There are a few movies that my Mom has great memories about, but has not been able to show me. The 1977 version of the movie Pete's Dragon was one of them. She says we use to have the VHS version, but it was eaten by the player, something I will apparently never understand. That meant it was really fun for her to join in watching this new version of the story. But anyways, I hope you enjoy my review on the remake of this classic movie.
The movie starts with a family consisting of a mother, father, and a young child named Pete (played by Levi Alexander) going on a car ride somewhere. Pete is trying to read his book while they are driving through the mountains, and his mother helps him on some words. When Pete reads the word "adventure", he asks if they are on an adventure, and his mother answers yes. Suddenly, a deer shows up on the road and his father swerves and crashes, leaving only Pete to survive. He runs into the woods when he hears wolves howling, but soon gets surrounded by them. Just when things seem grim for Pete, the wolves get scared by something behind Pete and run off. When he notices the large creature scaring them off, Pete walks up to it and it becomes really friendly towards Pete, who soon becomes its friend.
Six years later, we listen to a man named Meacham (played by Robert Redford) telling the story of the time when he saw a dragon in the woods, but his daughter and park ranger Grace (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) disagrees with him about there being a dragon. It then moves to a now more grown Pete (played by Oakes Fegley) running through the woods, while his dragon, now named Elliot, chases after him. They play around in the forest for a while, and then Pete sees a bunny and tries to catch it. He chases it down to a small river and catches it, but is confronted by a large bear. The two roar and growl at each other, but the bear backs off when it sees Eliot. Pete turns around, then climbs onto Eliot and goes flying around the forest.
The acting was really well done by the young actor Oakes Fegley. He had such a great emotional connection to Elliot, even though he was computer generated. This is the second great kid actor Disney has brought to us this year. I also liked how they brought in Bryce Dallas Howard as the park ranger Grace. She did such a good job as her character that it almost felt real. However Karl Urban's character Gavin felt a little exaggerated and over acted at some points.
The story plot flowed smoothly through the movie, but it could have done a little better. Even though it did really good character development in shorter times, there was a little bit of jumping back and forth between the two stories at first. However, the way they did Eliot's animations were extraordinarily detailed. If it weren't for how most fantasy dragons looked, I would almost say it might have been real.
Overall, the actors did amazing jobs with their characters, and the story was very moving towards the end. Though there were a few things not perfect, the animation is not one of those things. And for the reasons stated above, I would rate this movie 9.0/10.
