How to Train Your Dragon

by Mike McGranaghan

There is only one reason why a live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon exists: money. It isn’t because writer/director Dean DeBlois had a burning passion to tell this story. He already did so perfectly in the 2010 original. It isn’t because live-action is an improvement on the animated version. That is most certainly not the case. No, the only logical reason is because live-action remakes of animated classics have (mostly) been cleaning up at the box office in recent years. If this new version is a hit, maybe someday they’ll remake it in animation, and if that version is a hit, they could remake it in live-action. Let the idiocy train keep rolling.

Particularly confounding is that the movie requires massive amounts of CGI to create the dragons and to accomplish the action scenes involving them. All that really happens here is that characters who were initially rendered in animation are now portrayed by humans. They found an actor, The Black Phone’s Mason Thames, who is made up to look like the hero, Hiccup. He even emulates the way original voice actor Jay Baruchel delivered his lines. And to play Hiccup’s father Stoick, they brought back Gerard Butler, who already played the role 15 years ago.

This is what I find so perplexing about the remake. DeBlois isn’t bringing anything new to the table. He’s simply repeating his own work. Everything about How to Train Your Dragon is designed to be as faithful to the original as possible. That includes reusing dialogue and repeating a lot of the same shots. Except for a slightly elongated final battle, the movie does not do anything to distinguish itself. That, of course, begs the question: Why should anyone see this inferior Xerox copy when they could watch the wonderful original again instead?

I saw the original in 3D and was blown away by how exhilarating the sequences were where Hiccup flies on dragon Toothless’s back. They made me feel as though I was in flight too. You’d think at least those scenes would work this time around. They don’t. Even in 3D, they’re disappointingly flat. It’s just actors against a green screen with some CGI blended in. There is none of the magic or the majesty that viewers will reasonably expect.

If there were no previous version, How to Train Your Dragon would have been fine. A great deal of craftsmanship clearly went into the production design, and the CGI is elaborate and detailed. But there is a previous version. This one is soulless and empty, especially when compared to the original. Kind of boring in spots, too. Again, that’s because the filmmakers weren’t trying to produce a great movie, they were trying to make a prefabricated product with a high likelihood of being profitable.

This isn’t the worst movie of the year, although it’s certainly the most depressing.

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