Thursday, September 15, 2016

Film Review - Pete's Dragon (2016)

Pete's Dragon is based off of the 1977 Disney production and this one concerns Pete (Oakes Fegley) who lives in the woods with his dragon Elliott until he is discovered by a local park ranger named Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) but her discovery may bring with it some unwelcome guests.

I have to say that I quite enjoyed this new version of Pete's Dragon which is surprising as I have no real memory of the original film and there are 3 key reasons:

- The first is the amount of fun that I have had watching the film, for most of it I had a big smile on my face while watching it and it is nice to have a really fun family film.

- The second is it is utterly charming to watch and again when I was watching it I was swept along with the sweet and innocent story and lovely characters who you could really get behind and it also had a pretty good villain which has always been a bit of a strong point for Disney over the years.

- And lastly the film is just lovely with many emotional moments that did tug at my heartstrings and one scene nearly had me in tears and a lot of this comes down to the performances, Fegley is very good here and he reminded me somewhat of the feral kid from Mad Max 2, Robert Redford, Karl Urban and Wes Bentley are also pretty good here but the showstealer here I thought was Howard, she was great here and you really begin to feel the connection she develops to Pete and it has a very nice payoff.

And so that was Pete's Dragon a very nice and charming family film, 3 and a half out of 5.

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