Film review: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (2025) 

• DreamWorks
• “Toothless” and Mason Thames in How to Train Your Dragon

Over the ocean near a distant land, a thousand years ago, someone rides on the back of a dragon—and it's you. You dive and swoop, freefall and skitter over the surface of the water. ... Yes, you become the character riding that dragon—which is a good thing, because you're probably more interesting than the character riding that dragon.

I wrote the words in the above paragraph 15 years ago, about the original animated version of DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon—and it seemed like a good way to begin, because I figured, "If they're not going to put in the effort to change anything, why should I?"

On the one hand, you can't blame DreamWorks for taking a look at how Disney has spent the past 20 years printing money off of rehashing their classic animated catalog, and thinking that it would be nice to get a piece of that sweet, sweet action. On the other hand, they're catching the end of a wave that has long since become exhausting, with another "live-action" "remake" of a movie by the exact same filmmakers—Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois—appearing just a few weeks ago with Lilo & Stitch.

So now here we are, revisiting the Isle of Berk for another iteration of the story of timid Viking Hiccup (Mason Thames), whose homeland is beset by dragon hordes, and who takes the unlikely step of befriending one of those dragons, a wounded Night Fury he calls Toothless. And that story emerges in almost identical fashion to that of its predecessor—every camera position, every pause and hesitation in the line readings, every visual joke, every story beat, every montage. DeBlois—who has directed all the animated sequels in this franchise—is theoretically in the director's chair here, so I suppose you could argue he's only stealing from himself. It simply ends up feeling like such a naked attempt at "you liked this before, you should like it again" that it doesn't even wrestle with why it doesn't make more sense just to watch the original again, at home, on your streaming service.

Of course, it's not literally true that this is an identical product, and the ways in which it feels different are instructive. Mostly, those end up being reasons why this movie loses whatever originality the 2010 movie had, even in its re-use of the popular "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" plot of a community outsider finding their eccentricities ultimately making them special. Certainly the human performances end up being less interesting than what the animators conjured up in the original, which isn't so much a dig at Mason Thames, Nico Parker (playing Astrid) and company as it is a recognition that animated faces are just more fun to look at in a context like this. It's certainly weird to realize that Gerard Butler—reprising his own role as Hiccup's father and village chief Stoick—was more entertainingly Gerard Butler-ish when we weren't looking at his actual face.

And it's also true that similar action sequences in a photorealistic environment with CGI creatures—even ones designed to look virtually identical to the same dragons in the original film—don't feel the same. In 2010, watching Hiccup ride Toothless on an IMAX screen was exhilarating in its stylized specificity; taken out of the context of full animation, the same sequence here ends up feeling like an outtake from Avatar. The training sequences with Hiccup, Astrid and their young friends running from dragons similarly feel like they should be part of a Jurassic Park feature, and more of a tactile threat for young viewers. Repeatedly, you find instances where the filmmakers don't seem to understand that some things that work in animation just do not work in live-action in the same way.

There is one somewhat significant shift in the plot, which re-imagines Berk as an island of immigrants, ostensibly to explain the many different ethnicities represented among the human cast members. Yet there's a bizarre rationalization provided for that idea: They all moved to Berk specifically to fight the dragons, which makes it pretty confusing that they're so outraged about having to ... you know, fight dragons. Whatever moments of charm this movie has, they're second-hand, and serving something that just doesn't feel well thought-out. And I've already written more original words about this How to Train Your Dragon than the credited screenwriter wrote for it.