Normally I’m not one for remakes, in fact, more often than not, I despise them, but Pete’s Dragon is a magical little film that separates itself from almost every other big summer movie this year.
It has a silence and subtlety that has been missing from children’s movies in a time when kids are more focused on iPhones than what’s going on around them.
Based on the 1977 Walt Disney animated musical of the same name, the film is a story about a boy who loses his parents in a car crash and then befriends a giant, green dragon (he names Elliott) who has the power of invisibility.
Those looking for something with an intricate plot won’t be finding it here. In fact, there isn’t much of one. The film runs an hour and 42 minutes, but never feels a second longer as the pace builds to a grand finale that will make even the most stonehearted cynic smile.
Audiences are never told where the film takes place but it appears to be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, as for the lack of technology, it would suggest our timeline is pre-1990s.
Mr. Meacham (Robert Redford) is the narrator of the story and an old timer in town who is the only living person other than Pete (played with an honest innocence by Oakes Fegley) who has seen the dragon.
His park ranger daughter (Bryce Dallas Howard) has never seen or believed in the dragon, neither has her fiancé Jack (Wes Bentley) or his daughter (Oona Lawrence).
When Grace finds Pete living in a self-made treehouse/shack in the forest and takes him in, the film turns into a Frankenstein-type story on man versus nature as Jack’s logger brother Gavin (Keith Urban) tries to capture Elliott.
Writer and director David Lowery does a commendable job in touching the emotional chords, evoking an atmosphere similar to Steven Spielberg’s classic, E.T. The dragon, as well as the forest and the animals that inhabit it, have a physical presence that one rarely finds in the CGI dominated cinema world.
Hollywood doesn’t make many films like this anymore.
It’s a gift in a summer full of movie mediocrity.
For showtimes of Pete’s Dragon, visit www.cochranemoviehouse.com
