Welcome to Berk, a remote island in the north Atlantic, home to Vikings and their mortal enemy; dragons.  Stoick (Gerard Butler) embarks on another effort to find the dragon nest and vanquish the pests, but is ultimately unsuccessful. Upon his return to the island, he learns that his son, Hiccup (Mason Thames), is the unlikely top performer in this year’s dragon slaying class.  Hiccup, however, has a secret.  He does not want to kill dragons, rather he wants to tame them and understand them, and he has been keeping in secret a dangerous Night Fury as a pet and companion deep in the woods. 

For Dreamworks‘ first foray into the live action remakes, Dean DeBlois is tapped to revisit and reimagine the world of Berk in How to Train Your Dragon, adapting his own modern, animated classic from 2010.  In this second go-around, he pads out the script with 27 additional minutes bringing it to a total run time of 125 minutes.  There are some new scenes and expansions of others, but the majority of the new content is thrilling sequences in the sky which, besides showing off the studio’s capabilities, really are there to promote the opening of the Isle of Berk attraction at Universal Orlando’s Epic Universe. 

DeBlois’ film falls into the same creatively bankrupt yet emotionally effective category as Jon Favreau’s The Lion King (2019) does.  Largely a shot for shot remake, the film benefits from the effectiveness of its predecessor as it has little new or innovative – at least on a story level – to do on its own.  This, of course, begs the question more than some of the more liberal remakes as to why does this even exist if not to be touted as a tech showcase or commercial for a new park experience?  It all comes down to money, but in bringing back so many of the integral members of the original production, one can be convinced that there was something marginally altruistic about this endeavor as it pays such reverence to its source. Albeit gorgeous to look out and emotionally resonant, it nevertheless rings hollow and we are left to wonder what a Robert Altman like touch a la Popeye (1980) – sans songs – might have done to deepen this material, or even what a script that more closely followed Cressida Cowell’s Ur text 2003 novel may have been like. 

The major difference here between the two comes in the casting.  Unable to hide behind the digital animation, casting director Lucy Bevan had to find a capable troupe of younger performers instead of reaching out to more seasoned comedians and comic actors to lend their voices to the visuals.  The new cast is all very serviceable, but the timing is just ever so slightly off so the humor struggles to land and as seen only a few weeks earlier in Dean Fleischer Camp‘s Lilo & Stitch (2025) for Disney, animated characters have much more freedom and precision of expression than their live action counterparts do.  Since comedy is such a carefully calibrated game of timing, being able to dial down not only to the frame, but the pixels within the frame can make all the difference in landing some of these reactionary punchlines. 

Thankfully though, production designer Dominic Watkins maintains a surprising sense of tangibility in the sets that elevates How to Train Your Dragon well above the uncanny facsimile adopted by Disney’s reimaginings, and that commitment allows John Powell’s score to sweep across the Nordic vistas like a cool, invigorating breeze whipped up from the flapping of the majestic dragon’s wings.  Unfortunately, though, this embrace of the physical does not extend to the dragons.  While it would be unlikely that a film of this pedigree would be allowed to experiment with puppets or other physical renderings of its dragons as smaller scale such as Isaiah Saxon‘s The Legend of Ochi for A24 or Adrien Beau‘s The Vourdalak (2024) for Oscilloscope have both done quite recently, that Toothless and his cohort only ever exist as ones and zeros means that there are large swatches of the film that do tip into the uncanny valley when the studio treats the film more as a technical showcase than a proper narrative.  As cited, there have been incredible advances in filmmaking since Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) rode astride Falkor in Wolfgang Petersen’s The Never-Ending Story (1984), and this would have been a perfect outlet to show off the melding of practical and digital effects while also helping to inspire greater imagination than just another computer rendering that fits all too seamlessly into the digitally enhanced, if not entirely digital, background that is almost becomes a blur despite the cleanness of the image. Simply put, the image is so clean that it becomes sterile. 

Looking at what the film does present, again, it is hard to really judge because so much of the design is heavily indebted to the original animated film.  The cast all do their best to inhabit this version of their characters with Thames being given the most longitude to really stretch into and fill the role.  Opposite the fumbling Hiccup is the much more surgical Astrid (Nico Parker).  Parker, likewise, is given a little more room to grow into the role of Astrid as opposed to the rest of the supporting cast – Snotlout (Gabriel Howell), Fishlegs (Julian Dennison), Ruffnut (Bronwyn James), and Toughnut (Harry Trevaldwyn) – who all largely occupy the same animated sidekick tropes to, again, well enough effect, but they are hampered in the translation from animated to live action and further pressed back by a script that is more than content to treat them as bit players while expecting audiences to foster a relationship with them when it comes time for the final battle. 

The overall arc of the two films stay the same, and so while the third act of the film culminates in a show down at the dragon nest against a massive Bewilderbeast, this conclusion feels less organic than in the original.  Even in the animated film, there was some disparity in how the dragons were styled; Toothless was specifically unique, then there was everyone else who were more traditionally scaly and rugged, and then the final dragon was in a class of its own given its size.  In fact, none of those three subsets really seem like they belong in the same world together, and while our own world offers a wide array of strange creatures, Berk is not our world, rather a curated environment that lacks visual cohesion.  Further, the transition from animated to live action, even without major changes to the story, also adds a barrier of entry that the previous film did not have to contend with.  It is far scarier seeing real people put into these dangerous situations than it was to see their animated counterparts put in similar peril.  It again just proves that some adjustments to the visual style would have greatly improved the film if they were not going to tweak or expand on the narrative in any real meaningful way.  Handsomely mounted, sure, but it lacks the same heart as the original because this is such a work of mimicry rather than being a story – albeit, an adaptation – that was allowed to grow out organically.