Saturday, May 1, 2010

Movie Review: How to Train Your Dragon

The movie starts in a viking village, where the two main opposing factions are the vikings and the dragons. The dragons steal the Viking's livestock and burn their villages, in return the vikings kill thousands of the dragons. The village is filled with blood thirsty vikings, all strong, battle -ready and knowledgeable about the dragons they want to kill and the tactics required to kill them. All except one of the dragons, a night fury, apparently the most legendary and deadliest of dragons. Compare this to the protagonist of the story, Hiccup, son of the mightiest viking and the chief of the Vikings, who is considered an anomaly among the vikings. Nerdy, weak and unable to kill a dragon at all, he is still determined to prove himself as a powerful viking and during a dragon attack, he managed to shoot down a dragon. However, no one believed him. The next day, Hiccup went to look for the dragon and found that it was a night fury. Unable to kill it, Hiccup freed him and soon the two develop a friendship as Hiccup started to train it secretly. But secrets dont tend to be kept secret for long and the story end explosively as the two enemies realize they had to team up together to fight the biggest foe of all.

The best thing about the film was the plot. I thought it was a very deep plot, showing Hiccup's moral courage to go against the Vikings, proving to them that dragons were never bad. Despite the fact that all the other vikings were massacring dragons, he dared to be different and train them instead. This kind of courage is evident in our literature text, To Kill A Mockingbird, too.

Another thing about the movie that i love so much is the graphics. Other cartoon movies give you paper cut outs and animations, but this movie really went beyond the limits. The dragons seem to have the ability to look extremely real in battle, as did all the Viking's battle ships. And the 'Ultimate enemy' really did look extremely life-like. All the fireballs thrown and catapults shot in the movie were all incredibly real and life-like.

If there was any problem with the movie, it was that such a great movie should have the potential to be way longer, so many more adventures could have taken place within the span of the entire movie instead of just spending such a large part of the movie on showing Hiccup's attempts to befriend and train the dragon. But still, I consider this a small flaw in comparision to how great the movie is.

The character's were also well portrayed and managed to show the theme, which was that the dragons were essentially good, well. Other than the protagonist, there were other characters in the story who played a major part in the movie, mostly by turning from the typical, dragon-hating vikings to people who have understood the dragons and made peace with them. One of these people would be Astrid, Hiccup's girlfriend in the end but enemy at the start. After hanging out with dragons for so long, Hiccup had learnt methods to subdue dragons peacefully without any harm to either party and his ability caused him to be well-known and respected in dragon-training class. Astrid, who was as good as any other boy,or even better, was none too happy about this as she wanted to be number one in the class. Soon, her desire to find out what led to Hiccup's sudden improvement made her stumble on the truth by accident and she soon changed her mindset about the dragon who Hiccup had aptly named "Toothless"(for apparent reasons). Another person who had undergone massive change in mindset towards dragons was Hiccups father, the chief of the Vikings. At first, he was upset with Hiccup's inability to kill or even hate dragons. When Hiccup became a hotshot in town for supposedly "subduing" the dragons in training class, he was extremely elated. However, the relationship between the two deteriorated when his father found out that about the means his child used to subdue the dragons, in other words, peaceful means without bloodshed or weaponry. In the end however, Toothless helped save the tribe from the 'enemy' and Hiccup's father's mindset finally changed, as could be seen from him freeing Toothless from the restraining harness.

Overall, i feel that this is a wonderful movie and i would really recommend families to watch it together.

Rating: 4.2/5

P.S I'm aware that this movie isn't sci - fi but i already had intention to do a movie review on this even before you listed it out as an ACE opportunity. But I won't mind even if this post isn't considered for ACE.

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