Score: 1.5 / 5
This film is just not for me. I saw the 2010 animated film back in undergrad and didn't care for it much back then; it just seemed a bit too simplistic and oriented for much younger audiences than myself. It also pulled far too much from similar -- better -- fantasy ideas and imagery for me to take seriously. Apparently based on a 2003 children's novel (itself part of a series), the franchise blossomed with Gen Z and has evidently reached such success that we already are being treated to live action remakes.
That's plural, because the studio is already working on a sequel, which will reportedly be a similar remake of the 2014 animated sequel. Surely they intend to complete the trilogy. When will enough be enough? How soon is too soon? This blatant and artistically bankrupt money-devouring scheme should make everyone as angry at DreamWorks as they tend to be at Disney, if not more.
Worse -- and I admit I may not be the best judge of this -- this mostly live-action remake felt so like the original that I didn't even notice any significant change or departure. Written and directed by Dean DeBlois, who wrote and directed the originals, the material feels rinsed and recycled rather than scrubbed and redefined. It's just a cyclical exercise in content creation. It's barely filmmaking, and it certainly can't be called art.
I'll concede that, as someone who generally prefers live action to animation, I'd rather watch this film than the original. There's some nice set design and dressing, nice costumes, and some passably entertaining performances in this that I didn't appreciate in the animated original. There are also some indulgences in scenes like a flight sequence and some unnecessary backstory exposition that tend to slow the film's pace, making it feel just a bit more geared toward a slightly older audience, which I similarly appreciate (though I'm not sure any of it was necessary, and I'd have preferred a shortened viewing experience). And yet, despite this seeming-impetus for more developed storytelling, much of the action in the film requires extensive (and, surely, expensive) use of CGI to populate the screen with dragons and flight, yet these scenes provide CGI that would fit better visually in an animated movie rather than a live action one. Where is the logic here?! People criticized The Lion King (2019) for attempting live action yet feeling grossly animated (an accusation I find unfounded, as photorealism is a valid filmmaking goal in and of itself), yet this animation is more cartoonish and opaque than that. This is the kind of animation that we saw in Detective Pikachu, and nobody would say that hewed toward "realism."
And if you think I'm being too critical of the business side of this, take a look at what they're doing in Epic Universe in Orlando and how it aligned with the release of this film. The film is no artistic achievement in live-action remakes, in storytelling, in culture. It's a costly advertisement for a theme park, leeching money off fans who would rather cosplay and watch cosplay than engage in critically aware entertainment, art, and imagination. Disney has done this, too, but never have I seen such a blatant disregard for an IP's own fanbase in favor of grotesque desperation for money.
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