How To Train Your Dragon (2025)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on June 26, 2025.

(PG) ★★★

Director: Dean DeBlois.

Cast: Mason Thames, Gerard Butler, Nico Parker, Nick Frost, Gabriel Howell, Julian Dennison, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Peter Serafinowicz.

"Fly Cat-Bat!"

I have no problem with people remaking films, but good lord, have an actual reason to do so beyond "money".

Modernise it, gender-flip it, put it in space, explore its themes through a different lens, improve it. But don't just make the exact same movie again. And certainly don't do it with the same director.

Because that's what is going on here. And in redoing this charming 2010 CG-animated film as a CG-heavy live action film, How To Train Your Dragon loses a lot of its charm, and gains very little in return.

It's still the tale of Hiccup (Thames), the son of a Viking chieftain (Butler), who lives on an island besieged by dragons. After a run-in with the most fiercest dragon of them all, Hiccup learns these creatures aren't evil, just misunderstood, and sets about changing the destiny of his clan.

Admittedly it's been a while since I watched the original (15 years in fact), but this remake feels pretty close to a beat-for-beat retelling. There is nothing new here - the director, who co-directed the original, has even boasted of recreating sequences shot-for-shot. At least when Gus Van Sant did that with Psycho it felt like some kind of cinematic thought experiment. This just feels like an attempt to make money.

Leaving aside the remake thing for a moment, if the 2010 version of this didn't exist, on its own this film would be okay. It's weirdly flat in terms of tone and laughs, but there is no denying the beauty and power of its story, and some of the flight sequences are exhilarating and look incredible. 

The cast also does a pretty solid job. Thames is too handsome to play Hiccup, but the kid can act, and Parker is great as the star Viking teen Astrid. Butler gives perhaps the best performance of his career in the role of Stoick, which he voiced in the 2010 original, and Frost does a pretty good job at providing comic relief. The incredibly talented Serafinowicz is oddly wasted though, and the kids are largely annoying, but not enough so as to ruin the film.

But compared to the original, this live action knock-off feels oddly charmless, with nothing new to offer. It fails to recapture the spark of its predecessor, which perhaps says just as much about the nature of cinema as Van Sant's Psycho experiment. Even with all the same ingredients, sometimes a dish just doesn't taste the same.