Latest news with #liveactionremake
Geek Vibes Nation
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
‘How To Train Your Dragon' (2025) Review - A Live-Action Remake Done Right
An unsung curse that has plagued the cinematic landscape for years now is that of the dreaded 'live-action remake'. Despite coming on strong with Jon Favreau's Jungle Book reimagining in 2016, just about every genre entry since has suffered from a lack of color and inspiration in favor of a bland, play-by-play remake of whatever animated classic is being castrated. That is, until Dean DeBlois decided to tackle his own How to Train Your Dragon franchise, sculpting the live-action reformation with the same hands that created the original. The result is, in a rarity for the type, almost as magical as the original animated release was in 2010. DeBlois and Dreamworks didn't just get this one right — they set a new standard. While the live-action makeover's narrative is almost a one-to-one retelling of the first movie, it sets itself apart with strong casting and unique visuals. In an age of much more expensive movies looking unrealistic and unconvincing, the remake of a children's dragon movie coming onto the scene with some of the best visual effects in the last half-decade was certainly unexpected; yet, here we are. How to Train Your Dragon simply looks fantastic. The franchise's cartoonish sensibilities are not lost in live-action, like many feared they would be; instead, they're adapted in style, lending themselves to the realistic look of the titular creatures without losing the whimsy that makes them feel so unbelievably special. Toothless, especially, is flawlessly executed here. His characterization (which, of course, relies entirely on expressions) strongly translates to the film's relatively grounded visual palette. If anything, he stands out more in this one than he did in the original. Just fantastic work across the board in that regard here. Mason Thames as Hiccup, situated aside Toothless for most of the runtime, is nothing short of a stroke of genius in this adaptation. His interactions with the computer-generated dragon are terribly convincing and wonderfully spirited, and his bouts of emotion with the rest of the village, especially Gerard Butler's Stoick, his father, are staunch standouts. Butler voiced the character in the animated trilogy, but his role reprisal here isn't as simple as it seems. Seeing him in costume and working alongside the rest of the cast in physical form adds a new layer to his delivery as the character. He and Thames create the perfect sort of jagged, confused, painfully loving father/son relationship that the narrative necessitates at the center of the movie. Each of them plays a huge role in the third act's emotional weight, elevating every scene they're in and then some. On that final act, it too is brilliantly done here. While the original film still stands a little taller in most regards, if not only for the reason that it was the first to tell this story on the big screen, the last thirty minutes of the new retelling may actually be a tad stronger. How to Train Your Dragon's scale, from the moment the characters meet at the dragons' lair, is that of a true, proper blockbuster. It's clear that much of the money went to the last few scenes, but the result is a truly dazzling sequence of stakes taking physicality in the form of fire, beating wings, and lone teardrops. If anyone, by that point, is still asking the question: 'Why did this need to be made?' That scene answers it. Was this movie necessary? On the whole, perhaps not. But is it welcome? Absolutely. Prior to this release, it had been more than a decade since audiences were able to see this classic story told at the cinema. For the first movie's director to return to retell it in this form, and to this degree, is a true delight. How to Train Your Dragon is the best live-action remake of an animated movie ever. Point, blank, period. Here's to hoping they tackle the sequels next. How To Train Your Dragon will debut exclusively in theaters on June 13, 2025, courtesy of Universal.
Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Times
How to Train Your Dragon review — live action remake lacks creative fire
Thor almighty! It's happened! After decades of witnessing Disney raid its own back catalogue for soulless live-action reboots, rival studio Dreamworks has finally joined the self-cannibalising remake train. And boy has it proved, with this How to Train Your Dragon update, that it can be as bland as the best of them. Yes, we're in slavish shot-for-shot remake terrain, ie a live action copy of the original animated frames. This still makes no sense, neuters spontaneity and always proves the superiority of the animated version. It's the cinematic equivalent of those viral Instagram posts that feature classic paintings recreated with friends, kids and animals. Bravo, yes, it looks just like the original but…and? • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews The story of the geeky Viking protagonist Hiccup (Mason Thames) and his gang of teenage warriors now occurs within this awkward straitjacket of shot-for-shot narrative conformity. Hiccup tames a lethal 'Night Fury' dragon called Toothless and must convince his fellow dragon-hating Vikings, especially his father and chieftain Stoick (Gerard Butler), that these creatures are allies and the real enemy is, in fact, a mega-beast called the Red Death. And yet everything that happens on screen, and in the film's remote Northern Ireland shooting locations, has a strangely lifeless quality, like everyone's simply clocking in on the day for there 'This is the bit where…' copycat scene. • Cressida Cowell on How to Train Your Dragon: I have my own theme park now The acting is uneven and symptomatic of a film with no driving vision. Thames's Hiccup is all cartoon reaction shots and wide bug-eyes. Butler, by contrast, goes full Coriolanus in his scenes and even roars through spit and tears at his son, 'They took your mother for god's sake!' The role of fighting femme Astrid has been given to Nico Parker (the perfect child-minder from Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy) but without, it seems, any performance notes other than, well, just stare straight ahead and seem slightly miffed. It's directed by Dean DeBlois, who co-directed the first one and has, inexplicably and fatally, excised the wickedly snarky personality of Toothless. He's a complicated and grumpy teen-ish dragon in the original but an empty special effect here. DeBlois, however, has kept the brash American accents of the Viking kids, even though their parents are mostly Scottish or Cockney (see Nick Frost as the geezer blacksmith Gobber). Because, clearly, that's important. It's loud and diverting and very young children are sure to be entertained. But it's also utterly dead, right down to its hollow, greedy, cash-grabbing cinemas from Jun 13PG, 125min • The island that breathed fire into Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon Make Wednesday your go-to cinema day. Each month Times+ members can bring a friend for free at Everyman on a Wednesday. The perfect cinema experience with plush sofas, a full bar and great food. Visit to find out @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How to Train Your Dragon, review: How to drain your patience, more like
Few directors in Hollywood must be having a weirder summer than Chris Sanders. Who he? This gifted animator spent the noughties crafting two now-beloved films, Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, which both artfully coaxed their parent studios, Disney and DreamWorks, far from their lucrative 1990s comfort zones. Anyway, this year, both of those studios have released live-action re-dos of said films, each of which is expected to do very nicely commercially and is about as adventurous as a boiled potato. How to Train Your Dragon is the technologically splashier of the two, but also by far the more mind-numbingly redundant. It's less a remake of the 2010 original than a restaging: essentially scene-for-scene, often word-for-word, sometimes shot-for-shot. It somehow elongates its predecessor's running time by 27 minutes without adding a single atom of noticeably fresh material. Perhaps all the dragons are just flying around a bit more slowly this time, or the vikings have to walk further between huts. Two of said vikings, played by Gerard Butler and Nick Frost, are trying admirably hard to make it work. Butler returns as the thrusting village chieftain Stoick the Vast, the character he voiced in the animations: impressively, he manages to come across even more cartoony in person than he did as a cartoon. Frost, meanwhile, replaces Craig Ferguson as Gobber the tender-hearted blacksmith, and one-man moral support team for Stoick's weedy but resourceful son Hiccup (Mason Thames), who realises that befriending the local dragon population might be smarter than waging war on them at every given moment. The two are sturdy comedic assets in a cast blighted elsewhere by a common animation-to-live-action malady: characters that were charming and quirky in the former medium are, when moved to the latter, just wildly annoying. Hiccup and his teenage peers are vintage examples, and irksome in a community-theatre-troupe sort of way: each has a single irritating personality trait which they express once per scene, irritatingly, in the broadest and hammiest way imaginable. Then again, so much of How to Train Your Dragon '25 feels trapped mid-transition. Director Dean DeBlois, who captained the original with Sanders and the two sequels solo, has opted for a mix-and-match visual approach that wavers between caricature and realism in any given frame.
News.com.au
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Gerard Butler jokes he had to get out of his pyjamas for live-action dragon film
Scottish actor Gerard Butler has joked it was fun to 'get out of my pyjamas and actually put on a costume' to star in the live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon. The film star, 55, who voiced Chief Stoick the Vast in the animated films, has reprised his role as the Viking for the new version, which follows the same narrative as the 2010 film inspired by Cressida Cowell's book series.
Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Lilo & Stitch review — Disney hits a dead end with this abomination
After the ignominious critical and financial failure of Disney's recent Snow White adaptation, the entertainment giant has reportedly halted all future live-action remakes, starting with a planned update of Tangled. And so this mind-numbing abomination, filmed in 2023 and adapted from the 2002 cartoon, is hopefully a swansong for a fantastically lazy, cravenly commercial and artistically bankrupt process. The film instantly falls into the seemingly insuperable live-action remake trap — the deluded belief that simply putting the original on film, sometimes via a frame-by-frame copy, is enough in itself. And so we open with an intergalactic super-mutant called Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders, also director of the original) who crash-lands into the lonely life of Hawaiian orphan Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and her older
