At least I’m not boring.

How To Train Your Dragon 2 - 3.5/5

I can only assume they’ve got a new art designer, because this is straight up one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen. It’s shackled to the designs of the predecessor which while not terrible, are a bit genericore – faceless enough to have come from any of the handful of failed CGI comedies from the past 10 years. Solution? Badass motherfucking masks. And clouds, and small subtleties of human emotion, and the two most beautiful dragons having a fight in slow-motion that only feels slow-motion because of how goddamned massive they are. And then there’s that sort of useless plot where everyone does things that authority figures tell them they shouldn’t do and those actions kind of lead to a lot of death. Oh, well! It tries to have a lesson learned, but it’s a shitty lesson, I think, and that lesson comes out of the back end of poor decisions. I think Hiccup learns he was right at the end, and that is wrong. Not that he is wrong in the whole, but wrong in the time it takes for his point to be true. People can change their minds… it’s just not always a matter of talking to them. “Hey, you shouldn’t do that.” “Okay.” He should’ve learned how to be a leader – not by violence or isolation but by attrition. Instead, he learns to follows his gut and everyone else is a drive-by victim of his beliefs. He is selfish, and being selfish for a good cause is still being selfish. ANYWAY, THO, IT IS FUNNY AT PARTS AND EXCITING AT OTHERS AND THEN IT IS SAD ALSO.