DreamWorks follows in Disney’s footsteps as it makes its first live-action adaptation. Here’s our How To Train Your Dragon review.
How To Train Your Dragon, released in 2010, rarely gets the praise it deserves. Animation is so strongly dominated by Disney and Pixar – while films like Shrek that have found new life online and on TikTok – that How To Train Your Dragon doesn’t always get the appreciation it deserves.
But Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders’ animated fantasy should absolutely be mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned studios’ best work. How To Train Your Dragon is a gorgeously visualised and beautifully told story about companionship and identity. Oh, and dragons. Don’t forget the dragons.
Heading into this live-action remake, you might be wondering, what’s the point? The original is relatively new and still needs to rely on heavy CGI to bring its dragons to the screen. As the end credits begin to roll, the question looms in the mind even more strongly.
The new How To Train Your Dragon follows its source material faithfully – perhaps a little too faithfully. We fly into Berk, a Viking town with a dragon problem, and meet Hiccup (Mason Thames) the chief’s somewhat useless son, who finds himself unable to kill , especially after striking up a friendship with a Night Fury dragon whom he names Toothless.
I couldn’t stop thinking about 1998’s Psycho while watching How To Train Your Dragon. I’d sworn never to think of Gus Van Sant’s disastrous, shot-for-shot remake of one of the most influential horror films of all time again. Yet, here I was, wondering how we clearly learned nothing from it.
Podcast | In conversation with Dean DeBlois
How To Train Your Dragon, like Psycho, aims to simply repeat rather than reimagine or do anything original. DeBlois – who is stepping back into the director’s chair, this time on his own – seems to constantly discourage us from thinking about the film on its own terms, but to simply see the world, characters and scenes from the original come to life, with generous help from CGI.
The cast seems to have pulled the shortest straw here. There’s no room for Mason Thames to expand on what Jay Baruchel built when he played Hiccup, and Gerard Butler (who again plays the chieftain Stoick the Vast) mostly just repeats his role in the original animation. Nico Parker fairs the best out of the large cast, bringing in a new flavour of grit into Astrid, Hiccup’s fellow trainee dragon slayer.
How To Train Your Dragon doesn’t fall into the same trap as most of Disney’s live-action remakes, but nor does it really do enough to give us something new or exciting. This isn’t a bad film, but the only reason is because DeBlois and his team refuse to take any risks or even try to tell this story in a fresh way.
They did somehow manage to add almost 30 minutes into the runtime, though, which you can definitely feel in your backside. If you’re not familiar with the original, I’m sure How To Train Your Dragon will offer you a lot, but for those familiar with the superior version, this live-action remake simply can’t recreate its magic.
How To Train Your Dragon is in UK cinemas now.
