BEFORE: 2016 was something of a banner year for movies - so far I've seen at least 100 films that were released in that year, with another 12 still on the list. There was "Rogue One", "Suicide Squad", "Deadpool", "Arrival", "Batman v. Superman" and "X-Men: Apocalypse", just to name a few - and for kids movies, there was "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", "Sing", "Moana", "A Monster Calls", "The Secret Life of Pets", "The Jungle Book", "Zootopia", "Finding Dory", "The BFG", and "Ice Age: Collision Course", and "Kung Fu Panda 3", all competing for the attention of parents. Is it any wonder that this re-make of "Pete's Dragon" got lost in the shuffle?
I was shown the original "Pete's Dragon" Disney film when I was a kid, and I burned it to DVD recently when TCM ran it, so I was able to put both films together on one DVD, back before my DVR died and I lost the ability to dub films off the movie channels. Perhaps if I have time this weekend I should watch the old 1977 version for comparative purposes. Maybe it just doesn't hold up if you're not a kid any more, but then again, that one had songs and real hand-drawn animation, so maybe it will be better than this modernized version, there's only one way to find out.
Bryce Dallas Howard carries over from "Gold", and sets me up for another trip to the movie theater tomorrow night.
THE PLOT: The adventures of an orphaned boy named Pete and his best friend Elliot, who just happens to be a dragon.
AFTER: I see where they were going with this one, but how exciting can ONE dragon be, compared with a whole theme park full of dinosaurs? Maybe I'm getting hung up on the design of the CGI dragon character here, but it just looks kind of odd, like they started with Sully from "Monsters, Inc." and just expanded him out to dragon-size and shape.
Plus, the story is so simplistic, a boy gets orphaned on a car trip with his parents, and survives in the forest by teaming up with a dragon, that somehow doesn't choose to eat him. I guess it eats wolves and bears instead? Redford's character is an older man who claimed to have an encounter with a dragon himself when he was a young boy, so are we supposed to assume that this was the SAME dragon, or a different one? This is very unclear, the story never even bothers to think about this. I say it would have been a nice touch if the dragon recognized the boy, now an old man, from their previous meeting, but again, the story doesn't go there.
Instead we're led to believe that loggers are bad, hunters are bad, park rangers are good, which really seems too simple to believe. Don't we still need loggers, at least responsible ones? And not all hunters can be redneck meatheads, I'm sure some of them might have a few brains somewhere. So this really feels like a bunch of city-folk made a film about what it's like to live out in the country, where there might be Bigfoots, (Bigfeet?) chupacabras, and why not, maybe even a dragon or two, if you know where to look.
Plus, the dragon can turn invisible, which is kind of where they lost me. I could believe that the dragon could blend in, camouflage-style, in the greens and browns of the forest, but disappearing completely is another matter. I think this story element carried over from the 1977 Disney film, but it's just not believable. But then again, nothing here really is. At least with the "Jurassic Park" films there's one foot (or at least a big toe) in the science world, with DNA samples and gene-splicing and embryo implantation, and here it's just, "Oh, yeah, dragons are a thing." Plus, doesn't the film "How to Train Your Dragon" show 6 or 7 kinds of dragons? And this film has just one, how boring.
OK, I just took a really long break, during which I re-watched the original 1977 "Pete's Dragon", for comparative purposes. I don't think I've watched the film since I was a kid, so let's say 40 years or so. It's a very corny, very silly film, with a lot of slapstick and not a lot of sense. About the only thing the remake has in common with it are the characters of Pete and Elliot, the boy and the dragon, everything else is different. In the original the orphaned Pete arrived in the town of Pashamaquoddy (presumably in Maine, based on all the lobster traps) sometime in the early 1900's (after electricity was introduced but before cars, it seems) along with his occasionally invisible, possibly imaginary dragon friend. Questions about the reality of the dragon are compounded by the inebriation of the adults that happen to see him. Pete's running away from the Gogans, a family of hillbillies that bought him from an orphanage in order to make him work their fields, and then have fun abusing him. (This was back when you could make fun of hillbillies, and also child abuse...). Pete meets Nora and Lampie, a father-daughter pair of helpful lighthouse-keepers, after causing much ruckus in the town square with his invisible dragon, and then a pair of shady snake-oil salesmen who would love to catch a dragon and use it to make more phony medicines. Pete sends Elliot off to find a lost sailor, the intended of Nora, while living in the lighthouse and slowly forming a family bond - then the Gogans show up in town, and everyone tries to catch both Pete and the dragon for their own personal gain.
You just couldn't make a film like that today - the hokey musical had its time, which came and went, but the film does have animation from Don Bluth (back before he left Disney to do his own thing) and stars like Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Helen Reddy and Shelley Winters. (Also, a pre-Grease Jeff Conway as one of the Gogan boys, Jim Backus as the town's mayor and Charlie Callas as the voice of Elliot...). And kids might not realize (but as an adult, I sure did) that making the dragon invisible half the time isn't just a convenient plot point, but a great way to keep a film's animation and effects budget down. Just make a bunch of things fall down around the set, and say that an invisible dragon is knocking it over, it's diabolically genius.
So, I think they did what they could to modernize the story of Pete's Dragon, here, but unfortunately it just can't compete. Even after moving the story to (I'm guessing) the Pacific Northwest, and taking out the silly songs and slapstick comedy, it's still missing something - maybe the heart from the original Disney film? It's like they wanted to make a whole movie out of that shot in "Jurassic Park" where everyone stares slack-jawed upon seeing the dinosaurs for the first time - hoping that the same sense of wonder gets transferred to the audience, but that's just not enough in the end. Maybe a kid might think differently, but I have to judge this film (and now the original, too) as an adult.
Also starring Oakes Fegley (last seen in "This Is Where I Leave You"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Lovelace"), Karl Urban (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Oona Laurence (last seen in "The Beguiled"), Robert Redford (last seen in "Truth"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last heard in "Cars 3"), Marcus Henderson (last seen in "Get Out"), Aaron Jackson, Phil Grieve, Jim McLarty, Ian Harcourt, Steve Barr, Levi Alexander, and the voice of John Kassir,
RATING: 5 out of 10 tranquilizer darts
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