Thursday, February 28, 2019

How to Train your Dragon 3: Lost World

Last night I went to the movies and saw How to train your Dragon 3: Lost world. I was extremely excited about this movie and had the release date marked on my calendar so that my mom and I could make time to go and see it. I am so invested in the series that I have seen the first two movies multiple times and have watched every season of the TV show so I have an incredible amount invested in this series. I was also extremely excited to see this movie because the reviews that I have heard of said that it was excellent and the perfect end to the trilogy.
The movie uses the perfect combination of music, camera angle, and lighting to set the mood for a scene and is a treat to watch. In the beginning the only information you are given is that five years have passed before you are suddenly viewing fog covered ships with an ominous lantern moving around on the deck. This is accompanied by slow music that adds and almost spooky underlying tone. The camera as pans in from a far off shot were you can't really see anything except for the outline of the ship and the moving light. This leaves a lot up to the imagination before it zooms in on the guard patrolling the ship and teasing the caged dragons. The are many other scenes that exemplify these qualities but they are to obvious are don't leave as much up to the viewer in the terms of imagination and curiosity. 
The plot its self is also fantastic in the fact that all the human villains in past have just wanted to capture and either sell the dragons or harness their power, but in this movie the villain is the first that just wants to kill dragons for the ideal that it will bring peace. It is also revealed that he is the reason that Toothless is the last male Nightfury as he had hunted all the other ones aiming for their extinction. This had been one of the unsolved mysteries of the series and had plagued viewers because there was no real information given. The villain is also extremely smart and ruthless leading to the hero being outplayed numerous times until the end of course. When watching it was incredibly interesting seeing how the villain set traps because they were planned so far in advance that it was something that I couldn't reason and figure out before it happened.
My only real problem with the movie were some of the glaring issues involving the lore of the world. In this movie when Hiccup reaches the lost world they come across a flock of these tiny glowing orange dragons. They the stick their hands up, while they are flying, into the flying flock of these dragons making a reference to other movies when the hero flies for the first time and puts their hand into the clouds.  This is a very beautiful shot and looks amazing with the animation and art style but the problem arises when these tiny dragons burn as hot as the surface of the sun  as said in the TV series. Another problem was that Hiccup had lost his toy dragon when he was just a baby when his mom was taken by a dragon, but in the flashbacks he is shown to have it when he is around 4-5 years old still. And the last big one isn't really a huge problem but rather just lazy writing. The last one is that in this movie near the beginning Hiccup tells the story of the lost world and that it is past the world's edge were ships can't go. When they find the lost world, the entrance is just a smallish hole in the ocean that creates a waterfall on all sides and leads to a cave system. They could have made it extremely large or something but in the movie you can literally see the other side and just sail around in a few minutes.
Over all I agree with movie critics and give this a good good rating despite some lazy writing involving the lore of the franchise.

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