brother subplot is a nice, mature touch for a children’s movie-it’s charming enough.
While it’s not a particularly audacious story-although the brother vs. When they’re both kidnapped by the Pure Ones, Kludd ultimately sides with his captors to become a soldier in their ranks while Soren and fellow captive Gylfie ( Emily Barclay) find their way to the Guardians, the good owls who will help save the day. In this larger story, we get the more personal tale of the hero Soren ( Jim Sturgess), a young owl who earns the jealousy of his brother Kludd ( Ryan Kwanten). Snyder is such a bizarre choice for a family film about talking owls who are kidnapped by evil owls (the "Pure Ones") to work in the mines and get a special metal that can defeat the guardian owls of legend. RELATED: Every Batman Movie Ranked from Worst to Bestĭid you forget this film existed? Did you forget that Zack Snyder directed it? I did! A friend had to remind me in the middle of my re-watch project about Legend of the Guardians, a film that has been lost to time, and, after watching it, I can understand why. It’s a film that just doesn’t work because it’s trying to serve too many requests while Snyder also wants to tinker around with superheroes that haven’t had enough of a chance for development in their latest iterations. That's not to mention the weird "Knightmare" scene and time-traveling Flash. But then that’s not enough so you have to have Wonder Woman (one of the few bright spots in the film) as well as an awkward scene where we meet the rest of the Justice League in Quicktime videos. The film itself feels like its bowing to Man of Steel underperforming at the box office so they have to introduce Batman. All we learn about either hero is that Superman is kind of aloof except for his love of Lois Lane, and Batman is a bit of a sadist and also super dumb as he’s easily manipulated by the (terribly acted) Lex Luthor.Įven with Snyder’s personality fully on display, you still get the sense that he’s bending over backwards to address studio notes. The movie highlights how badly we needed another Superman solo movie before digging into this one as the Man of Steel is forced to share screentime with the Dark Knight. To deconstruct Superman and Batman doesn’t really play to the strengths of either character, and instead turns their big battle into a dour affair where the film is bookended by funerals.īatman v Superman’s biggest sin isn’t that it’s dark, but rather that it’s dull. Nevertheless, on the whole, Zack Snyder’s superhero film feels overbearingly dark and brooding, and while that’s a legitimate take, it’s a take he already kind of made with Watchmen. To its credit, the Ultimate Edition makes more sense than the theatrical cut where all the conspiracy stuff feels incomplete and just raises more questions than it answers. The sucker punch results in a miss and a faceplant.
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On one level, I do admire the film’s bonkers ambition, but Snyder, who values visuals above all else, doesn’t understand how to best tell his own story. gave him so much money to execute his lavish vision. The “shared fantasy” really only belongs to Snyder, and I can’t believe that Warner Bros.
Why does she care about clockwork zombie Nazis? Did she have a grandfather figure who doled out fortune cookie wisdom? Those elements are Snyder stepping out from behind the camera intending to chastise but instead coming off as complicit.
We don’t know what Babydoll loves because we never know her as a character. You can't put that much effort into design and execution and then feign indifference or subversion.
It wants to hit you with the “sucker punch” of feeling guilty of having relished those dull set pieces and young women in skimpy outfits, but in truth, Snyder loves those things too. Some see this as a rich critique on the masculine gaze, but the problem with Sucker Punch (among the fact that the action scenes are tedious and have no stakes because they’re not real) is that it wants to have it both ways. The asylum is the reality, the brothel is the fantasy, and the action set-pieces that come when Babydoll dances are the double-fantasy. The problem comes in the way it’s structured-the girl, Babydoll, is doomed before the film really even begins, and we’re witnessing fantasies layered on fantasies. The movie has an interesting set-up: A young girl ( Emily Browning) wants to escape a mental institution before she’s lobotomized, and recruits her fellow inmates to steal a list of items to aid in their jail break. At worst, it’s an unbearable slog of total hypocrisy drenched in empty machismo. Sucker Punch is, at best, a woefully misguided feminist treatise.