Pete’s Dragon is like a meal made with delicious ingredients that’s just undercooked. It’s a movie chock-full of beautiful images, packed with thematic import, heavy-laden with drama, and yet the final result is shallow and watered down, somehow less than the sum of its parts.

The story of Pete’s Dragon opens with a young boy named Pete riding with his mother and father through a wild untouched wilderness. But when they swerve to avoid hitting a deer the car is sent tumbling down a ravine into the woods. It’s here, not five minutes into the film, that we’re hit with one of the film’s most powerful visuals, a locked-down shot of Pete strapped into the back seat of the car watching in wonder as the contents of the car whirl around him. It’s a striking juxtaposition of innocent awe and genuine danger, and in this one shot we see the apex of everything Pete’s Dragon aspires to convey.

The car comes to a rest at the bottom of the hill. Pete is the only survivor. And as a pack of wolves close in around him, it looks like he might not live much longer than his parents. But then another creature swoops in to scare off the wolves.

This is the titular dragon. He’s huge, green, and furry, and despite the mysterious tone of the trailers the movie itself never tries to keep him hidden nor mysterious.

The film then skips forward five years, where we see that Pete and his dragon are surviving and even thriving in the woods. Pete is easily the best character in the movie, played wonderfully by Oakes Fegley. He embodies the kind of fantastical independence that children always dream of and yet he still gives an incredibly grounded and realistic performance.

The dragon, who Pete has named Eliot, plays the role of a giant intelligent dog (you could replace Elliot with Clifford and have exactly the same movie), and the two of them spend their days romping through the woods and soaring through the clouds together. It’s basically the coolest life any ten-year-old could ever hope for, so of course some adults have to come along and screw it all up.

Enter Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard), a nature-loving ranger, who discovers Pete in the woods and tries to bring him back to civilization, separating him from his huge furry friend, and inadvertently putting the dragon in danger of being discovered by the loggers that are cutting into his forest home.

It’s here that the movie pins its intentions prominently on its sleeve, making Eliot the surrogate for the the untamed and wild beauty of the forest, and the loggers representatives of….well, loggers. And it’s here that the weaknesses of Pete’s Dragon begin to show through as well. All of its charms are shallow and obvious, all of its characters mono-dimensional.

In particular the character of Gavin (Karl Urban), a logger who serves at the film’s de facto antagonist, seems closer to a cartoon character than a real person. He charges into the woods and begins relentlessly hunting Eliot with no greater motivation than seeing a tree fall over mysteriously. You can feel Karl Urban struggling to play some humanity into the man, but he’s hamstrung by a script that might have been better served by a performance based in caricature.

Grace latches onto Pete with even less motivation, electing to keep him from the social services workers (whom the movie never bothers to suggest have anything other than Pete’s best interests at heart) after knowing him for a only single day. And Eliot, after fighting to get back to Pete, finally sees him reading a book through a window and flies off and sulks as if the boy had thrown rocks at him and screamed for him to go away.

The movie is full of these shallow moments and gossamer-thin emotional connections, and it suffers because of it. Which is a terrible shame, because on a skeletal level the story is fine, and the visual execution of the film is impeccable. Director David Lowery paints each frame with haunting light, and Eliot himself is one of the most perfectly realized CG characters I’ve ever seen in a film. But for all of that beauty and wonder it never quite manages to make any kind of lasting mark.

Those are my thoughts. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another person’s perspective. I took my four year old to see Pete’s Dragon with me, and he looked up at me during the climactic scene and said, “I love this one daddy.”

So even though the film didn’t cut deep enough for my tastes, if it inspired him to dream of a life where friendly invisible monsters lurk in the hidden corners of the world, then I will count it as some kind of success.

Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw .

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