Review: Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

My grandson who is eight liked this movie. I thought it slooooooooow, thin and dependent on the 3-D as a substitute for true content.

When Soren, a young owlet, falls from his nest one evening, he’s plucked up and taken to the sinister St. Aegolius Academy. Once there, he must use his wits and bravery to escape his captors. Soren and his new band of orphans fight their way through many dangers, hoping to find refuge with a group of brave owls thought only to be a legend—the Guardians of Ga’Hoole! They find the Guardians, and return with them to the Academy in order to defeat the masked and evil owl and save all the other owls from evil domination. That sounds a lot more interesting than this movie turned out to be.

The first rule of good script writing is to keep the plot turning as it advances and each turn must be different and interesting of its own accord as the plot is revealed. This movie fails to do this. It flipped back and forth but the flips were rarely very different. A major plot point – the time line of hypnotizing Soren’s sister and handing her over to the traitor among the Guardians, was developed backward what we say being the reverse of what was reported – sloppy and lazy in a movie with so few plot points. I don’t believe there was enough to the book to keep the movie interesting. Watching owls fly over different scenes does not fill that need for change and development the plot of a full length movie requires. It might have done better as a television series where the dearth of material wouldn’t have been so obvious. It was occasionally beautiful, marginally interesting, not once exciting and at times utterly boring.