Writer-director Dean DeBlois’s How to Train Your Dragon isn’t some interpolation of the 2010 animated film, as it’s more or less a carbon copy, with the filmmakers having recreated 99% of the original in live action. And as Gus Van Sant proved pretty decisively back in 1998 with his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the only value in such an exercise is the degree to which you’re curious, if at all, about its fundamental reason for being.
Children may not really care, especially those who are too young to have seen the original, even its sequels. Indeed, those familiar with the story—of the bond between a Viking boy and the loveable Toothless, the last known Night Fury species of dragon, and the boy’s attempt to convince his Viking tribe to respect the beings they hunt—might just fall in love with it all over again. But considering that this remake, unlike Van Sant’s Psycho, can’t benefit from the excuse that there’s a 38-year divide between it and the original (heck, the last film in the series, The Hidden World, came out in 2019), even that reasoning is a little shaky.
Does this How to Train Your Dragon savor the thrill of seeing your favorite characters in the real world interacting with photoreal dragons? Well, to the film’s credit, the dragons are a huge point in its favor. As wonderful as the original is, the dragons were always designed to be a bit more kid-friendly, with exaggerated, cartoonish features that were of a piece with the deliberate and charming slapstick comedy. Here, they’re every bit as believable as the beasts that Daenerys Targaryen rode on Game of Thrones. They’re visually intimidating, but they’re also intelligent, empathetic animals whose lives are worthy of the respect Hiccup bestows upon them.
That’s counterbalanced by this remake’s take on Hiccup and Astrid. The former is a frail and gawky kid who’s meant to be understood as a bundle of nerves and neuroses—the physical and emotional deficiencies that cause him to develop mercy as his defining skill. Astrid (Nico Parker), on the flipside, is written as the foil—the perfect Viking warrior in training. But Thames and Parker’s Instagram-ready screen presences are such that it’s impossible to buy into any of the adversity their characters face in the film, including from their own people.
The other actors playing fellow trainees Ruffnut, Tuffnut, Snotlout, and Fishlegs (Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Gabriel Howell, and Julian Dennison, respectively) do fare better in that regard, as does Gerard Butler, now grizzled enough in real life to play his animated character, Stoick the Vast, on screen, and putting a commendably huge amount of heart and soul into the part, even above his original voice performance. But as heartwarming as this story remains at its core, it’s hard to shake that you already know how it will play out—that it’s a magic act that you can experience anew without even having to go to the theater.
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