Good but not great family adventure movie; many boring parts, and almost has a good female role model but doesn't

Rating: 7/10 (18 April 2010)

This is a good but not great movie that I liked but did not love. My principal objection is to the fact that one spends a great deal of time watching dragons swish their tails around and eat fish and be confused and do other things that are not awesome. It could be protested that this is consistent with the film's likable themes of peaceful coexistence and friendship. I am not interested in excuses; I am interested in seeing cool things happen in movies. A good movie finds ways to let the viewer see awesome things. For example, the terrific family adventure movie Kung-Fu Panda has many great kung-fu fights throughout its entirety. Imagine if the kung-fu fighters always found reasonable excuses to not fight most of the time in that movie. What a bad movie that would be. The viewer of How to Train Your Dragon is given just such an experience.
I enjoy when movies, particularly movies like this one that appeal to a younger audience, feature strong female characters. The character of Astrid in this film is a strong character. Within the context of the goofy fantasy society she lives in, she is more like an aggressive over-achiever - she is expected to fight dragons, and does so well. She is not rewarded for her hard work because the hero destroys the entire system of values to which she dedicated her life. Nonetheless, she is a strong young lady, and that's cool. She gets sold out later, at the end of the film, when all the kids get to ride around on dragons, and she has to ride behind the hero on one of the crappy dragons until he can jump off to ride the coolest dragon of all. Why can't she ride on the second best dragon? The character of Snotlout, who is a jerk, gets to ride on the second best dragon, and she has to ride behind the hero. She is also very pretty aside from being good at things, so when boys like her, it's like, do they like her because she's good at things? Probably not. Anyways, this movie has a pretty good but far from perfect strong female character.