Can a Live-Action Makeover Teach an Old Dragon new Tricks?
DIRECTED BY DEAN DEBLOIS/2025
What’s a boy to do when he can’t kill a dragon?
That’s what the aptly-named Hiccup (Mason Thames) is trying to discover. Though he wishes he could help his clan defend their village from fire-breathers who regularly pillage and destroy, his clumsy attempts usually end up backfiring. Not helping matters: His dad (Gerard Butler) is the leader on this small island of Berk, which only increases the spotlight on his foibles. His only hope for redemption seems to be succeeding in the next round of Dragon Training, a.k.a. learning how to fight and kill the flying beasts. But then he stumbles onto a new kind of training when he meets Toothless, a wounded dragon that doesn’t demonstrate any of the heartless qualities he believes the species to have. Could Hiccup and Toothless’s clandestine friendship be the key to saving Berk?
JIM TUDOR: No sooner does Disney appear to be approaching the end of the tunnel on its deluge of live-action remakes of its own animated classic films than DreamWorks opts to go the same route. The studio’s first such effort is adapting its own adaptation of the children’s book series by British author Cressida Cowell, How to Train Your Dragon.
Being a mere casual admirer of the 2010 animated film that gave flight to a tremendously successful franchise, I hadn’t followed the development of the live-action remake with any kind of interest. Next thing I know, here it is. Considering the ways in which the animated entries (including a flurry of original short films tentpoled with the high-profile features How to Train Your Dragon 2 [2014], and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World [2019]) leaned into increasingly dark story territory as they went on, I suppose I figured that this remake would adopt a more PG-13-level intensity level. Nope! With the core creative Dean Deblois (who at least co-directed each previous film) at the helm, we get a large-scale VFX spectacle that, for better or worse, seems to be almost exactly in keeping with the tone, tenor, and plot of the 2010 adventure that started it all.
Afterwards my 14-year-old son with whom I attended the preview mused that the online discourse he’s seen has been critical of the fact that this live-action remake brings nothing new to the table (aside from the obvious flesh-and-blood actors and practical sets) while the same loudmouths were bashing Disney’s nearly concurrent release of its live-action Lilo & Stitch for changing too many things. (Incidentally, DeBlois also co-wrote and co-directed the original 2002 Lilo & Stitch with collaborator Chris Sanders, with whom he did the same with for the first animated Dragon film).
While there is a definite air of the live-action Dragon playing it too safe, no one appreciates unmotivated changes to an established favorite. From my seat, as someone with no horse (or dragon) in this race, I will simply say that the new How to Train Your Dragon manages to come together well enough in the second half, moving fast enough to haphazardly pave over its own really bad first half. Like the original film, all the adults speak with hardcore Scottish accents while all the kids are American. This disconnect is somehow compounded by the live-action of it all, with some of the young supporting cast giving grating Disney Channel-esque performances. Quite thankfully, the leads are quite compelling, particularly Mason Thames as the main character, the dragon killer in training, Hiccup. Literally, the only good scenes in the first half are the titular training sequences between Hiccup and Toothless.
TAYLOR BLAKE: Your level of investment in this franchise may be even greater than mine. Probably about the time the original animated film arrived available to rent on DVD in late 2010 or early 2011, it was a Blake family movie night selection, and if memory serves, it was a perfectly pleasant evening. That said, I don’t believe any Blakes have interacted with any How to Train Your Dragon content until now, so I don’t think it made any great impression, even on the youngest who was 10 at the time.
Though it is the “large-scale VFX spectacle” you mentioned, that target audience of 10-year-olds doesn’t seem to have changed in the last 15 years. Really, the only thing that has changed is that the runtime is now 30 minutes longer to fit in that VFX spectacle instead of expanding the character development. (Notably, this waters down the presence of the one real star and returning performer, Gerard Butler.) Much of the dialogue is lifted from the original film, and the story beats have hardly changed, making this even more of a rehash than the recent Lilo & Stitch remake. I’m in the camp that Lilo & Stitch benefitted from those updates, and many of the best moments of this How to Train Your Dragon are when they lean into their deviations. The only truly thrilling sequences—and to its credit, they are the most important ones—are when Hiccup and Toothless take flight, with the camera soaring and swooping over green isles and breaking waters. The movie counts the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Scotland as filming locations, and in those moments, it’s difficult to determine where the real landscape ends and the CGI begins.
Then again, perhaps Lilo & Stitch isn’t the best comparison—the movies that come to mind most are Jurassic Park and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Though How to Train Your Dragon keeps a PG rating by mostly implying its bloodshed, its creature effects aspire to those PG-13 films’ level of “realism” (if that’s what you can call their depictions of dragons and extinct dinosaurs). Toothless’s design has changed little since 2010, but the other dragons are so much less cartoonish it’s as if the creative team just tweaked design files off the Universal servers from their colleagues who are working to get Jurassic World: Rebirth out the door this summer. And with the expanded runtime, Hiccup and his (mostly annoying) classmates are competing with higher stakes not unlike when Harry battles a Hungarian Horntail in the Triwizard Tournament. If this kind of fantasy film is your jam, it will probably be up your alley, though the darker scenes do lack the beauty the animated series built its reputation on.
JIM TUDOR: Your apt mention of the implied bloodshed reminds me of how unintentionally ridiculous that aspect of the film is. I’m certain that 10-year-old me would’ve scoffed dismissively at the shots of every single person managing to barely sidestep every attacking dragon’s rain of fire, every single time. It’s like the old G.I.Joe cartoons where they’d blow up planes and helicopters left and right, but the pilot always bailed out with a white parachute in the distance. We haven’t seen this much implied bloodshed as key plot motivation since we were told (and only told) of the attacks on Naboo in The Phantom Menace. (“People are dying, senator!”). At one point, and enraged Gerard Butler chastises his son Hiccup’s move to sympathize with the dragons by harkening back to the film’s opening attack-on-Berk showpiece, shoutily reminding him, “People were almost killed!!”
Also, your thoughts on how the VFX animators might well have pillaged servers of existing CGI beast files from earlier films reminds me of a discussion my son and I were having on the way to the theater. It was basically the same topic, thinking about how DreamWorks Animation, having been almost all CG all along, could conceivably have a much easier time than Disney in unleashing a flurry of these remakes. (Although, DreamWorks… please don’t). I doubt it actually is as simple as applying a new coat of detailed photo-realistic skins to the pre-existing wireframes, but that was our thought in terms of a starting point. Then any and all “live-action” remakes could literally be the same movie again. Can you imagine such remakes of Home or Shark’s Tale? That’s exactly why we harbor a love of cinema… said no one, ever.
All that said, any movie that hinges so earnestly, and yes, effectively, on a hardline plea for tolerance of the perceived enemy “other” in this day and age and political climate mustn’t be altogether denounced. Granted, this may be the biggest, most expensive and redundant way to recirculate that massage that was already made loudly and clearly in 2010, but we’re living in expensively redundant times. Hopefully the 10-year-olds of today will take to heart an empathetic life lesson when they hear it- and hear it in a way that so many of their previous generation has not. I suppose some dragons still training.