Movie Review: How To Train Your Dragon (2025)

So we've had a lot of live-action remakes over the last, let's say 10 years. The best have been the ones like Cruella and Christopher Robin which take a story and go off on their own tangent, while the worst have been one-to-one remakes like Pinocchio or The Lion King that don't add anything to the film and just feel a little lazy. Up until now, I have only ever seen live-action remakes of animated films I had seen as a child, meaning that there is an inherent bias towards the thing I had seen repeatedly over the last 30 years.

I had not seen How To Train Your Dragon prior to sitting in a theater yesterday so that bias is not there. Originally I planned to watch the animated film this week in the lead up to this release for Thirty Minute Reviews but I changed my mind so I could conduct this experiment. The result is that I can look at this movie with a certain objectivity that was missing from past live-action remakes. With that in mind, I enjoyed this movie quite a bit, in spite of some of the problems that may plague the narrative.

The biggest issues come from issues that may just be systemic to this iteration of the story. First, I'm not entirely sure why we need to have Stoick and Hiccup start in a situation where Stoick doesn't want Hiccup to fight dragons while Hiccup does, only to flip it about ten minutes later into the dynamic that carries the rest of the movie. It just makes the opening feel disjointed from the rest of the movie and only exists to cause additional scenes to explain why both characters are shifting their motivations.

Second, Astrid flips to join Hiccup too quickly, and maybe it's just that the character is underutilized in the majority of the film. Considering how entrenched this society is in its belief that dragons must be exterminated and how single-mindedly focused Astrid is on being the person who will get to kill her first dragon in the arena, I don't necessarily buy that she would flip the way she does and decide to go 100% with Hiccup, especially since the two share barely any screentime before Astrid discovers Toothless, and the screentime they do share is short and adversarial. Astrid needed more time with Hiccup as friends before that scene for it to work properly.

The third and possibly largest issue is who the "final boss" of the movie is. The thing that sets Hiccup apart from every other Viking in this world is that he does not have the instinct to kill Toothless because Toothless is defenseless, and he acknowledges that the dragons do have sentience. The fact that ultimately this movie ends with Hiccup killing a dragon anyway, even if it is a big evil dragon, feels like a mistake. Arguably the better ending to what Hiccup's arc is would be for there to have been another group of Vikings on the other side of the island or something who are treating the dragons poorly causing them to attack and they have to learn to treat the dragons better to beat those people.

There are some nitpicky things about the visual style that probably come from the translation from animation to live-action (Hiccup flying with Toothless doesn't look that visually interesting, there are times that people crash into the ground that definitely should cause injury to a human) but this is an enjoyable experience that nails both the comedic and emotional moments to the point that I'll probably watch the animated movie at some point in the near future.

★★★★

How To Train Your Dragon (2025)
Directed by: Dean DeBlois
Written by: Dean DeBlois and Cressida Cowell
Starring: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler, and Nick Frost
Release Date: June 13th, 2025
Rating: PG