Metacritic reviews

Director Zack Snyder (300) has crafted the rare 3-D eyegasm that's worth the premium ticket price.

This picture sometimes rivals "Avatar" in its spectacular landscapes and thrilling flying sequences, but of course it won't come anywhere near those megagrosses, and it's too scary to be wholeheartedly embraced by children.

There's a confusion that you can sense as well, with the film pulled between its light and dark sides just as the owls struggle with forces of good and evil. That hesitation keeps "Guardians" from reaching the deep, emotionally rich center that confers greatness in the animation world.

A gorgeously animated combat fantasy - "The Lord of the Rings" meets "Happy Feet."

The result is sometimes charming and always visually astonishing.

The movie is beautiful but, for one unfamiliar with the source material, confusing. I needed an owl scorecard.

Issues of faith, courage, loyalty, sacrifice and betrayal (the last perpetrated by Soren's brother) are all tackled by Snyder with understated maturity, though a series of slightly repetitive aerial skirmishes can't quite match the inventiveness of Feet's buoyant song-and-dance mash-ups.

Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.

Though visually stunning and blessed with immaculate 3D work, film is fatally bogged down by tackling an essentially ridiculous premise (gladiator-attired owls fight genocide) with stony solemnity, and by subsisting on a note of sustained menace and terror in what is ostensibly a children's film.

Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.