Never On Sunday

Saw How to Tame Your Dragon yesterday, with the in-laws, the animated flick in which young and slightly nerdy Viking Hiccup tames a dragon and ends a centuries-long feud between Viking and dragon-kind. It was okay. Better than the impression left me by watching the trailer, which was that it was strictly for the kiddies, but neither did it measure up to the “also for adults” praise Eileene’s friends lavished on it. Very Disney-esque, very boy and his dog, lots of abrupt and cheerful changes to deeply ingrained attitudes. A feisty just-as-good-as-any-man love interest to be tamed, cheap heroism, stock footage of learning to fly, the repeated triumph of the little guy over the big bully, the triumph of adolescent emotion over adult wisdom and experience. I had a hard time, especially, with the Viking half of the feud; taking their distress seriously was awfully difficult when the Vikings themselves didn’t treat it seriously.

My attention had good reason to drift through most of the movie, and did. So I was slightly embarrassed at the moments when I found myself emotionally engaged: a montage in which protagonist Hiccup rises to the head of dragon-slaying class by exploiting what he’s learned from his pet dragon to tame and otherwise nonviolently neutralize the dragons on which Viking children train, and that same stock footage of learning to fly I mentioned a moment ago. Worldy-wise Gen-Xers are supposed to be above such sentiment, especially when packaged in thick layers of smarm and cliché.

But, as it happens, I had just read something on that very subject by an author I respect, albeit that from RPG materials. Robin Laws wrote an RPG called Feng Shui, a game that attempts seriously to recreate the decidedly mockable action movies coming out of Hong Kong. Laws knows he’s not working with high art, and fills the book with humorous asides to admit it. But he also pauses to remind the reader:

“Our culture has a curious ambivalence about action movies, which are just our high-tech versions of the hero myths celebrated by all cultures since the dawn of time. Even people who really enjoy them sometimes have to feel they have to show that they’re really above all that. Try not to condescend to the material or think of it as cheesy. Sure, these stories are stylized and highly exaggerated, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t satisfy a real emotional need.”

That was my experience with How to Train Your Dragon: mostly trite, often shallow or stupid, but capable in its better moments of engaging an adult audience nevertheless.