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So I watched How to Train Your Dragon 2 because it won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature and I needed to know why they chose it.
It had to be good right? After all, many times, a sequel can be a vast improvement upon the original....
Well guess what?
It wasn't any good. Wanna know why?
Well, for one thing, for a film that only runs an hour and 141 minutes, it feels like a three hour movie. That's a bad thing. And it's not like, say, Up or Toy Story 3, which have 90-100 minute run times yet feel longer. No, no, this isn't a story taking it's time to breathe and tell the story, this is just a badly paced film period. Everything moves painstakingly slowly or freakishly fast, everything dragging along with generic characters delivering generic dialogue generically.
I'm going to list the (few) positives of this film first so I don't look like a TOTAL Negative Nancy.
And because I can count them on one hand.
The cinematography is standard beautiful Deakins', but since I have no emotional investment in the film, I just kinda end up going 'oh hey that looks nice' and then checking my watch again. I can't blame Deakins for the film's bad pacing though, so I'll just leave it at that.
The music is....okay? I guess, since it's basically a retread of the first film's music, just now with female choirs instead of male choirs. Wow. Also, there's this bit when Stoic dies, and the bagpipes kick in and I swear some of the score for Titanic got edited in as a joke, but then they kept it in without telling John Powell.
Also, there was this really tender scene between Stoic and Valka where they sing their wedding vows, and I honestly didn't know that Cate Blanchett could sing. She's just too awesome man. But yeah, that was pretty much the only scene I got vaguely emotionally connected to anybody, and it was to the two forty year olds, and not the main character. Oh yeah and they had to screw it up by injecting lame comedy into it. Thanks. Can't just have a sweet tender scene between husband and wife can you? Have to stick in a joke in the middle of his emotional expression of undying love? Classy.
Okay now to the negatives.
This is the fun part.
This film is so damned boring man. Like I said before, the pacing is slow, and there is ZERO emotional investment in anything. Everything just feels like a paint by the numbers sequel. There's no spark, no life to it. It just feels like a boring, boring excusion back into the world. Sure, there's some nifty ideas, such as Hiccup becoming his own man or discovering his mom is alive (albeit a crazy Scottish cat dragon lady). But, instead of exploring that emotional investment, we just breeze over it. What's that? Your mother got kidnapped and you and your father thought she died a horribly violent death for twenty years? Oh wait, I'm wrong, she's just fine. She's just been hanging out with dragons for twenty years eating fish and dressing like a Star Wars alien reject. No attempt at contact, no attempt to send a message back saying "hey don't worry". Nope, she's just been a dragon loving hippy, spouting the whole 'oh they're just misunderstood' spiel that all of these crazy nature folk spout in these kinds of stories.
The worst part is that she's voiced by Cate Blanchett, one of my all time favorite actresses, and one of the greats of this century. She is an incredible actress, winning two Academy Awards, but here, her performance is hampered by the fact that I can't see her face and the fact that she decided to put on a rather over-the-top Scottish accent....when she's playing a Viking....who are from Norway. Okay.
Did I mention that the expressions of these characters are completely dead eyed? Never have I been so struck by such astoundingly soulless eyes. Except Toothless, and even then he's just an animal I feel minimal emotional connection to. But everybody else has the same, weird, bloaty headed, big eyed DreamWorks look that's just weird to me. Their expressions always feel either far too understated or far too over the top for the situation, and it doesn't help that, many times over the course of the movie, they over animate the body, so that the shoulders are pumping up and down like a jackhammer while the person's head swivels on their neck like a boggle head. It's very annoying.
Okay, what about Stoic. Oh well he gets no real development. He gets that scene with his wife, which is sweet, but that's it. I felt nothing when he died, since the film hadn't really built him up as a character. Gerard Butler does his best, but again, the facial animation isn't doing him any favors. I will admit his eulogy was poetic. I'm a sucker for those kinds of things. But yeah, I felt nothing when he died. Not a tear or even a pang of sadness. Just a sense of 'oh that's a bummer man'.
I did however get an emotional response....of disgust. You see, Kristin Wiig is in this. Her brutish, annoying puke of a female character has a crush on Kit Harrington's character. We get to see a shot of Kit Harrington's character's sweaty biceps flexing and then Kristen Wiig's character looking like she just had an orgasm while saying "Take me". How........pleasant. They do this twice you know. Because I need a horny teenager fantasizing about sweaty men in my movie. Thanks DreamWorks.
The villain is generic as all get out, and a waste of Djimon Housou's talents. Also, I'm a bit uncomfortable that the evil, dragon enslaving villain......is dark skinned....and all the heroic, dragon loving protagonists....are white skinned. Okay then. Just gonna leave that there for you guys to read into as much as you wish.
The rest of the supporting characters are just annoying 'comic relief' that serve no purpose to the overall narrative and just pad the film out. I felt nothing when Toothless got taken over by the alpha, I felt nothing when he defeated the alpha. Overall, this film did nothing but chew away 101 minutes of my time.
How delightful!
So yeah, I'm giving this film 1 star, and that's only for the cinematography and that one song that one time. That's it. What a boring, unemotional film.
It had to be good right? After all, many times, a sequel can be a vast improvement upon the original....
Well guess what?
It wasn't any good. Wanna know why?
Well, for one thing, for a film that only runs an hour and 141 minutes, it feels like a three hour movie. That's a bad thing. And it's not like, say, Up or Toy Story 3, which have 90-100 minute run times yet feel longer. No, no, this isn't a story taking it's time to breathe and tell the story, this is just a badly paced film period. Everything moves painstakingly slowly or freakishly fast, everything dragging along with generic characters delivering generic dialogue generically.
I'm going to list the (few) positives of this film first so I don't look like a TOTAL Negative Nancy.
And because I can count them on one hand.
The cinematography is standard beautiful Deakins', but since I have no emotional investment in the film, I just kinda end up going 'oh hey that looks nice' and then checking my watch again. I can't blame Deakins for the film's bad pacing though, so I'll just leave it at that.
The music is....okay? I guess, since it's basically a retread of the first film's music, just now with female choirs instead of male choirs. Wow. Also, there's this bit when Stoic dies, and the bagpipes kick in and I swear some of the score for Titanic got edited in as a joke, but then they kept it in without telling John Powell.
Also, there was this really tender scene between Stoic and Valka where they sing their wedding vows, and I honestly didn't know that Cate Blanchett could sing. She's just too awesome man. But yeah, that was pretty much the only scene I got vaguely emotionally connected to anybody, and it was to the two forty year olds, and not the main character. Oh yeah and they had to screw it up by injecting lame comedy into it. Thanks. Can't just have a sweet tender scene between husband and wife can you? Have to stick in a joke in the middle of his emotional expression of undying love? Classy.
Okay now to the negatives.
This is the fun part.
This film is so damned boring man. Like I said before, the pacing is slow, and there is ZERO emotional investment in anything. Everything just feels like a paint by the numbers sequel. There's no spark, no life to it. It just feels like a boring, boring excusion back into the world. Sure, there's some nifty ideas, such as Hiccup becoming his own man or discovering his mom is alive (albeit a crazy Scottish cat dragon lady). But, instead of exploring that emotional investment, we just breeze over it. What's that? Your mother got kidnapped and you and your father thought she died a horribly violent death for twenty years? Oh wait, I'm wrong, she's just fine. She's just been hanging out with dragons for twenty years eating fish and dressing like a Star Wars alien reject. No attempt at contact, no attempt to send a message back saying "hey don't worry". Nope, she's just been a dragon loving hippy, spouting the whole 'oh they're just misunderstood' spiel that all of these crazy nature folk spout in these kinds of stories.
The worst part is that she's voiced by Cate Blanchett, one of my all time favorite actresses, and one of the greats of this century. She is an incredible actress, winning two Academy Awards, but here, her performance is hampered by the fact that I can't see her face and the fact that she decided to put on a rather over-the-top Scottish accent....when she's playing a Viking....who are from Norway. Okay.
Did I mention that the expressions of these characters are completely dead eyed? Never have I been so struck by such astoundingly soulless eyes. Except Toothless, and even then he's just an animal I feel minimal emotional connection to. But everybody else has the same, weird, bloaty headed, big eyed DreamWorks look that's just weird to me. Their expressions always feel either far too understated or far too over the top for the situation, and it doesn't help that, many times over the course of the movie, they over animate the body, so that the shoulders are pumping up and down like a jackhammer while the person's head swivels on their neck like a boggle head. It's very annoying.
Okay, what about Stoic. Oh well he gets no real development. He gets that scene with his wife, which is sweet, but that's it. I felt nothing when he died, since the film hadn't really built him up as a character. Gerard Butler does his best, but again, the facial animation isn't doing him any favors. I will admit his eulogy was poetic. I'm a sucker for those kinds of things. But yeah, I felt nothing when he died. Not a tear or even a pang of sadness. Just a sense of 'oh that's a bummer man'.
I did however get an emotional response....of disgust. You see, Kristin Wiig is in this. Her brutish, annoying puke of a female character has a crush on Kit Harrington's character. We get to see a shot of Kit Harrington's character's sweaty biceps flexing and then Kristen Wiig's character looking like she just had an orgasm while saying "Take me". How........pleasant. They do this twice you know. Because I need a horny teenager fantasizing about sweaty men in my movie. Thanks DreamWorks.
The villain is generic as all get out, and a waste of Djimon Housou's talents. Also, I'm a bit uncomfortable that the evil, dragon enslaving villain......is dark skinned....and all the heroic, dragon loving protagonists....are white skinned. Okay then. Just gonna leave that there for you guys to read into as much as you wish.
The rest of the supporting characters are just annoying 'comic relief' that serve no purpose to the overall narrative and just pad the film out. I felt nothing when Toothless got taken over by the alpha, I felt nothing when he defeated the alpha. Overall, this film did nothing but chew away 101 minutes of my time.
How delightful!
So yeah, I'm giving this film 1 star, and that's only for the cinematography and that one song that one time. That's it. What a boring, unemotional film.
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