Rise of the Guardians: Meh. (Spoiler Free)

[attackfish]

I’ve been wanting to see Rise of the Guardians for a while now, because Rufftoon worked on it, and because of all the cool gif sets on tumblr, so I got it from Netflix.

And I’m not really sure what other people see in it.

Maybe it’s because I never really celebrated Christmas or Easter as a kid, but Rise of the Guardians seems even more culturally specific and alienating to people outside of the culturally Christian European and North American mainstream than the current Hollywood norm.  Two of the guardians are specifically tied to Christian holidays.  Great.  Little kid me would have felt very welcomed.

And then there’s the fact that of the main characters, there are five guardians, Pitch, and a kid.  Of those, all but one of them are male.  One out of seven is pathetic, especially in a movie about people who guard and take care of children.

Plus, I didn’t like the movie’s attitude towards fear.  Fear itself is a protective force.  Yes, it can become toxic and put you in danger, but as anyone who has ever had a manic episode can tell you, so can the “positive” emotions.  Fear protects children.  It helps keep them safe.  I would love to have seen a dark, terrifying, but ultimately good guardian embodying fear, and instead we got the sinister and one note Pitch.

There were things about it I did like.  I liked the animation, I liked Jack’s story and why he was chosen to be a guardian, I liked a lot of the imaginative details, especially he hummingbird themed tooth fairy.  It was fun, it was diverting, but it didn’t do much for me, and I don’t feel the need to rewatch it. *shrug*

Comments

[sholio]

Yeah, I'm kind of relieved it's not just me, because I was actually looking forward to the movie quite a lot, and then it totally left me flat. Two-dimensional characters (I mean, even leaving aside that they're cartoons), by-the-numbers plot, only one female character in the whole cast, a message I couldn't really get behind ... I can usually forgive a movie for one or more of these flaws if it's funny and clever enough to make up for it (see: Pixar and their typical lack of women) but this movie just wasn't.

[attackfish]

I'm glad it isn't just me too, because everyone else seems to really love it, and it left me, pardon the pun, cold. It didn't have a whole lot of substance, and what substance was there left a bad taste in my mouth. And why do people keep crossing it over with everything?

[lizbee]

I didn't see it because I was really mad about the Easter Bunny being Australian, with stereotypically "Aboriginal" art and voiced by a white man. Glad to hear I didn't miss much.

[attackfish]

That went right over my head (now if the art had been stereotypically American Indian...) but I did notice and really disliked the way the guardians had a pretence of being multicultural, Austrailian and Russian accents, etc. but were all either visibly white or coded white.

No, you did not miss much.

[lokifan]

Agreed, I felt alienated and I'm a culturally Christian Brit. From what I hear Pitch is a more complex character in the novel? But I haven't read it. And yeah, I agree: fear is protective as well as potentially destructive.

[avocado-love.livejournal.com]

I just thought it was a poor movie -- overly corny, even for a holiday flick with a strange moral of a story about faith that didn't really fit in with anything. People were all sorts of up in arms because they thought that the general public didn't want an 'original story' but the fact was... it just wasn't that good.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

There's a novel? That's good to know. And unusually for m after watching a movie based on a book, I feel so underwhelmed, I don't even feel inclined to search it out.

EDIT: I looked it up, it's based on a series of children's novels and picture books, and there is a novelization of the movie. Either way, not overly inclined to read,especially since both look like they have the same gender and cultural problems as the movie.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Didn't want an original story? Part of the problem is that it wasn't that original. It was pretty though. That makes up for a lot in a lot of people's minds.

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

One word for you, scientology. The whole about fear . . . yeah. Fear and negative emotion are just the spirits of the aliens that died 10,000 years ago and are now invading our bodies. So . . . yeah, O.O There you have it.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oy.

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Volcanoes are apparently the Icon of the . . . er. that. yeah. After Earth was all about that.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Do you mean Battlefield Earth? I remember back when The Last Airbender was made, a bunch of people were trying to decide which was worst, TLA, or Battlefield Earth.

We looked up Scientology's core beliefs in class in 10th grade, since none of us knew what they actually believed, and we were just like "What?"

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that one too. Star Trek ITD also had undertones. I had never heard of it until I read an article about it that left be . . . baffled is probably the best way to describe it.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Covert religiosity in SciFi isn't uncommon. My dad used to be Mormon. He wrote an essay long after he left about how the original Battlestar Galactica was all about Mormanism.

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Huh, how interesting. I don't mind it but when they're shoving it down your throat, yeah, not very welcomed then. I don't like to have things shoved down my throat.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Literally or figuratively.

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Pff . . . I plead the 5th. ;-P