Movie Thoughts: Lassie Come Home (2020)

• Released: February 20th, 2020
  
• Directed by: Hanno Olderdissen
• Running time: 1 h 36 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A boy named Flo deeply loves his dog Lassie. But when the duo have to separate for a while, Lassie goes missing an island in the north of Germany. Flo decides to look for his dog, while Lassie is busy making her way back home to her owner.

My Thoughts

It's a cute movie. Inoffensive. Nothing more, nothing less. I wish I had more to say about it, but it's honestly just fine. I've already seen the sequel before seeing this one (small accident since they weren't clearly labeled as "movie one" and "movie two") and the sequel is pretty much the same quality-wise.

The plot is pretty basic, just your "heroic dog travels a long distance to reunite with her master" type of deal. It's simple, but hey it works. Not that the movie does anything particularly unique with the plot, but the execution was honestly pretty fine.

I do have to say that Lassie herself is a pretty uninteresting character. She feels like the heroic dog archetype, but she doesn't seem to have a real personality or flaws as a character outside of this. With her being the titular character I expected there to be a bit more to the main dog. 

The human characters were honestly really simple and can be mainly shoved into two categories: characters who like Lassie and Flo and those who do not. It's pretty black-white but since it's a children's film that makes sense. I do appreciate that characters like the Graf are a bit more on the morally gray side, though, even if in the end he's just another good guy. The villain is very simply the villain though. Nothing to him aside from being greedy and selfish.

The kid acting could be a bit cringe sometimes but it was honestly pretty fine overall. What I do have an issue with, though, this the Dutch dub of this film I watched. It's originally a German film, which is fine. So a Dutch dub was made...except I can't really call this a full dub? Because some of the original German lines were left randomly into the movie. 

Which makes the movie very inconsistent (why are some characters speaking Dutch but some German?), but also very confusing to Dutch people who don't speak German (largely children) watching this. Like sure, I understand what was being said because I speak the German language, but for people that don't I can only imagine this being super frustrating and confusing to people that don't speak the language. Like if they weren't going to do a complete dub, why bother to begin with? They might as well just have released the movie with subtitles or something. But this semi-Dutch/semi-German dub without subtitles is just very confusing and inconsistent. I know this isn't an issue of the film as a whole and only the Dutch release, but it was still rather frustrating to see. It basically feels like I paid to see an incomplete product.

Overall a fine movie. Nothing much to it but it's okay. But the Dutch dub was frustrating.