HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON Review: Live-Action Remake Fails to Justify Its Existence

When filmmaker Gus Van Zant (Milk, My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy) remade Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho, in 1998, critics somewhat justifiably dismissed the end result as a stunt, a prank, a jest, and not an affectionate homage to a filmmaker Van Sant considered without equal or parallel.

 

Homage or not, copyright/brand extension wasn’t front and center in Van Sant’s mind. But it’s been the primary, some would say, sole rationale for the seemingly never-ending spate of live-action remakes of animated classics from the Disney vault.

 

While artistically dubious, there’s little, if any doubt, they’ve been massively popular and thus, profitable, making the likelihood of another animation studio, say for example, DreamWorks Animation, from upgrading one of their inarguably best releases, 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon, from computer animation to live-action — or more specifically, a live-action/computer animated hybrid.

 

Rather than hand the reins to a new writing or directing team, DreamWorks Animation tapped writer-director Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the original with Chris Sanders, to handle both duties on the live-action remake. Relying on state-of-the-art tech, including fully rendered, near photorealistic backdrops and, of course, the dragon(s) of the title, swapping out the big, bold, brash animated characters for their human analogues, and essentially retelling the exact same story with negligible variations, the result rarely looks anything less than spectacular. It also never breaks away from the constant, unending wave of deja vu that repeating the same plot and emotional beats over and over again that will wash over even the most nostalgic, open-minded of audiences.

 

As before, How to Train Your Dragon centers on Hiccup Horrendous Haddock (Mason Thames. The Black Phone), a Viking teen more interested in engineering and technology than learning how to fight the dragons who regularly beset the Vikings’ island home, Berk. A massive disappointment to his big-bearded, broad-shouldered chieftain-father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, reprising his voice-over role in the original). When Stoick, a single father and presumed widower, looks on his diminutive (for a Viking) son, he can’t help but have his equally big heart broken. 

 

That’s more than tension between father and son to create a satisfying through-line for the live-action remake, but How to Train Your Dragon turns primarily on Hiccup’s unexpected relationship with the most dangerous of dragons, a Night Fury Hiccup dubs “Toothless” moments after they cross paths hours after Hiccup injures Toothless via one of his contraptions. Almost imperceptibly redesigned for the live-action remake, Toothless resembles a cross between a cat, a bat, and a reptile (plus some canine behaviors), albeit with black scaly skin, here upgraded pixel-wise to withstand close inspection on an IMAX screen.

 

Once again, Hiccup funds himself on the outs with his zealously anti-dragon father, a Viking village indoctrinated into hating dragons and treating the winged creatures as their mortal enemies, and Hiccup’s longtime crush, Astrid (Nico Parker). A warrior closer in ability and temperament to Stoick, Astrid seems poised to take the title of chieftain whenever Stoick retires from office or more likely, expires in battle against the invading dragons. She might not be related to Stoick by blood, but even he acknowledges her worth as a warrior to the anti-dragon Viking cause. 

 

Split between Stoick’s failed attempt to find the dragon’s nest, Hiccup and Astrid’s dragon-fighting training under the mentorship of Gobber the Belch (Nick Frost), the village’s blacksmith and Hiccup’s occasional counselor, and Hiccup’s burgeoning relationship with Toothless (essentially taming/domesticating the feral dragon), How to Train Your Dragon offers little in the way of narrative surprise — and when it does, as in the introduction of non-Caucasian Vikings gathered from around the world, it drops them almost immediately — leaving audiences to rely solely on the novelty of seeing their favorite animated characters brought to semi-convincing life by human actors explicitly chosen for their resemblance to their animation counterparts. 

 

With narrative surprises all but nonexistent, DeBlois relies on DreamWork Animation’s formidable production team to convert Berk and Hiccup’s friendship with Toothless (among other familiar story elements) to an often remarkable level of verisimilitude. Everything from the Viking village to its massive meeting hall to the costumes show an obsessive attention to detail, while the performances, broad or grounded as needed, never stray far from the demands of the narrative. 

 

As Toothless and the other dragons, plus their environments, are essentially one continuous visual effect, predictably polished to the nth degree, audiences can at least take comfort that DeBlois and his production team didn’t shortchange or undermine the animated characters they’ve come to love over the course of three films (2010-2019), several shorts, and a standalone animated series (also 2010-2019). 

 

If the live-action remake succeeds commercially (critical success matters little, if at all), franchise fans can expect to see the second and third films in the well-regarded animated trilogy remade as well. Assuming the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon offers a way forward for the franchise’s risk-averse stewards, the next two entries will not follow in regular, two-year interval, but also hew closely to their animated counterparts story-wise.