How to Train Your Dragon has been turned into a live-action remake that lacks the original's heart

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

You couldn't ask for a more faithful remake than How to Train Your Dragon — and in some ways, that's for the best.
The original animated trilogy, which loosely adapted Cressida Cowell's book series of the same name, is easily the most beloved fantasy film series of the 2010s.
What: An obsessively faithful live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon.
Directed by: Dean DeBlois
Starring: Mason Thames, Gerard Butler, Nico Parker
Where: In cinemas June 12
Likely to make you feel: Like they should've just re-released the original
In translating the initial outing to live action, Dreamworks has tapped franchise steward Dean DeBlois to take the reins, having first brought the Viking isle of Berk to life with co-director Chris Sanders 15 years ago. (Both also directed 2002's Lilo and Stitch, another recent victim of the budding Gen Z nostalgia industry.)
Some of Disney's live-action remake trends have rubbed off. The film has been padded out by an extra half hour and augments the story's darker moments (particularly in the scaled-up showdown of the third act) to better service older, pre-existing fans. Its cast has been diversified in a half-hearted, 'Disney's first gay character' kind of way. The lighting looks cheap.
Otherwise, How to Train Your Dragon offers a re-telling that's virtually shot-for-shot in its design — an act of cinematic self-mimicry that hasn't been witnessed in some time. In doing so, DeBlois at least fulfils a baseline promise that few of Disney's own reheated efforts have realised: if you liked the original film, you'll probably like this.
The main downside of this constricted approach — apart from the degrading treatment of animation as a second-rate visual medium waiting to be made "real" — is that there is not a single interesting creative choice visible on screen.
Our protagonist, Hiccup (Mason Thames; The Black Phone), is once again a nebbish teenage boy who's been sidelined in his village's bitter feud against the local dragon population. The fire-breathing beasts, who steal livestock and displace limbs from bodies, have inspired a coalition of Viking warriors to rally around his windy northern island, over which his father Stoick (Gerard Butler, who perfectly transitions from his voice role) reigns.
Like any good tale of adolescent self-actualisation, How to Train Your Dragon is about the necessity of disappointing your parents. Hiccup's attempts to live up to the village chief sees him shoot down a Night Fury, the most elusive and feared species recorded in the history books, only for no-one to witness the event.
Worse, still: when he tracks down the wounded beast (who irresistibly marries the appearance of a winged axolotl with the temperament of a black cat), he can't bring himself to finish the job and instead sets him free.
It's a strikingly mature moment that few other family films have matched since its first iteration. Younger heroes are rarely allowed to act like scared children, let alone be confronted with the consequences of their physical harm.
Hiccup's lack of a killer instinct is also tested at a dragon-slaying bootcamp for Berk's youth, in which he faces a fiery gauntlet alongside strong-willed love interest Astrid (Nico Parker; The Last of Us), dragon nerd Fishlegs (Julian Dennison; Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and other soon-to-be child soldiers.
But as he strikes up a friendship with the Night Fury, who he names Toothless, he discovers that dragons are far more benign than advertised — and with his engineering expertise, he designs a prosthetic to help his injured companion take to the skies once more.
Mason Thames noticeably struggles to bridge the gap between his protagonist's earlier incarnation and the grounded reality of live action. The animated Hiccup benefited from outsized expressions, a buoyant physicality and an exaggerated, shrunken-down character design. His dialogue, which was written with this kind of heightened performance in mind, is largely unchanged.
Again, How to Train Your Dragon is essentially the same film as its animated counterpart. The joys of the original film — from its ecstatic flying sequences to John Powell's rousing score to its inclusive approach to disability — have been kept intact. But so has one of its main problems.
The refreshed characterisation of Astrid still feels outdated, broadly fitting the trope of an ultra-competent heroine who's upstaged by an initially clueless hero, eventually relegated to cheerleading duties by the end.
Even when she's given more space to flex her own agency or (in a distinctly 2020's twist) chide Hiccup for his nepo-baby status, it's the kind of fundamental character problem that a couple of additional beats can't solve.
The creation of the original How to Train Your Dragon is the kind of story that makes one feel almost romantic about filmmaking. The film's stormy production was already well underway when Chris Sanders was brought on to overhaul the project in the span of just 12 months. (For reference, its sequel took about four years to make.)
Sanders immediately enlisted DeBlois to share directing duties; legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins (working as a visual consultant) and composer John Powell soon followed.
It would've been a miracle if a compromised, but technically complete film had staggered into cinemas on release date. Instead, How to Train Your Dragon represented a triumph of creative ingenuity, tight-knit collaboration and forward-thinking ideas in the face of overwhelming odds.
It's hard to imagine anyone feeling inspired by the process behind this remake, which — for all the gargantuan challenges that every tentpole inevitably faces — feels like the creative equivalent of tracing over paper.
In a recent featurette about the film's lightly remixed score, Powell aptly sums up the pointlessness of this endeavour: "If I've done my job right, people will think I haven't done anything different at all."