Just when we thought we’d seen the worst trailer of the year, with Kevin Spacey as Jack Abramoff in “Bagman,” along comes Zack Snyder to lower the bar… The “300” director is finishing up his masturbatory female-led actioner “Sucker Punch” at the moment, but he’s found the time to direct a CGI-animated version of popular kids books Guardians of Ga’hoole which hits in IMAX 3D this September, and a new trailer has just premiered over at Yahoo.
Suggesting a level of animated animal murder not seen since “Watership Down,” the plot involves Soren, a young owl who is kidnapped and placed in an owl orphanage that attempts to brainwash owls in an attempt to take over all the kingdoms of owls. Owl owl owl owl owl owl owl. Owl. The mostly Australian-accented cast includes Jim Sturgess, Rachael Taylor, David Wenham, Emilie de Ravin, Geoffrey Rush, Richard Roxburgh, Hugo Weaving, Ryan Kwanten, Helen Mirren and Abbie Cornish, so the performances should at least be reliable, and the visuals are admittedly fairly impressive.
But really, this looks awful. The trailer’s pretty badly cut, but even so, the plot seems to go through the same old destiny/chosen one bullshit, the characters look to be indistinguishable from each other and someone really needs to take Zack Snyder’s music collection away from him. And don’t get us started on the quote-unquote comedy; if the director’s career has taught us nothing, it’s that he doesn’t have a comic bone in his body, and that’s borne out by this clip. ‘Hiwawious’ indeed…
But it’s at least good of the marketing department to include the moral in the trailer. If you’ve always wanted to see Helen Mirren and the guy from “True Blood” play an evil pair of married birds, or if you have a child with an unhealthy interest in cockfighting, “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole” hits theaters September 24th.