‘How to Train Your Dragon' Review: The Return of Hiccup and Toothless
About halfway through 'How to Train Your Dragon,' Hiccup, the unlikely hero hiding under a mop of teenage hair, hops onto the back of his newfound dragon friend, Toothless, and cautiously goes for their first ride. Soon, they're soaring; they're bumped around and perilously tumbling; they're finding each other midair; and finally they're shooting off at light speed, twisting impossibly through the craggy rock formations sprouting over the sea.
It's a moment of pure exhilaration, the first instance when you nod and momentarily understand the point of this remake — a live-action mirror of a big sequence from the 2010 animated film that adds visceral weight and big-screen grandeur to the original. By the film's end, it's one of the few scenes that genuinely justifies the entire conceit of this reimagining from Dean DeBlois, the franchise's returning director.
To be sure, this new iteration is entertaining, bears a sense of heart and brings a tight script of fantasy and friendship to life. It is, in short, all of the original, only too much so: Most of the good of this 'Dragon' come directly from its source material, as DeBlois has almost religiously mimed his original creation without much daring or new dimension beyond mechanically translating it to an IMAX screen. For the faithful to a strong franchise, that is perhaps the best way to do it.
This remake of the 2010 film comes just six years after the third and final installment of the animated trilogy, barely a blink of an eye when it comes to developing the nostalgia kick that tends to fuel live-action retreads. And yet, the movie is bringing to life a franchise that, far more than most animated films, has the pure DNA of a real-deal blockbuster: an immersive fantasy epic full of dragon fights and warmongering Vikings.
Like its original, the new film begins by introducing us, mid-battle, to Berk, a remote island village that is in a perpetual war with dragons. When Hiccup (Mason Thames), the feckless son of the village chief, Stoic (Gerard Butler, reprising his role in the animated films), wounds a Night Fury, the deadliest of dragons, he develops a bond with the creature. He names him Toothless and comes to find him, and all dragons, to be more skittish dog than aggressive predator, a realization Hiccup struggles to translate to his people as their war turns ever more deadly.
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