"Pete's Dragon," Walt Disney's soulful remake of its whimsical 1977 animated movie, is a gentle, understated family adventure, full of magic and wonder. A four-year old boy sits in the backseat as his parents drive through the Pacific Northwest forest. 'We're on an adventure,' his mother tells him and when the boy asks if the adventure won't be a little bit scary, his dad tells his son that an adventure often requires bravery. Moments later, the boy watches curiously as everything turns upside down around him, the car rotating off the road and into the woods. Six years after the accident that claimed his parents' lives, Pete (played at 10 by Oakes Fegley) is a wild child living deep int he woods, protected by an enormous dragon, a green, furry, flying creature Pete has named Elliot. The two sleep together, et together and play together, leaping through the trees in unabashed delight. As it turns out, the dragon of Millhaven is a kind of local legend, joked about by everyone but taken seriously by kindly old Meacham (Robert Redford), who likes to tell the story of his long ago encounter with the dragon to scare local kids. When Meecham's dubious daughter, park ranger Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) discovers Pete out in the forest, she immediately opens her heart and family to him. He responds, and naturally wants his new friends to meet his old friend Elliot.
The plot of "Pete's Dragon" is simple: Pete gets lost, Pete gets found, Elliot gets captured (in a remarkable scene that younger children might find a bit too scary), Elliot gets rescued. With a plot this thin, the movie isn't helped with a villain (Karl Urban, most recently Bones in the Star Trek series) who seems more cartoonish than real. What saves the movie is the on-screen magnetism of 79-year-old Redford who gives the entire enterprise a certain gravity, the beauty of the majestic Northwest and the CGI actions of Elliot, who behaves like a big dog that can fly and turn invisible. "Pete's Dragon" is a genuine family movie that everyone will enjoy.
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