I don't watch a lot of movies. Not good ones anyway. The theater experience is not usually my favorite thing unless it's timed well (I frequently get headaches in the theater, and if I go into the movie when it's light out, and come out when it's dark, I tend to feel depressed and like I wasted my time), and movies take a lot of investment in attention. I also have weird tastes, I tend to like things to be not too serious, I don't like a lot of gore, I don't like things that are really grim or dark. I mean, the world is a pretty grim place, so if I'm trying to distract myself from that I want it to be on the lighter side, right? Not that there isn't a place for grim or serious movies, but most of the time, it's not what I'm in the mood for. I grew up on 80s and 90s TV as well, episodic shows with no real consequences, over within a half hour. The time investment of a two or two and a half hour movie feels like a lot to me.
Also I cannot do horror movies of any kind, and I ESPECIALLY can't do zombie movies.
I'm more likely to watch movies at home, where I can leave the room for scary, intense, or embarrassing parts (please don't pause the movie if I get up and wander off for a minute or two...) and have easy access to additional water or the bathroom without missing large parts of the movie (and I can usually still hear it anyway from whatever room I'm in...)
So our household recently decided we were doing too many video games (or at least, spending too much time on them) and set aside a night of the week to not do video games. Right now it's Monday, and we'll either play board games or watch movies. Hatstand and Biggnife have movies they want Aproustian and me to see (most of the marvel movies, etc.) and I recently made a whole watchlist of Kaiju movies (every monster who appears in Godzilla movies, I want to watch their movies, in order of release...) so that seems a good time for it.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying there are a LOT of movies I've not seen (if it hasn't been on MST3K or Rifftrax, and even a lot of those I've not seen yet) and we're slowly working to remedy some of that, while keeping my tastes in mind.
Anyway, tonight we watched "How to Train Your Dragon", a movie I have been peripherally aware of especially as it spawned so much merchandising and apparently several sequels. I'd never seen it. Aproustian had seen it once, but didn't remember it. Apparently it is one of Biggnife's and Hatstand's favorite movies. I'd heard good things, and having such a strong recommendation made me interested (and also a little nervous, I hate it when I don't like something that other people love...)
It's a Dreamworks movie, and I know I've liked Dreamworks movies in the past. This is a general sense, I can't actually think of any Dreamworks movies as I type this and I'm not going to look them up right now. Feel free to list them all in the comments.
So, spoilers will follow this point now. You have been warned.
The movie starts off with a narrator describing the island he lives on. It is populated by vikings with Scottish accents (although, after the movie we agreed Scottish accents worked in a way that Norwegian/Minnesotan maybe wouldn't have) who are constantly fighting dragons that raid their livestock and burn their homes. Our protagonist is a straggly boy amongst a village full of sturdily built fighting people, and he is constantly getting in the way while trying to help. His name is Hiccup.
I appreciate the movie didn't actually linger on this for too long. And while he did have a moment in the fight in the beginning when he uses a ballista he developed to fire a bolas at a mysterious Night Fury type dragon, followed quickly by another dragon attempting to roast him and forcing his father, the village chief, to be distracted from the main fighting, it wasn't played too heavily as an embarrassment. The rest of the village was largely resigned to him. "That's just what he does." The blacksmith viking, who Hiccup works for, is jolly but also dismissive of who Hiccup is. The whole village is really, they want him to be like them, not... him.
However, Hiccup soon discovers that his ballista succeeded in knocking the Night Fury out of the sky, something no Scottish viking has done before. But when he attempts to kill it and earn his place amongst his people, he finds he can't. And he cuts the bolas free instead. The dragon then rounds on him, and moves to kill him, but also stops, and flies off. Hiccup is confused, and returns to tell his father that he will accept not being a warrior, that he can't kill a dragon after all. Unfortunately, the blacksmith had just talked his father into putting Hiccup into dragon-killing raining school, because ignoring Hiccup wasn't going to work forever. And his father, in typical movie-father fashion, ignores Hiccup's protests entirely, and immediately sets out to try and locate the dragons' nest to drive them away once and for all.
Hiccup finds himself imminently ill suited to dragon fighting, though the rest of his class of youngsters is not much better except for Astrid. Astrid is a girl about Hiccup's age who has dedicated herself to becoming the best dragon killing viking she can be, and goes about it in a very serious and studious fashion. I appreciated that the movie took a page from history and didn't make all the fighting vikings men here. Even in the big battle scenes, there are obviously women standing and fighting alongside the men with equal ferocity and tenacity. I definitely liked that.
Not so long movie short, Hiccup discovers the dragon he hadn't killed can't fly due to an injury to its tail-wing, and over time he builds a mechanical replacement while befriending the dragon, whom he named Toothless. (The name comes from the fact that Toothless apparently has retractable teeth.) In the process, he also learns various weaknesses of the dragons (they're basically big flying cats who breath fire and are scared of eels), and utilizing this knowledge, Hiccup rises to the top of his class, frustrating Astrid. All the scenes of Hiccup learning to interact with Toothless were adorable, especially the initial scene where Hiccup brings a fish for Toothless, and toothless eats it, then spits half of it back up for Hiccup to eat. Hiccup tries to pretend to eat it, but Toothless makes a swallowing motion until Hiccup gags down the raw fish. It was hilarious. If that had been my cat, his primary means of telling me what he wants it to swat my feet and gently bite my ankles. Hiccup has it easy.
The father comes back, having failed to find the nest and having lost a lot to the dragons in the process. But he is overjoyed that Hiccup is apparently finally becoming a dragon fighter. Meanwhile, Hiccup has perfected his wing replacement, and he and Toothless are getting better at flying together. I liked that Hiccup actually had to help with the flying, as he couldn't rig Toothless's replacement wing up to Toothless's control, and needed to essentially change gears to help in controlling the flight. It made the evolution of the dragon-riding feel very natural, if that makes sense.
Astrid becomes suspicious, and eventually finds Hiccup with Toothless, but after a brief argument, and some petty revenge flying by Toothless, Astrid is won over to during a flight through the clouds with Hiccup and Toothless. Unfortunately, they get caught up in the aftermath of a dragon raid, and Toothless flies along with the other dragons, where they find all the stolen sheep and fish are dropped into the maw of a giant queen dragon in the center of the dragon nest. After a narrow escape, they return, but the next day Hiccup is going to have to kill a dragon in front of the whole village as a reward for being the top of his class. His attempt to prove that dragons don't have to be harmful goes predictably wrong when his enraged father bangs on the cage, enraging the dragon Hiccup had calmed. Toothless flies to Hiccup's rescue, but the vikings subdue him. Hiccup's father disowns him, but learning about how Toothless flew Hiccup to the dragon's nest, chains Toothless to a ship and sets off with the entire village. I saw this coming, but I really liked the way the movie handled it. I'm always intensely uncomfortable about this sort of misunderstanding/family squabble sort of thing, and I really appreciated that the movie did not linger on this whole sequence. It was a necessary sequence to move the plot forward, but it happened without a lot of overly dramatic moments or excruciatingly painful embarrassments, and just moved on. Basically it had moved on before I had a chance to feel uncomfortable, and I really liked that.
Hiccup is distraught, and Astrid confronts him (in a friendly way) about why he didn't kill Toothless the first time. And again I really liked how the movie handled this. Hiccup is unsure, initially just saying he couldn't kill the dragon. Astrid challenges this, and he replies that when he tried, he just wouldn't. Astrid points out that he said "wouldn't" instead of "couldn't" the second time, which forces Hiccup to examine it further, and conclude that when he went to kill Toothless, he realized that Toothless was just as scared as he himself was. And that moment of dawning empathy lead to a new understanding of dragons that the old "kill on sight" methods had not allowed. It was sort of understated in the movie itself, but I think maybe one of the most powerful scenes for me after all that had gone before.
Moving along, Hiccup's father and the viking fleet finds the dragon nest, and break the wall down to get into the cave. The regular dragons immediately flee, and Hiccup's father realizes he may have made a mistake. The gigantic queen dragon emerges and lays waste to the viking ships, and would lay waste to all the vikings as well if Hiccup's father and the blacksmith had not distracted it. This gives enough time for the youngsters, led by Hiccup and Astrid, to ride to the rescue on the training dragons. While the others keep the big dragon distracted, Hiccup goes to save Toothless from the boat Toothless is tied to. Exciting series of events, Hiccup and Toothless manage to defeat the big dragon, Hiccup's father apologizes and says he is proud of Hiccup, all ends well, Toothless saving Hiccup from a deadly fall at the last moment. Well, most of him.
Hiccup wakes after apparently several months to the sight of Toothless in his house. Emerging he discovers the village has welcomed dragons into their lives, and everybody is now riding around on them and stuff. Hiccup himself survived although he lost his left foot, and the blacksmith has replaced it with an iron prosthetic. And the ends with an inversion of the initial narrative description: Where before the dragons were pests, now they are pets.
It is a very sweet movie, I think it has a lot of heart. And the dragons are adorable in many ways. (I'm a sucker for cats, and a giant flying cat I could ride would be pretty fantastic.) I liked how it handled a lot of things that are frequently difficult for me to get through in a movie. Overall, very much liked this one. I would rate it very high, but I have no rating scale. Only avoid if you do not like dragons or fantasy settings or Scottish vikings, because you get a lot of all three of those in the movie.
I don't know if I'll do more of these movie reviews, but I felt like writing this one, so I hope you enjoyed it!
I'm glad you liked it! The flying lizard-cat take on dragons I thought was up your alley, so I'm glad I wasn't wrong :)
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