Remake? Try Cinematic Déjà Vu

The best way to enjoy the new How to Train Your Dragon is to be totally unfamiliar with the original animated movie from 2010. The live-action version is so close to the Dragon cartoon it recalls a kid-friendly version of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. If you don’t know the first HTTYD, that won’t matter; the new film features the same clever story, the same likable characters, and the same John Powell score, which remains one of the most stirring pieces of 21st century movie music. On the other hand, if you do know the first film, this How to Train Your Dragon plays like cinematic déjà vu.

The story is exactly the same. The characters are mostly identical. So are the dragons, even though this movie is set in a live-action world populated by flesh-and-blood humans with a much more muted and realistic color palate than the 2010 HTTYD. Dialogue get repeated verbatim. Even one of the franchise’s main voice actors —Gerard Butler — returned to reprise his role. That would be Stoick the Vast, the leader of a village of Vikings in a fantastical world also populated by hungry, fire-breathing dragons. Stoick is a brave warrior, and a bit of an absentee parent to his awkward inventor of a son, Hiccup (Mason Thames, replacing and sometimes mimicking Jay Baruchel).

While Stoick and his army hunt for the beasts’ nest, Hiccup stumbles upon an injured “Night Fury” dragon that he managed to clip during one of the monsters’ raids on his village. Using a weapon of his own design, Hiccup wounded the dragon’s tail, trapping him in a deep gorge hidden in a nearby forest. As a Viking prince, Hiccup should kill this dragon. But he can’t bring himself to do it. Soon, Hiccup begins to sneak away from dragon-slaying lessons to spend time with the creature he names Toothless. After building Toothless a prosthetic tail, he realizes the dragons are not as ferocious as they appear; like any good domesticated pet, all they need is a little love (and some delicious food) to bond with a human.

READ MORE: A Brutally Honest Kid’s Review of the New How to Train Your Dragon

Sound familiar? If you have seen How to Train Your Dragon, it should. While this live-action version runs about 30 minutes longer than the 2010 movie, it often plays like a 1:1 copy of its predecessor. Hiccup learns to trust Toothless, flies around Berk to the sounds of Powell’s soaring music, and starts to subdue the dragons during slayer training by exploiting information he’s learned from Toothless. (Just like dogs, dragons love it when you scratch under their chins.) Complications arise when the village’s best female slayer, Astrid (Nico Parker), grows suspicious about Hiccup’s extracurricular activities. And more problems pop up when Stoick returns to the village and discovers that Hiccup is now a local celebrity famed for his prowess at dragon taming.

As remakes go, How to Train Your Dragon is handsomely made. Writer/director Dean DeBlois, who was also one of the writers and directors of the animated film, studiously recreates his fine work on that project in live-action. Butler was a good choice for the gruff but loving Stoick in animation, and he gives an equally moving performance here — despite the fact that he plays every scene beneath a mountain of beard hair and braids. Even Toothless, with his enormous green eyes and wide, friendly face, has been transposed to this world with minimal changes. And I have no doubt How to Train Your Dragon will work for young viewers today the same way it did 15 years ago, when it became a major box-office hit and an Academy Award nominee.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a remake in theory, but one always hopes that an update like this will add something new to its franchise. I’m struggling to think of anything that qualifies in this case, or any reason for it to exist besides restarting a franchise that had sputtered out after 2019’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

The original How to Train Your Dragon’s animation looks a little dated by 2025 standards, but it’s still an exciting coming-of-age story and a darn good parable about the importance of not judging books by their covers. Look past the surface of this remake and you’ll find … basically the exact same movie you’ve seen before, and could watch at home anytime you want. There are no surprises, except maybe the total lack of surprises.

Additional Thoughts:

-It took almost the entire film before I recognized Peter Serafinowicz as Spitelout, the father of one of Hiccup’s dragon-training classmates. It’s particularly hard to spot him because he barely speaks through most of the movie. It just seems like a total waste of a good actor in a nothing role. Did they trim his part in the editing room or something?

RATING: 5/10