Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

After an entire month of horror movie reviews, what better way to cleanse the palette than an animated feature for children?  I opted to go with a movie that I had always been curious about, but never went to see because...well...I don't have kids, so I can pick and choose my animated movie experiences.  Aside from the fact that the CG animation looks amazing in this trailer, this is also Zack Snyder's first effort at directing an animated movie (although I would argue that Watchmen and 300 come pretty darn close), and I've always liked his visual touch, so hopefully this is pretty awesome.

In a throwback to 80s "children" movies like The Dark Crystal, The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole opens with a kidnapping.  After all, who says that children's movies shouldn't make your children cry?  Soren (voiced by Jim Sturgess) is an owl that was goofing off with his little brother, Kludd (Ryan Kwanten), when Kludd kicks Soren out of the nest, before he could fly.  And, because nature abhors terrible siblings, Kludd also lost his balance and fell to the base of their maghty home tree, with Soren.  Instead of getting eaten by Tasamanian Devils, which was apparently an option, the pair was rescued/kidnapped by a couple of dim-witted adult owls.  These scary-looking creatures take young Soren and Kludd to a distant land, where they are presented with an interesting choice.  They can either follow the racist/speciesist teachings of Nyra (Helen Mirren), queen of the Pure Ones, or they can become mindless slaves.

Alternate title: White (Owl) Power

Kludd opts to follow the obvious villain, while Soren rebels and tries to escape.  The strange thing about the Pure Ones is that they're supposed to be the stuff of legend; Soren and Kludd grew up to takes of them being the villains in a long battle against the heroic Guardians.  If the Pure Ones are real, I wonder if the Guardians could be real, too?

Above: an owl realizing that someone wrote sixteen books about owl racism

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole could not be a modern animated movie without a ridiculously famous cast of voice actors.  The most effective in their roles were probably Helen Mirren and Geoffrey Rush; both have wonderfully emotive voices and did a fine job as important, but ultimately peripheral, characters.  Rush plays a great grouch, so it was nice to see that talent being utilized.  Hugo Weaving had a double role, although his voice talents are not exactly what I would call "audibly versatile."  He fine fine in both parts, but anyone who knows his voice can instantly recognize him in both roles.  Joel Edgerton was pretty good as the head bad guy, but it seems odd in retrospect that he was the cast member chosen for the villain role, and not Weaving or Rush.

Maybe he got the role thanks to his physical presence

Sam Neill was well-cast in a bit part, where his lovely voice was meant to be a contrast to his character's actions, and that was nicely done.  But those are just the most notable supporting voice actors.  Jim Sturgess played the main character, a young and idealistic owl who sometimes gets the benefits of super-slow motion shots.

ACTING!

Sturgess was fine, but this is a pretty generic character and he didn't really add anything special to the part.  An odd thing about this cast (that I just noticed) is that it is predominantly Australian, with a few Brits  sprinkled here and there.  I didn't realize that owls needed to speak the Queen's English.  Ryan Kwanten, Anthony LaPaglia, Richard Roxburgh, Leigh Whannell, David Wenham, Essie Davis, Abbie Cornish, and Angus Sampson, Aussies one and all, had roles of varying importance.  Most of their voices were recognizable, but I guess that's point when you fill your voice cast with actual actors.  None of them were bad, but none were too impressive.  As for the non-Australian supporting cast, I thought Miriam Margolyes was suitably cartoonish as a snake nanny and Emily Barclay was suitably bland as the romantic interest for Jim Sturgess.

Romantic owl eyes are slightly unsettling

What about Zack Snyder's direction?  It's no secret that Snyder likes to aim for "epic" as a director, and he did a solid job framing Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole in an epic fashion.  It is interesting watching Snyder's direction in a film where he can get exactly the visuals he wants.  It's not too different from his normal style.  The visuals are stunning.  The slow-motion is prominent and occasionally questionable.

Or, as Snyder likes to call it, "The speed at which all things should happen"

There are large-scale battles, where a small cast of heroes faces down a large number of interchangeable villains.

They're like Storm Troopers that cough up pellets

Snyder tells the story ably enough, but he doesn't get great performances out of his most important characters.  The ideas of love and betrayal have never been prominent in any of Snyder's other films, so seeing him ignore them in a children's story might not be as surprising as it should be.  Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole has all the basic elements of an entertaining animated film, but there's no emotional core to it. Part of the problem is with the writing, which spends little time on characterization, but the director should notice a little thing like entirely two-dimensional characters and have it changed.

I'm guessing he focused more on eye reflections than the script

My other problem with Legend of the Guardians is that it feels very, very familiar.  If you're familiar with Star Wars or the Chronicles of Narnia, or just about any other epic tale with children as an intended audience, then you've seen this plot before.  A lot of kid's movies are like that, but this feels like a Frankenstein of epic childhood fiction, with the only new addition being the owls.

This scene actually dubs in dialogue from Attack of the Clones

I take that back.  Making some of the child characters into mindless slaves is somewhat unique, especially in a movie aimed at children.

The moment that crystallized my feelings toward Legend of the Guardians came toward the end.  After growing up with tales of the Guardians of Ga'Hoole, Soren is happy to tell his father that the Guardians are not just legend, but are real.  His father's response was, "You made them real."  At first glance, it looks like the meaningless "kids rawk" fluff that often pops up in animated movies.  But this was so blatantly wrong that my wife got seriously irritated.  She actually raised her voice to ask, "HOW?  They already exist!"  My wife doesn't like every movie, but she doesn't loudly question movies very often.  To put that in perspective, the last time she watched an animated feature and wasn't happy with it was G-Force.  Congrats, Legend of the Guardians, you are in elite company.  Apparently, there was not enough cute to counteract the dull and stupid here.

Sorry kid, not cute enough

Let's be honest, though.  This is a movie for kids, and the standards of entertainment for children are comically low.  Sadly, Legend of the Guardians doesn't quite meet those unimpressive standards.  There are a few moments that truly "wow" the viewer --- yes, they are in slow motion --- but they are not the most important or memorable parts of the plot.

This scene > rain flying

However, thanks to the dull story, these inconsequential scenes are what I remember most about this film.  The story is too dark to be cutesy, but there are characters clearly designed to just be cute.  And yet, the story is not dark enough to be frightening or to make the story less predictable.  Even the primary staple of animated movies, the goofy supporting character, is absent for most of this movie.  Yes, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole looks nice, but it is genuinely uninteresting and charmless.

In the Mouth of Madness

While searching Netflix for a horror movie that might have slipped under my radar, I stumbled across In the Mouth of Madness.  The film was directed by John Carpenter, who I occasionally enjoy, and was released in 1995, right around the time when he made the silly but enjoyable Escape From LA and the James Woods-ian Vampires.  A director I enjoy in the midst of a film stretch I like?  That sounds like a reasonable bet.

In the Mouth of Madness begins with John Trent (Sam Neill) being taken to an asylum, where an inquisitive doctor (David Warner) asks to hear his tale.  This doctor also comments on how clever Trent is to cover himself and his cell in black crayon crosses; it's almost like he wants to stay in the psych ward.

He doesn't look crazy at all, does he?

The rest of the story is told in an extended flashback.  Trent is an insurance investigator that has a talent for sniffing out fraud.  He is hired by a literary publisher (Charlton Heston) to find his missing golden goose, the ridiculously successful fantasy/horror author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).  Cane has disappeared just before turning in what promises to be his most successful (and, perhaps, final) script.  Trent, along with Cane's editor, Linda (Julie Carmen), begins to investigate.  At first, the investigation seems to go nowhere.  Trent can't see any angle to explain Cane's disappearance if the publisher is legitimately worried about its author.  Things start to fall into place as Trent begins to read some of Cane's work; it appears to be a blend of H.P. Lovecraft themes with a little Stephen King mixed in.  While engrossed in the books, Trent begins to experience symptoms that many Cane readers also suffer: hallucinations, lost time, and difficulty identifying reality.

Things only get more surreal when Trent has an epiphany; through a laughably convoluted scenario, Trent comes to the conclusion that Sutter Cane is hiding in a hidden town that is named after the fictional setting for his stories.  Oddly enough, Trent appears to be right; but is the town based on the fiction, or are the books based on the town?

The acting in In the Mouth of Madness is a little odd.  I like Sam Neill just fine, although I occasionally questioned his accent.  The rest of the cast, though...I'm less sure of.  Julie Carmen doesn't seem to match the script very well, playing a pretty boring character, even when things take a turn to the fantastic.  Jürgen Prochnow does his best to play up to the maniacal gatekeeper his character is written as, but it's a surprisingly non-sinister role that could have used more depth.  Also, his hair was distracting.

Evil is sometimes fluffy

David Warner was wasted in a role that amounted to little more than a cameo.  Ditto for John Glover.  If you have a sharp eye, you can spot the film debut of Hayden Christensen, although his part consists of a kid who thinks Neill is acting weird.

The obvious successor to Jake Lloyd

This is the third and final chapter in what John Carpenter refers to as his Apocalypse Trilogy; as far as I can tell, they are unrelated  except for the depressing endings (the other two are The Thing and Prince of Darkness).  The more I see of Carpenter's work, the more I appreciate him.  That's not to say that the man doesn't disappoint from time to time, but he is consistent in his own way.  For instance, In the Mouth of Madness is yet another plot-driven film with a largely unimpressive cast and some solid special effects.  One of the downsides to this film is that Carpenter chooses to only give glimpses of the underlying horror in the movie, instead of glorifying in it, like he does in The Thing.

Take a good look, because this is all you get

My problem with In the Mouth of Madness is with the story.  For starters, I don't particularly enjoy metafiction; I think it is usually used by less talented writers to disguise the depth of bad scripts.  This movie didn't change my opinion.  The fact that it is mentioned early and often that Sutter Cane's fans frequently believe that his fictional world is reality makes it a foregone conclusion that In the Mouth of Madness will eventually get to the question of "What is reality?"  That's a respectable theme, but John Carpenter isn't the director for it, and this isn't the script to explore it with.  There isn't a twist.  You see the basic developments miles away, and that negates the alleged cleverness of the concept.

There are some good little moments here and there --- the makeup is good (when glimpsed) and I thought the insane asylum Carpenters (the band) joke was hilarious --- but there's just so much clumsiness.  For instance, Trent concludes that Sutter Cane is in New Hampshire by noticing a common red line on all of Cane's paperback covers; if you arrange the red lines just right, they make the outline of New Hampshire.  First of all, what makes someone look at a tiny snippet of a line and think, "Hey, that looks Hampshirian!"  Second, how many other shapes could have been made, using the images on those book covers?  Honestly, I don't care to know the answer.  This isn't an awful film, but it sets the bar high and doesn't come close to meeting it.  I'll give it credit for ambition, but the execution simply isn't there.

While researching this film, I stumbled across a blog that featured art for Criterion Collection DVD covers for movies that haven't been selected for the Criterion Collection yet.  Does In the Mouth of Madness deserve the Crtierion treatment?  Definitely not.  Still, this is a pretty cool cover.

Daybreakers

Let's assume that the inevitable vampire apocalypse happens in a few years.  What would that world look like?  According to Daybreakers, surprisingly similar to today.  In the year 2019, the world has become overwhelmingly populated with vampires; vampirism has spread like a pandemic, infecting almost the entire human population.  Aside from the streets being empty during the day, though, things appear much as they do now.  There's still TV, vampires drive cars, drink coffee (with sugar and blood), and eat normal stuff.  They just happen to catch fire and explode in the sun.  With vampires being so much like their human selves, it is not surprising that they are running through their most precious natural resource: human blood.  Yes, it is a subtle allegory.  The number of "wild" humans is almost nonexistent and, even with human farms (a term that is not used in the movie, but totally should have been), the supply of human blood will run out in a matter of days.

So, what's the big deal?  There are lots of animals that bleed.  Unfortunately, human blood is the only blood that can keep vampires from turning into monsters.  With extended periods of human blood starvation, normal human-looking vamps begin to change; they become paler, their ears become pointed, they lose the ability to speak, their hands become claws, and they grow wings.  Basically, they end up looking like Nosferatu with wings.

Ethan Hawke's character is a vampire hematologist (Hilarious!  Aren't they all amateur hematologists?) that is trying to create a human blood substitute for the vampire population.  So far, his best result has led to his vampire subject exploding.  And that, apparently, was progress.  Hawke works for Sam Neill's company; Neill wants to farm humans out for their blood.  Why he is funding Hawke's work when he clearly just wants human blood, I don't know.  They kind of explain this (the general population gets the substitute, while the rich pay for the good stuff), but Neill later claims this was a lie.  Whatever.  Hawke happens to hate being a vampire.  He doesn't want to die, but he has been abstaining from human blood for a while, drinking only pig's blood.  He accidentally encounters the human resistance and meets Willem Dafoe's character, a  human that was once a vampire.  Together, they work to find a cure to vampirism...but will anyone want it?

As far as vampire movies go, this is a solid entry into the genre.  It's smarter than a lot of vampire movies and I liked the pseduo-science that went into the script.  Hawke's work with Dafoe was interesting, if a little silly, and followed a moderately logical stream of thought.  Basically, the sun starts a vampire's heart beating, but it increases too fast, causing their body heat to increase, eventually lighting on fire.  The explosions aren't explained.  Still, that's not a terrible idea, so writers/directors Michael and Paul Spierig deserve some recognition for trying to make vampirism sound scientific.  I liked a lot of little touches in the movie.  I liked that vampires can buy cars that have darkened windows and digital video cameras so they can drive in the daylight.  I like that they don't only drink blood, but it is an important part of their diet.  I really liked that this movie explained the more monstrous style of vampires; you don't usually see the scary vampires in the same movie with human-ish vampires.  A lot of thought went into the production for the lifestyle of vampires, and it really comes through in the details of this film.

That said, this movie could have used more attention to the script.  To give you an idea of the poor choices made in this movie, Willem Dafoe sings a few lines of Elvis Presley's "Burning Love."  Yes, it's awkward.  There are other things that just don't make sense.  Sam Neill has a human daughter that is captured.  He has her turned into a vampire against her will, despite knowing how close they all are to starvation.  Not exactly father of the year material.  There is a scene where humans are traveling great distances to reach a supposedly safe hiding spot for humans, but they decide to travel at night.  Maybe I have more military training (I have seen several war movies) than the Spierig brothers, but that just strikes me as stupid to a fault.  Should they travel through empty streets during the day, or travel at night, when vampires are active?  Tough call.  That sort of random stupidity is all too common in this movie and really keeps it from being genuinely good.

The acting is solid, despite a largely foreign cast.  Ethan Hawke apparently combs his hair back only when he's a vampire, but is fine aside from that.  Willem Dafoe is Willem Dafoe; he's not winning over anyone with this performance, but he is typically solid and over-the-top at the same time.  Sam Neill does a good job with this villainous turn; he does not appear to like acting in American movies much, but it's always nice to see him pop up. Claudia Karvan, Jay Laga'aia, and Michael Dorman turn in respectable supporting performances, but nobody really stands out.  As far as direction goes, the Spierig brothers seem competent, but I think directing is just their way of getting their screenplays to the big screen.

Daybreakers has an interesting concept with a lot of good detail, but the story allows a lot of stupid things to happen.  I'll give the Spierig brothers kudos for trying to make a smart vampire movie, but they don't succeed here.