Change Your Image
tomrwhite
Reviews
The Legend of Zelda: The Hero of Time (2009)
Painfully Awkward and a complete mess.
Hardcore Zelda fans might like it just because "Hey, it's Zelda" but aside from the novelty factor of getting to see your beloved series on the screen, there's really nothing to offer here. The plot is barely there and yet still unclear. Things just sort of happen. The hero does not have any emotional resonance to anything in the entire movie. We get only the most vague notion of what sort of world the characters inhabit or what's at stake. There's no weight to any of it. The only idea we have of who the villain is, what he wants, and what impact he has on the world is mostly done in one scene where he just explains his plan to a bland side character, or through vague pleadings to Link to save the world. Characters do things simply because they're things they do in the game. If you've never played Ocarina of Time, you'll have no idea what anyone is doing or why. And if you have played it, you'll still be baffled by how the storyline veers away from a simple retelling of the game and into fanfiction territory.
It's difficult to tell who this is supposed to appeal to because non-Zelda fans won't have the slightest idea what's happening and won't learn anything about the Zelda mythos, but it still contains "plot twists" that Zelda fans will see coming a mile away. Oh, Shiek was Zelda the whole time? Yeah, we know. And then when Zelda reveals herself, which is completely unprompted by anything, Link doesn't even react. Is he surprised? Did he know all along? The answer is: Shrug! Link reacts to this surprise reveal like a bean bag would react to a chemistry lecture.
I can acknowledge some talent went into this and it's sad that so much of it was wasted. The visual effects aren't Hollywood-worthy but for a small indie project, they aren't terrible. Maybe the actors are good in other productions, but the script and the direction is so bad they just don't have anything to work with.
Some of the scenes feel improvised and just don't work at all. There's one scene where Link enters a store and the shopkeeper launches into a whole... bit? The actor goes on for a while about nothing, and Link, like usual, does not react, so the entire tone of the scene is just confused. Are we supposed to find him funny? Not a single character has any defining traits so we don't know if this guy is comparatively wacky or silly. It's just a lot of words and gestures that mean nothing to us.
I do not recommend this movie to anyone other than the truly morbidly curious for case studies in what not to do in movie-making.