How to Train Your Dragon is a movie that finally dares to ask, “What would you get if you asked Leonardo da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa…again?”
In 2002, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois were two talented filmmakers who made the hit animated movie Lilo & Stitch. These two would go on to have flourishing careers, including directing the 2010 film How to Train Your Dragon. Somehow, these directors’ two incredible animated works have been placed through the live-action machine and landed on the cinematic conveyor belt three weeks apart. The Lilo & Stitch remake made some bold changes that didn’t work for everyone, but it had the audacity to take some risks and shake things up a bit.
The live-action How to Train Your Dragon is a carbon copy of the original film. I watched both movies back to back and felt as if I was watching the exact same movie again. Now, you may be thinking, “What did you expect? It’s a remake, so of course it’s going to be a similar movie!” Look. We’ve gotten an endless number of remakes over the past few years. Remakes are Hollywood’s bread and butter these days. Why tell an original story when you can reheat someone else’s nachos? For the record, the nachos were delicious the first time. But if you’re going to serve me nachos again, I at least want a new flavor to go with it.
So, as crazy as it may sound, I don’t watch a remake to see the similarities it has to the original. I watch a remake to see the differences. 2002 gave us Sanders and DeBlois’s take on the Lilo & Stitch story, and I was open to seeing Dean Fleischer Camp’s take on it. But now, we have a new live-action How to Train Your Dragon movie directed once again by Dean DeBlois, who directed every movie in this series before it. He’s a phenomenal director, but there’s nothing to gain from watching him reinterpret his own work. Reinterpreting might not even be the right word; self-plagiarizing is more accurate.
The original How to Train Your Dragon movie is fantastic. It’s an animated film that spoke to an entire generation of children, and it’s absolutely stunning. How do you remake something like that? How do you improve upon perfection? We come into a similar problem that The Lion King remake had, where the source material was so perfect that they decided it was best not to tamper with it. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The Lion King remake failed because it removed the emotions from all the animals. How to Train Your Dragon does better; it keeps all the emotions, but it doesn’t do anything interesting.
This movie is by no means a disaster. It’s an enjoyable movie that families with children can go to the theater for. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even have a bad time watching it. As far as live-action remakes go, How to Train Your Dragon doesn’t make any grave errors. There are no horrible creative choices, like there were with Snow White and Mulan. This is an incredibly faithful adaptation of the original movie, but it’s faithful to a fault. It gets to a point where if you’ve seen the original film, you’re not getting anything new out of this. DeBlois has nothing left to offer. He’s told this story before, and he’s telling it again. When you hear the same story a second time, it loses the charm it had the first time.
From the opening shot, when we return to Berk, we’re already getting copy-pasted narration. I’d estimate that about 70% of this movie’s dialogue is lifted directly from the original. Even if not all the words are the same, every scene follows the exact same beats. We’re not getting a new movie in theaters; we’re getting a movie we watched 15 years ago. It’s frustratingly safe because DeBlois wasn’t interested in doing anything new with this movie. He already had a perfect movie, so he didn’t need to make any bold creative choices. This film is frustratingly safe. Where’s the fun in creativity if you’re not taking any risks?
It’s remarkable how this movie can simply take no risks. It’s the prime example of a safe bet for Hollywood. They can take a script for a movie from years ago, copy-paste it into a new document, and film it. They know that families will come out and take their kids to see it, and it’s guaranteed to earn them a few million dollars at the box office. And in the meantime, children who love this will nag their parents to go to the Isle of Berk in the newly opened Epic Universe at Universal Orlando, which will make even more money. This is not film; this is corporate greed disguised as children’s entertainment. Just because this cash grab maintains the heart and soul of the original film doesn’t make it any less of a cash grab.
There was a time of old when original stories were pushed forward. The theater was a place for original animated movies, and animated sequels and remakes would go direct-to-DVD. Now, banking on IP is Hollywood’s go-to move, and remakes and sequels are their biggest moneymaker. Originality is no longer the norm; it’s the exception. Creativity is dead. Nostalgia is alive and running. All the filmmakers are doing here is replaying the hits. From the shots to the dialogue, nearly everything here is recycled. The movie adds approximately two scenes that are completely unnecessary and don’t add anything to the story, except to explain where Stoick the Vast is for part of the second act.
It’s a shame because it’s not like we don’t have talent here. Mason Thames is phenomenal as Hiccup. I didn’t recognize him from The Black Phone (he’s great in that film too), and he really brings this movie everything it needs. It was a wise choice to have Gerard Butler reprise his role from the animated film here as Stoick. He’s a ginormous personality, and Butler plays him with a lot of energy. Some of the flying sequences are breathtaking, particularly in IMAX. John Powell’s musical score is as amazing as ever. You’ll never be bored watching this movie because the source material is excellent. The issue is that it feels like in a few years, we could be uploading animated movies to A.I. software, telling it to turn them into live-action, and then we get something like this in return: a live-action retelling without anything truly innovative.
This film has gotten higher praise than many live-action remakes because of its faithfulness to capturing the heart of the original, which is Hiccup and Toothless’s friendship. Again, there isn’t much to hate about this movie. The friendship is there, and it feels authentic. The CGI on Toothless and all the dragons is excellent, and you can tell the VFX artists worked hard to make every character photorealistic. But the faithfulness was this movie’s downfall to me. It’s the fact that the filmmakers were so scared to mess up the original movie that they didn’t try anything new. They didn’t innovate; they copied. I understand not wanting to mess up the original film, but for a remake to not do anything substantially new is a massive disappointment and a missed opportunity.
Devoid of risks, How to Train Your Dragon is a painfully familiar movie. It’s definitely not the worst live-action remake because the other remakes made some pretty awful creative choices. But I respect those movies more because they at least wanted to try something new. Even if it didn’t pay off in the end, they tried. There’s no trying on display in this movie; the filmmaking is cowardly. The fact that we’re already set to get a live-action How to Train Your Dragon 2 is living proof that it’s not about making new, delicious dishes; it’s about popping the same food into the microwave over and over again until it becomes inedible. And at this point, I’ve lost my appetite.
SCORE: 5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 5 equates to “Mediocre.” The positives and negatives wind up negating each other, making it a wash.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our How to Train Your Dragon review.
