TRAILER: How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Universal released a full trailer for their live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake last week. I don’t know about you, but I keep trying to forget that this movie exists, so I just now got around to watching the trailer. Much like the excellent 2010 original, How to Train Your Dragon follows Hiccup, son of Chief Stoick and outcast among Vikings. Hiccup meets and befriends Toothless, a Nightfury dragon known as “the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself.” From there, it’s a story about accepting differences and forming alliances in unexpected places. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it’s very emotionally satisfying. But they must ruin everything eventually, so they’re doing a remake. Check out the trailer here:
I like Mason Thames; he was great in The Black Phone. I don’t dislike Nico Parker, and Gerard Butler varies greatly by project. I still think the Lion King effect of keeping one cast member from the animated movie is bizarre, and I don’t understand why it always seems to be the lead’s father who gets to come back. Just redo everything if you’re going to remake it. But on that note, my second biggest gripe with this movie (after its existence) is that it looks like the exact same movie. We don’t need How to Train Your Dragon remade, regardless, but it seems shot-for-shot. They even got Dean DeBlois, one of the same directors, back to shepherd this abomination. The only difference I’ve noticed yet is actually in the previous trailer when Hiccup flies alongside Toothless rather than on his back. In the animated films, this doesn’t happen until the third movie. I don’t see the point of moving this event up by so much, but hey, at least it’s a creative decision. It’s not exactly like the original. However, this shot looks ugly, and the CGI is bad. I hope they intend to keep working on that before the film comes out on June 13.
In fact, I don’t like the visuals in general, particularly the designs of the dragons. I know I just said this movie looks exactly like the animated one, including the scaly critters. I get that they’re reaching for the member berries, but these designs don’t lend themselves well to live-action. Honestly, nothing about How to Train Your Dragon, its characters, or its setting really screams “live-action do-over” to me. The things in this trailer that look good, like the dialogue and acting, are identical to the original movie. And yet the bad stuff, like the dragons and Hiccup flying, are also from the animated films. I really, really wish Hollywood would cool it with the live-action remakes. Even the score is the same, at least in the trailers. I assume it’ll at least be embellished on in the final film, but I’ve come to feel manipulated when trailers play familiar music. It reminds me of those Force Awakens trailers with pieces of original trilogy score in them, and that’s not a positive association for me, especially in retrospect. It’s difficult even to evaluate a trailer that so heavily recreates an existing movie, especially one I love. These performances and lines of dialogue did the job in 2010, and of course, they work now, at least on the surface. But this is still the hollow shell of a movie, at least based on what we’ve been shown thus far.
But what do you think about the trailer? Are you going to see this traves… I mean, movie in June? Let us know in the comments below!
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