader) - Gylfie, as Webster notes, begins the movie as the adorable, vulnerable sidekick, but she does go on later to get the main characters where they need to go, and makes it obvious during the training montage and rescue of the Guardians that she can pull her weight (though that said, the writers don't give her the time she deserves when it comes to exploring her potential as a character).

That said, the other main characters are also useless - Digger is even more useless than Gylfie, and Twilight actually wastes minutes of valuable running time by singing songs that add nothing to the plot. Even Metal Beak ends up doing basically nothing, except dying.

And then there's Nyra, who gave Kludd a sense of purpose and belonging when he didn't have one, and despite her immorality is arguably the most likable character in the entire film. The inexplicable fantasy racism (speciesism?) doesn't cast her in a good light, but considering that Kludd expressed beliefs of "Tytos are the best" from the very beginning of the movie, which his parents did not call into question or challenge (and who else could he have learned to think that way as a young one except from his parents?). Nor did they so much as mention him at the end of the movie, because they couldn't have known about his disappearance unless Soren told them about it offscreen, which would be stupid... Nyra makes a better guardian figure for him than either of them.

Another movie reviewer, Tom Huddleston, says in his piece that "There’s too much story for 97 minutes, leaving much of the film feeling rushed and confusing." It might be more accurate to say that there are too many characters for 97 minutes, because all of them try to be really central and important to the story, but the movie ends up failing at that, because as much as the other characters are touted to be important, it's really a story about Soren and how great Soren is. There's not enough runtime for everyone to get that kind of attention. If there were, that would be terrible.

Jason Anderson describes the film as "essentially a condensed version of The Lord of the Rings with a cast of talking owls." He goes on to say that some of the themes would be a bit too involved for younger viewers to grasp, but I disagree - the plot is much simpler than that of the books on which it is based, which I had no trouble reading at light-speed when I was small. (The movie doesn't really follow the same storyline as the books, though - the movie isn't a retelling of the books' story so much as a continuity reboot.)

He praised the artistic direction of the movie, which was a common thing for other reviewers as well. No one whose criticism I looked at had anything bad to say about the visuals, and they shouldn't have, because the visuals are stunning.

The plot, however, leaves so much to be desired, and no one can quite agree on why exactly it's terrible. There are many worthwhile aspects to talk about, whether it's the portrayal of certain characters or the cliche storyline, but one thing's for certain: whatever story Legend of the Guardians tried to present isn't a worthwhile one, and the symbolism it tried to use certainly wasn't helping its case.

References
Mighty Strange Birds
Tom Huddleston's review
Who-who knew Ga’Hoole could be a hit?