Don Reviews "How To Train Your Dragon" (2025)

When the 2010 animated original of How to Train Your Dragon was released, I never saw it in the theaters, but when it was released on premium cable I recorded it.  I still waited almost nine months before I actually watched it and not only ended up falling in love with it but it has also become one of my personal favorites.  Given this and pairing it with my distaste for overdone sequels or remakes, you can understand my hesitation when going into the live-action remake.

Original director Dean DeBlois actually helps this with a cast including Mason Thames, Nico Butler, Gerard Butler, Nick Frost, and Julian Dennison.  It is the same story of Hiccup (Thames), who lives in an ancient Viking village called Berk with his father Stoick (Butler) being its chief.  Hiccup is a little small and is having trouble fitting in, especially given the biggest issue in Berk lies in dragon attacks. When he is able to catch a elusive “Night Fury” dragon one night, instead of killing it he helps him heal and a friendship grows between them, naming the dragon “Toothless”.  As Hiccup learns about the dragon, he realized that there may be more to the dragons than his fellow villagers realize.

First off, this film looks amazing: the filming took place in Ireland, and it was perfect to represent Berk.  The landscape and the ocean cliffs looked just like it did in the animated feature, and that truly is impressive which could be in comparison to the Vikings television series.  The CGI is also incredible: of course there is a ton of it, but it is used just right in order to keep me focused on the film and not even looking at the dragons as manufactured by computer.

I’m glad they used Butler to play the same role he played the first time around, making me feel like I saw the same big chief again and works well with Thames.  Parker did fine as Astrid, but I have to give a shout out to Frost as Gobber, whose performance is spot-on as the man who is half man and half interchangeable parts.  The rest of the cast who play Hiccup’s fellow trainees in dragon slaying did fine, keeping things on par from the original.

Overall, this one pretty much does follow the plot of the original, but it also stretches the run time by about thirty minutes, so some scenes are extended, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  If have one gripe, it would be that there are a couple of moments in the original that were not in this version that I was hoping for, but there were other moments that helped explain a couple of things that were not as clear for me the first time around.

I will the first to admit that I was skeptical about making a live-action version of one of my all-time favorite films, but I also wanted to be tough but fair as I saw it.  In the end, I am actually glad they made this version of How to Train Your Dragon because it gave me all the joy and emotion that the original did and did it in a great way.  After the screening I attended, a fellow critic said to me, “I loved the original, and I adore this version”, and I agree with that statement one hundred percent.  It was hard for me to find things that I did not like, so of course, it gets my “coveted” full price in the theaters recommendation, and get my extra coveted “Bomb City Promise” that this film will make my upcoming Top Ten favorite films of the year list.