Saw it yesterday. It was good, not great. It follows the story formula to the letter but manages to squeeze in a few 'cute' things here and there, but it's everything I've already seen before.
Still, while I would certainly like to love this movie a lot more than I did, my one weakness was forced to take a stand in pointing out that this film is a shining example of my strange observations in movies nowadays where it's always got to be the males that carry the story, and the females be around solely for the love interst. Nothing sucker punches me harder than the depiction of the character of Astrid who's hard work, dedication and ambition to achieve a goal she takes seriously is put to shame in front of the whole village when some cheating jerk called Hiccup passes all these tests ahead of her using techniques he keeps to himself. What makes it worse is that when she goes to find answers and rightfully gets angry over them, she's put into a position where SHE is forced to apologize for her actions. Way to go movie. You take this female character with ambition, give her a goal she wants to achieve, fail at it miserably by someone who cheated, and make her the one who should be apologizing. :angry
Add to the fact that she contributes nothing to the story other than to give our hero a love interest, she actually goes down a whole letter grade by asking our hero again and again "what's your plan?" and "what are you going to do?". Movie, if you're going to give me a character who has a thirst to be the best, why the heck is she being treated like she can't come up with a plan of her own to contribute to the cause? It doesn't get better for her either during the final battle where once the action focusrs on her, she becomes a freaking damsel in distress for Astrid to rescue, which puts her out of the battle and into the inevitable 'girl watching from the distance fretting over the fate of the male hero'. I haven't seen such a useless character tacked on only for the male character's benefit since Colette from Ratatouille.
