Well, I finally went to see Rise of the Guardians. It was one of the films I had been looking forward to this year. I liked the concept and I liked the William Joyce books they were based on, It had Guillermo Del Toro as one of the producers and it had Santa and the Easter Bunny fighting the powers of darkness to protect childhood, what’s not to like.
Regrettably while I enjoyed it, and didn’t feel as if I had wasted my money, I was more than a little disappointed. The design was beautiful and the actors did their job, especially Hugh Jackman as a very surly Easter Bunny, but all the way through it felt like it should have been better and I have a bad feeling I know why. I’ve been seeing numerous reviews that facetiously call Rise of the Guardians the Avengers with holiday characters that it is in fact another superhero film. If that is the case it suffers from what is the problem that most superhero films have out there have. The producers just have to make it an origin story showing how the characters become what they are, or how the band got together, or both. Nearly all of the time the story, no matter how good it is, gets dragged down by so much exposition it is almost impossible to follow. Very frequently in these franchises you almost want to ignore the first film completely and enjoy the sequel since it’s the one where they took care of all the baggage earlier also because of this I’ve seen a lot of these films suffer because they feel like all they’re doing is establishing the franchise.
In Rise of the Guardians the main plot (along with the fight the bad guy stuff) is about Jack Frost becoming a Guardian and learning his purpose and his place in the group. Because of this the rest of the cast spends a lot of time preaching at him. There’s also a lot of time put into the importance of belief. One thing that annoyed me throughout the film is why everyone says the power of faith should be, saying things like: “Do you stop believing in the sun on a cloudy day” What they show in the film faith is ridiculously fragile and this is exactly what the children do when their belief is challenged for more than a second.
Still Rise of the Guardians is a very pretty film with some utterly gorgeous designs and set pieces. My favorites include the eggs being prepared in the Easter Bunny’s warren; all of the scenes in Santa’s workshop and Jack Frost giving a boy the best sleigh ride ever. As I mentioned previously the big problem with this film is that it could have been so much more.
