I just saw this movie, thought I give a brief report. Short version? It’s a good movie for kids, and it will entertain adults as long as you don’t expect anything too much. It’s apparently based on a book or something, and it’s clear that either the book was a bit thin or the adaptation a bit rushed. Still, not at all bad, just… shallower than I wanted. But it’s not too long and not a pain to sit through, so have at it.
Spoilers below
…
…
…
Longer version
The movie is beautiful, and if it overuses slow-mo, it’s still very good in the art direction and workup. The owls are nicely expressive and are just a flat joy to watch onscreen.
Really, the only problems are that the plot feels way rushed, with way too much left unexplained and unexplored. I had a hard time keeping track of the names of most characters, and some I wasn’t sure ever got them.
The basic story here is that two brothers (twins? not explained, but they seem the same age) Soren and… err… OtherGuy… are young owls learning to fly. They have a bit of rivalry, and OtherGuy doesn’t like Soren’s obsession with the tales about the Guardians.
They get atacked and kidnapped, and are soon enslaved by the evil Pure Ones. And it’s ludicrously obvious that they’re evil. They come across like Nazis who watched Lord of the Rings and realized they’d been slacking off compared to Sauron. OtherGuy watcehs as Soren is dragged off to be a slave (and this worked: I could believe he was afraid and not at all wanting to get thrown into the Obviously Bad Fate).
After that, things get a little hairy, though. OtherGuy more or less just waltzes onto the side of evil and does heinous things for, well, no reason at all. Somebody told him he was special and a day later he’s betraying everybody. In fact, I’m honestly not even sure what the evil soldiers were getting out of the deal except bragging rights. It looked like a crappy place to live, and the Big Bad clearly had no trouble using them like tools. I was also confused since I have no idea why “tyto” owls are supposed to be better, or even in what way they’re better.
Soren and a new friend escape (the new friend never really did squat). They meet some people, who are amusing but not really that important. They more or less just arrive at the Guardians’ home in minutes and with very little fuss. Honestly, the rest of the story was so awesomely predictable there’s little point in writing it down. The obvious traitor is a traitor, the blatant Big Bad kills off said traitor (saw that a mile away), Soren saves the day and the Guardians win.
Really, now that I think about it, the movie is deficient in two ways. First, owl society is pretty neat to see, but very confusing. It’s just all kinds of images which don’t mean much. Why is Ga’Hoole semi-mythical to Soren? Yes, it’s a bit isolated but apparently not more than a few day’s travel. Why does OtherGuy basically wander into psychotic villainy inside of two days. What is the Big Bad after? is it revenge or does he think he’s superior or something? And maybe I’m confused, but he looked like he wasn’t even the same kind of owl as his soldiers, and neither was his wifey. Or does “tyto” mean something else?
In the end, it’s not bad, like I sid. Just awful shallow and not really worth a full ticket price. But if you want to kill a couple hours or quiet the kids, you could do a lot worse.