How to Train Your Dragon

I expected that this would get about a 50% at Rotten Tomatoes. Half liked it and half didn’t. Imagine my surprise when I saw it had 98%. That just doesn’t make sense to me. There was very little going for this movie, it was so routine you could imagine the scene 15 minutes down the line, you could know pretty certainly which line of dialogue was about to come from the mouth of which stock character. Utterly unoriginal. There was all the hyperkinetic movement we have come to expect (and dread, in my case) in movies that exist only to show off the 3D. I was very glad we were seeing it in good old-fashioned 2D. I didn’t understand why the boy—naturally, the only smart person in the whole village—having gained the trust of the dragon with the broken tail, was suddenly able to bond with and train all the other dragons. Made no sense. And something that kept nagging at me … why was it that all the adults—Vikings, for chrissake—who didn’t even seem like the same species as their children—spoke in annoying Scottish accents, and the children all spoke like kids weaned on Facebook, cell phones, shopping malls, and television sitcoms? No trace of an accent. Was it because Shrek speaks like that (the only thing I don’t like about the Shrek movies)? Just plain annoying. The only thing I liked in this movie was that the dragons were fairly interesting to look at. That’s faint praise indeed.