How to Train Your Dragon 2 (spoiler free)

Saturday's movie was How to Train Your Dragon 2, unsurprisingly a sequel to 2010's rather excellent How to Train Your Dragon. I will note that I do plan to see it again to pick up on bits that I may have missed while chasing a small child around the cinema and trying to keep her from eating floor food.

HtTYD2 does a number of pretty brave things. Firstly, it advances the storyline of the franchise by five years (some of which is filled in by the surprisingly good Dreamworks' Dragons TV series), and allows the characters and their relationships to grow because of that fact. Secondly, it turns a number of characters against obvious type, especially Stoick the Vast, who has evolved from a slightly one note character in the first film to a deeply layered individual (as fathers do when their sons get old enough to really know them). Thirdly, it is even more willing than the first film to draw blood.

HtTYD2 is a more mature film than HtTYD, in just about every way, and that is not intended as a criticism of the first film. Dragon was the child, and Dragon 2 is what it's grown into, encouraging its audience to take a chance and grow with it. The writer/director Dead DeBlois has likened it to The Empire Strikes Back as a growth and maturation of the franchise, and it's not an unfair nor especially boastful comparison (although I hope this doesn't mean we'll get Ewoks in part 3 and a series of disappointing prequels); Hiccup even has a low-tech lightsabre. The central characters are beautifully realised, and the relationship between Hiccup and Astrid in particular is wonderfully real and rounded, with the animation and voice acting both depicting an impressive chemistry for a cartoon.

Speaking of the animation, now that I've started, the film is absolutely gorgeous. I saw it in Ipswich, and while I can take or leave 3D I do regret not getting to see the film on IMAX, because the world of Dragon is so sumptuously rendered and so full of the kind of sweeping vistas that IMAX is truly good for. The dragons remain impressive in their motion and expressions, as well as their overall design. The human characters avoid the uncanny valley through their stylised, exaggerated appearance, without looking silly or ever causing us to doubt their reality.

I caught this one early, so by request I'm not going to do a spoiler-review part; I might do one later on.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I love this version of the poster

I never expected to enjoy Captain America. He's one of those superheroes, like Superman, who is just so uptight that he's not a lot of fun, and besides, every other film version has sucked mightily.

The First Avenger blew me away. It might not have been ground-breaking as a movie, but it blasted through what I thought I knew about Captain America. It played the origin almost identically to the 1990 Albert Pyun version - that's right, Bad Movie lovers; Albert Pyun made a Captain America movie - but with just enough changes to make the difference. Weakling Steve Rogers wasn't a wannabe hero anymore, he was a hero constrained by his physique, and once he became a super soldier he was shown to be heroic, but also human, with flaws and humour just like anyone else. The Avengers built on this characterisation, and brought us up to the point of The Winter Soldier.

Spoiler free to start with: The Winter Soldier is an action movie, but it is also a post-Cold War Cold War conspiracy thriller. It's watchwords are 'trust no-one', although its moral is actually to trust in people, and its calling card is betrayal. The casting of Robert Redford, erstwhile poster boy for the fight against corrupt governments (All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor) as a slick politician is a clear nod to its origins.

Other new faces in the film are Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie), very nicely pitched as a scarred veteran soldier who happens to be black, Agent 13/Sharon (Emily VanCamp), and Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo), while Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson and Cobie Smulders return as SHIELD agents Nick Fury, Natasha Romanoff and Maria Hill. Toby Jones and Jenny Agutter also reappear in smaller roles as Emil Zola and the unnamed British World Security Council representative. This is a pretty sizable ensemble, and yet everyone gets their moment.

The spoilery stuff will start after two more paragraphs.

The plot of the movie follows Steve Rogers as he uncovers a conspiracy woven throughout SHIELD, and plot which threatens to bring about total world domination. It falters a little on the occasions when you wonder why in the name of Stan Lee this isn't worth assembling some form of team for the purposes of, perhaps, a little avenging, but that's a minor quibble and can actually be taken care of through fridge logic: Tony Stark has (publicly at least) blown up all of his suits and had his chest reactor removed; Bruce Banner is presumably in seclusion; and Thor is being as subtle as he can be. We can only presume that Hawkeye is sufficiently undercover that even he doesn't know where he is.

We bounce from set piece to set piece with just enough quiet time to get caught up and see what's happening, just as an action thriller ought to be. There is also some musing on identity and loss, which is brief, but surprisingly poignant.

And now, the spoilery stuff.

Much of the film actually approaches cinematic perfection. In particular the quieter moments transcend what could be trite material to be quite touching, especially when Natasha is questioning her own identity after years of assumed roles. I also applaud moving the character out of the fanservice zone, putting her in formal suits and casuals away from the trademark catsuit.

Speaking of costume, I loved the switch back to the original fighting uniform to signal Cap's commitment to an ideal instead of a pragmatic cause, and Falcon's flight suit was a thing of beauty. The Winter Soldier was chillingly realised by the somewhat baby-faced Sebastian Stan, even if he could have had his own Image Comics title in the nineties with that look.

If I were more of a comics geek than I am, I would probably have suffered some sort of terminal nerdgasm. I'm not sure, but I suspect that pretty much every named character was either reappearing from an earlier film, or has a long and venerable history in the comics, down to the naming of Stephen Strange as on of Insight's prime targets. I strongly suspect that you would find the same if you were able to read every target name that flashed up on screen (I was watching in 3D and barely caught 'Anthony Stark').

On the downside, The Winter Soldier does something that The First Avenger impressively avoided, and many of the larger ensemble succumb to second hero syndrome in the finale, wherein the loyalist SHIELD agents basically exist to confirm the extent of the HYDRA infiltration and the Winter Soldier's reversion to mission by getting slaughtered in droves. I think my only other criticism is that I really wanted it to be 13, not Falcon, who put Rumlow on his arse, because anyone that macho just has to be taken out by a tiny blonde.

Oh, and that the climax of the movie would have been rather more tense if we hadn't seen the Insight helicarriers crashing in flames all over the trailers.

The film has a dramatic effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, signalling as it does the end of SHIELD; it will be interesting to see what it does with that. I am particularly looking forward to next week's episode of Marvel's: Some Guys on a Plane.