How to Train Your Dragon

The Echo of a Roar

There is a peculiar melancholy in watching a creator dismantle their own masterpiece only to reassemble it with heavier, more expensive materials. Dean DeBlois, the architect of DreamWorks’ soaring 2010 animated triumph *How to Train Your Dragon*, has returned to the isle of Berk not to expand its horizons, but to trace over them in flesh and photorealism. The resulting film is a curious artifact of modern Hollywood: a work of undeniable technical competence that feels suffocated by the very reality it seeks to emulate. It is a film that walks earnestly where its predecessor flew.

To translate the boundless expressionism of animation into live-action is to trade metaphor for literalism, and nowhere is this exchange more costly than in the film’s visual language. The original film was a study in kinetic joy; when Hiccup and Toothless took to the skies, the frame felt untethered, vibrating with the impossible physics of a boy’s imagination. Here, under the weight of visual effects that strive for texture over emotion, the "Test Drive" sequence—so seminal in the original—feels technically impressive but spiritually grounded. The camera, now obeying the laws of simulated optics, captures the scales of the dragon and the spray of the ocean with rigorous fidelity, yet it misses the giddy, stomach-dropping sensation of flight. We are no longer dreaming; we are simply watching a very expensive simulation of wind physics.

However, if the spectacle feels dim, the human element flickers with a surprising, albeit different, kind of light. Mason Thames, stepping into the fur boots of Hiccup, wisely sidesteps the neurotic caricature of the animated version. Instead, he plays Hiccup with a bruised interiority, a quiet desperation that makes his isolation feel less like a narrative quirk and more like a genuine adolescent wound. This darker, lonelier interpretation allows the film’s central relationship—the bond between boy and beast—to resonate on a frequency that is distinct from the original. When Thames reaches out to touch the snout of the CGI Night Fury, the moment works not because the dragon looks real (though it does), but because Thames plays the scene with the trembling reverence of someone encountering the divine.

The most fascinating aspect of this experiment, however, is Gerard Butler. Reprising his role as Stoick the Vast—this time in body as well as voice—Butler offers a performance that feels like a conversation with his past self. Stripped of the exaggeration of animation, his Stoick is a figure of tragic weight, a father paralyzed by a worldview that no longer serves him. The live-action medium allows us to see the micro-expressions of regret in his eyes that a cartoon, for all its artistry, could only suggest. It is in these quiet scenes between father and son that the film justifies its existence, finding a gritty emotional texture that feels appropriate for a story about breaking generational cycles of violence.

Ultimately, this 2025 iteration of *How to Train Your Dragon* suffers from the paradox of the "faithful remake." It is so devoted to the beats of its predecessor that it rarely finds its own rhythm. It stands as a monument to technical proficiency and nostalgic reverence, yet it lacks the unruly spark of invention. We are left with a film that is undoubtedly "real"—the mud looks like mud, the fire looks like fire—but in its pursuit of the tangible, it has forgotten that the true power of dragons lies in their ability to make us believe in the impossible.