Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'Pete's Dragon (2016)'

​Written by Mike Cervantes

It was halfway through watching this film that I came to a realization about what Disney’s long term plans are for family films in the ongoing. Between this and The Jungle Book, which ran this past April, I’ve discovered that Disney is trying to create a template for re-making live-action movies based on their previous animated properties. There’s a scene in the opening of this film where a 5 year old Pete, played by Levi Alexander, (a young kid stand-in for a slightly older kid, 10 year old Oakes Fegley) is standing in the woods about to be attacked by a pack of CG wolves. At that moment I very seriously wondered if those were the exact same CG wolves from The Jungle Book.

The entirety of the movie operates using that exact same level of quote-unquote “wonder,” for as much effort that a giant media empire can pour into any single movie property that they own, you can’t help but imagine this film sitting in a Wal-Mart DVD four-pack alongside this year’s Jungle Book, Maleficent, and-oh, that upcoming re-make of Beauty and the Beast starting Emma Watson.

It’s a dull, cynical idea I’ve just thought, that’s for certain, but we mustn’t forget that this is Disney, a company that has always been in the business of doling out completely bland, inoffensive, family-targeted movie faire at the same rate as a fast food worker assembles a Jimmy John's sandwich. The original version of this film, a musical circa 1977, was a good and memorable film, which people surely have very fond memories of watching as children. But it came out at a time when kindly Uncle Walt had established a formula for his live-action features, rubbing shoulders with equally whimsical films like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Herbie Rides Again, and The Apple Dumpling Gang. If you ventured to watch all these films together you’d lose sight of the point where one of them ended, and the other one began. Still, these movies possessed a sense of simple innocence. They all sought to make a film for kids, and then worked their way up to the adult audience. The only achievement this re-make has to his name is that it took that original Walt Disney concept and did it again, only without the music, without the spectacle, and without the heart. 

---

I watched this movie in search of anything that could have tied it to its original concept and came up with fool’s gold. I’m certain that a modern viewing audience would not stand for the story of a small kid and his allegedly imaginary dragon fleeing the clutches of a trio of abusive hillbillies and a sinister snake-oil salesman, with Jim Backus and Red Buttons along for comic relief. Instead we get an entirely domestic story about the open woods surrounding a small logging community. This Pete, garbed in Mowgli-esque rags instead of dirty overalls, lives a comfortable, if not entirely happy, existence in the trees with the constant help of Elliot, now a furry CG refugee from a Maurice Sendak illustration, rather than a personable Ken Anderson cel cartoon. A logging crew led by Karl Urban’s Gavin, the principal villain of the film, cuts too deep into the woods, exposing their home. Pete is yanked to civilization after making contact with a girl his age named Natalie (Oona Lawrence) and is taken in by her father Jack (Wes Bentley) and his girlfriend, a forest ranger named Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), leaving Elliot in the woods to become lonely and follow Pete back to town. The wise old man role, accomplished ironically in the original film by a drunk and erratic Mickey Rooney, goes to a far more sober and charismatic Robert Redford. It is through Redford’s tall tale of meeting a dragon in the woods, that all the characters seem to magically accept the existence of Elliot, a revelation that is less pleading to the concept of imagination, as it is a way to fill a big gaping plot hole.
​
Several threads make up the emotional center of the film, but the combination of the short-run time and the film’s inability to commit to a theme leave all these concepts to float in the proverbial log-flume of its own generic existence. You can sense, for example, that they wanted to explore some themes about environmentalism, hence the logging. Grace falls short of that by virtue of the fact she’s engaged to Jack, who is the president of the logging company. Then there’s the concept of Pete as a feral child, something that provides a lot of the films kinetic action, as he’s always climbing a tree, or a fence, or even hitching a ride on the back of a school bus. Then again, he can also speak perfect English, and always has the adult characters hanging on his every word, so that doesn’t work either. Elliot’s motivations are either to follow Pete to remain at his side or leave him alone and let him live among his people, leaving him to do absolutely nothing in the city scenes except stand around while people do variations on “oh look, a dragon.” Even Karl Urban, who I think could have easily served as a good villain in this film, is forced to bounce between hunting Elliot to prove he wasn’t crazy by seeing him, to making the world’s most bland heel-face-turn so he can patch things up with his brother, who is, by the way, Jack, his brother, his boss, and Grace’s fiancé.

My initial thought upon hearing this that this movie was going to be remade was once as simple as “why?” They can’t make a film that was anything like the original, what with all the singing, choreography, and just plain un-pc depictions of Appalachians. In order for it to work it would have to be toned down significantly, and according to the final product, it most certainly was. The drawback is, without any of the outright zaniness, the daringness to create something that is a live-action cartoon to match its fantastical protagonist, this version of Pete’s Dragon is…well…I suppose it has a dragon in it. So at least it has got that going for it. Which is nice. 

---