CinemaNerdz

Trailer Trashin’: There’s Something in the Woods in the Pete’s Dragon Teaser Trailer

Timothy Monforton

It’s the last week of February, dear readers, and the Academy Awards are this Sunday. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen Deadpool yet, but I plan to do so as soon as possible. In the meantime, this week’s new Trailer Trashin’ column takes a look at the teaser for Disney’s upcoming remake of Pete’s Dragon.

Premise: For years, old wood carver Mr. Meacham (Robert Redford) has delighted local children with his tales of a fierce dragon deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. To his daughter Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), who works as a forest ranger, those stories are little more than tall tales until she meets Pete (Oakes Fegley), a ten-year-old with no family and no home who claims to live in the woods with a giant green dragon named Elliot. From Pete’s descriptions, Elliot seems remarkably similar to the dragon from her father’s stories. With the help of Natalie (Oona Laurence), an eleven-year-old girl whose father Jack (Wes Bentley) owns the local lumber mill, Grace sets out to determine where Pete comes from, where he belongs, and the truth about his dragon.

My take: Pete’s Dragon is a 1977 live-action/animated hybrid musical from Walt Disney Productions, about an orphan boy named Pete and his friendship with Elliott, a dragon who acts as his protector. While Disney has had a lot of success in recent years with live-action remakes of their animated classics, this is the first of their classic live-action films to get remade. The first teaser trailer for the remake of Pete’s Dragon has arrived, and while it looks interesting, I’m not sure how good of a movie it’ll be.

Pete is played by Oakes Fegley; best known as Paul in the film Fort Bliss (2014) and young Elias Thompson in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. The other major kid character in the film is Natalie, Pete’s presumed love interest, played by Oona Laurence, best known for playing the title role in Matilda the Musical on Broadway. Our main adult characters are Bryce Dallas Howard as forest ranger Grace Meacham, and Robert Redford as her father, Mr. Meacham. Wes Bentley plays Jack, Natalie’s father who owns the local lumber mill. Given that Bentley plays Jack, I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance that Jack ends up being the villain of the film. And the always-reliable Karl Urban is on hand playing a character named Gavin.

If nothing else, the film looks really impressive. The film was shot in New Zealand, standing in for the Pacific Northwest, and this beautiful, almost prehistoric-looking forest definitely seems like the place a dragon would live. The brief glimpse of Elliot at the end of the trailer looks pretty good, too. I’m not so sure about the film’s story, though. From what we see here, it seems very different from the original. This has more of a vibe of The Jungle Book, with this kid who’s grown up in the wild and his intelligent animal friend. I also suspect that, much like the trailers for Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Jungle Book, they put as many action shots as they possibly could into this teaser.

Right now, I’d say my feelings about this film are pretty mixed. I’m not really a fan of the original film – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) is more my taste when it comes to the old live-action Disney films – so I don’t have a major opinion about the changes to the story. This remake looks visually impressive, but I’m not drawn to the characters and story so far. I’m kind of interested in Pete’s Dragon, but I’m going to wait to see how the final film is received when it comes out in August.

ANTICIPATION: Here there be dragons, but I don’t know if I want to go there.

Release Date: August 12th, 2016

Starring: Oakes Fegley, Bryce Dallas Howard, Oona Laurence, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, and Robert Redford
Director: David Lowery
Writers: Toby Halbrooks and David Lowery, based on the short story Pete’s Dragon by S.S. Field and Seton I. Miller

Timothy Monforton

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