2010’s animated How To Train Your Dragon boasts a fun, sparky script and an unimprovable story about a lonely, damaged boy bonding with a lonely, injured dragon. This remake has, therefore, largely decided not to improve it, playing out a near-identical script with live human actors and calling it a day. It’s the Gus Van Sant’s Psycho of animation remakes. It is frequently soaring and gorgeous, but can’t take full credit for its beautiful moments because we’ve quite literally seen it before.
How to judge a remix, an echo? Maybe returning director Dean DeBlois, returning composer John Powell and returning star Gerard Butler have fixed some tiny details that always bugged them or added something in that they missed first time, but it’s not always evident what. This adds some tiny wrinkles — a little more backstory for Nico Parker’s star dragon-slayer-in-training Astrid; the idea that the people of Berk are an international dragon task force merely led by the Vikings (though in that case why are the leads, aside from Parker, also so pale?) — but none fundamentally change much of what happens.
Where this is different, it doesn’t necessarily feel better.
That said, the individual elements are fine. Mason Thames makes a good Hiccup, the hapless Viking who can’t kill an injured dragon and so befriends it, and learns from it, instead. Toothless the dragon remains, thankfully, irresistible, and his bond with Hiccup will make you cry. Butler, who voiced Stoick before, is full of heart as the dad who can’t express his feelings. And Nico Parker is an excellent Astrid, given more to do than ever.
Where this is different, it doesn’t necessarily feel better. The actors generally do great work for humans but don’t truly outplay the wildly expressive characters of the original. Cinematographer Bill Pope brings the island to glorious life (though why is it the same cartoonish shape?), but he’s up against the memory of Roger Deakins using all the possibilities of a CG world.
Not to harp on, but remakes used to try to add to or alter something in the original: the gender swap of His Girl Friday; the ’80s Miami excess of Scarface; even the more restrained flourishes of Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella compared to the Disney original. This one just tries to do the same thing again, and while it does it well — while it can’t help but do it well, given how much everyone involved in this obviously loves the original — that’s all it does. Given the animated film so heavily adapted the Cressida Cowell books on which it was based, you’d think the makers of this new version could have played a little looser with the source and really let themselves fly.
