The New How to Train Your Dragon Is an Existential Crisis for Live-Action Remakes: Review

As a culture, we’re now pretty deep down the rabbit hole when it comes to live-action remakes of animated movies — Disney’s now released at least 25 of them (including sequels), only two of which were released before 2000. Given their prevalence, you’d think that some basic standards would now exist for their creation. And yet, the How to Train Your Dragon live-action remake exists.

It is pretty much impossible to tell, while watching this new live-action rendition of the 2010 animated movie, what the point is — aside from making what will likely be a very large amount of money at the box office. It could be argued that that’s the point of releasing any movie, of course, but usually there’s some sort of creative justification for the thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent on making a movie.

To be clear, Dragon is not the worst live-action remake this year — congrats to Snow White on holding onto that prize. It’s just a slightly distorted copy of what came before. Its best attributes are fully a credit to the original, while its worst qualities all come from the foolishness of adapting a movie that was just fine the way it was.

The story hasn’t changed: A teenage Viking, living on an island prone to dragon attacks, yearns for his father the chief’s approval, except Hiccup isn’t exactly the dragon-slaying warrior type. His intelligence, though, helps him capture one of the most mysterious and deadly dragon types out there — said dragon, though, turns out to be a Very Good Boy, and soon he and Hiccup are flying through the sky together, even while Hiccup’s father and the rest of their clan aim for dragon extinction.

In terms of the cast, Gerard Butler is the one actor from the animated version to make the live-action leap, and he works like hell to act through his massive beard and even more massive shoulder pads, which do a lot to give his character the same out-of-proportion build from the original. As Gobber, Nick Frost seems to have a lot of fun, while Nico Parker (great in the recent Sundance indie Suncoast) brings a reasonable level of spunk to the role of Astrid, a badass trainee/Hiccup’s requisite crush.

And young Mason Thames — cast, one suspects, largely based on his physical resemblance to the animated character — proves technically capable of selling Hiccup’s innate awkwardness, while only occasionally mimicking Jay Baruchel’s original voice performance. The filmmakers don’t even make Thames do the thing Baruchel never did: Sound Scottish.

Though that matters less here, because this crowd of Vikings, we learn, is a multicultural group of Vikings! This is actually the only original element of the movie: A scene which explains why there are people of color present, the answer being that “many tribes” from around the world have come to the island of Berk to take on dragons. (This movie was greenlit before America decided to outlaw DEI.)

It all really builds to the great existential question of why these movies exist. Especially since sometimes, it’s okay for things to not look real. Like, for example, a story about a Viking boy who learns how to ride a dragon! The experience of being told this story is not improved by the fact that there are human actors on screen instead of cartoons, especially give the fact that the CGI dragon being trained is nigh-identical to the one we first saw on screen in 2010.

Technically, this is a smart move: Toothless was already great as he was, no need to improve on perfection. But the cognitive dissonance in seeing the memorable animated rendering interacting with humans we’re told are real proves hard to process. It’s even worse when a CGI-rendered human performing a digital stunt is involved, because the CGI is only fine — not bad enough to inspire laughs, but not good enough to ever suspend disbelief. When characters gaze in wonder at the Northern Lights in the animated movie, it’s a beautiful spectacle. In this new edition, one pictures the original green screen against which the scene was shot, the fans blowing in the actors’ faces to simulate wind.

What’s fascinating about Dragon, in comparison to other adaptations of its kind, is that for some reason, the ancient gods decreed that bringing an animated movie into the live-action realm means adding a minimum of 15 extra minutes to the movie’s runtime. However, with other remakes it’s not hard to figure out why the extra screen time was necessary, as the stories featured “updates” to make them fit better in a modern context: 2023’s The Little Mermaid dabbled in geopolitics, for example, while the live-action Snow White learned about the power of peaceful protest against a tyrant.

Here, though, there are no major additional plot beats. Instead, everything in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon simply takes longer, for no clear reason. Aside from the scene explaining why people of color are present, there are no major new storylines, or characters, or twists, yet somehow the same amount of plot has been stretched from 98 minutes to 125 minutes. How? It’s truly a mystery.

It’s not that all live-action remakes are inherently bad — the original Lilo & Stitch is one of this critic’s favorite Disney movies, and I still enjoyed last month’s remix, even with the significant changes it made to the original’s story. It at least had a take, which is more than the new Dragon does. All this movie has instead is… Dragons. And we’ve seen them before.

How to Train Your Dragon flies into theaters on Friday, June 13th. Check out the trailer below.