After watching How to Train Your Dragon for the first time, I give it credit for doing one thing most "grown-up" actions films don't do...

Never saw this film before but was watching some younger relatives and threw it on. Most of the film is your typical "This kid is different and special and they want to break tradition" film. Nothing super interesting.

Then the predictable final battle, impossible odds, hero uses One Neat Trick against the big bad, only to be seemingly killed...

Except for one spoilery thing.

The kid loses his leg.

I mean, it makes total sense. If you were to have a 12 year old fight a dragon while flying at 200 mph, odds are they're going to get fucked up. Cut, burnt, concussed, etc.

And yet almost no films ever have bodily consequences or even mild suffering for the heroes.

For me it's part of what made (pre season 7) Game of Thrones good. There was no plot armor, or very little. A prisoner taunts some thieves, and they slice off his hand. A boy falls from a tower and gets paralyzed. You feel the real vulnerability of these human players, and root for them more to overcome what's happened to them.

It took like 15 Marvel movies for one character to suffer a serious but non fatal injury, Thor, and it's not even clear it has impacted him in any way.

Meanwhile, this kids movie had the guts to dismember the hero. I was shocked and filled with respect.

Submitted December 11, 2021 at 09:53AM by wingspantt https://ift.tt/3oJYMM3