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You can't just throw words around and expect them to make sense

One of the worst crimes that an adaptation of a fantasy book can commit is to assume that absolutely everyone going to see it will be completely and fully aware of its source material. Some series, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, could get away with this because they are so phenomenally popular that they could just preach to the converted and make plenty of money, but they don't, instead choosing to provide at least basic explanations of what is going on for anyone who thinks that books are dumb and for chicks.

NAZI OWLS! does none of that, and from the outset starts throwing around words and concepts that are completely alien, assuming that people will care about the different castes of owl, or that they will be able to hear the word "gizzard" without thinking it sounds weird and funny. If this was a kind of sudden and shocking immersion into the world of the film, one designed to throw necessary information at the audience before easing up on the weirder concepts later on, then that'd be fine, but NAZI OWLS! just keeps going further and further down the rabbit hole. (Or whatever the owl equivalent of that saying is. Further up the tree?) After the main character,Soren, is kidnapped and taken to the evil owls' lair, he and a group of other owls are forced to look at the moon for several hours, a process known as "Moonblinking", which is meant to make them docile and easily controlled. Basically, it's a family friendly version of a full-frontal lobotomy. Yet this isn't really explained at all, it's just something that we are told will happen right before it does. There's nothing at stake, no weight, no danger because we don't really understand what is going on.

On the other hand, the film also fails spectacularly when it tries to provide explanations, because its explanations are completely insane. Take The Flecks, the MacGuffin at the center of the film which is meant to provide the evil owls with the advantage they need to finally defeat the Guardians of Ga'Hoole. (God, writing that combination of words made me feel like a fucking idiot.) All that is known about The Flecks for most of the film is that they're blue, they let off some form of energy, and they really hurt owls but don't hurt the bats that the evil owls have joined forces with. There's no real explanation offered until right at the end, when the Guardians are tricked into landing next to The Flecks, and the evil owl played by Helen Mirren (Oh yeah, Helen Mirren's in this. As an evil owl. She really can play anything.) triumphantly shouts, "Bats don't have gizzards to be impaired by the Flecks!" As far as I can tell, this means that The Flecks work by giving owls really, really powerful stomach cramps.


Putting pop songs in a fantasy epic is a really dumb idea

For most of its running time, NAZI OWLS! uses a classy orchestral score to soundtrack all of its action. The one exception is a montage in which Soren learns about blacksmithery (Okay, whilst this *does* answer the question of how all the owls have helmets, HOW DID OWLS INVENT BLACKSMITHERY? THEY LIVE IN TREES, WHY WOULD THEY EXPERIMENT WITH FIRE?) which is set to a song by Owl City.

I decided to start a new paragraph so that you would have a bit of breathing space in which to take in that knowledge, and have an opportunity to groan, cringe or facepalm, whichever you deem most appropriate.

Now, the problem with this isn't the choice of song, but the mere fact that they went for an pre-existing song in the first place. All it does is raise the question of whether or not the song exists in the reality of the film. Is there a band of owls called Owl City (a name which seems kind of redundant) who perform the song? More importantly, it pulls you out of the world of the film. It'd be like Peter Jackson deciding that, instead of using Howard Shore's iconic score, he would set the Hobbits leaving The Shire to I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers.

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