How to Train Your Dragon
Year: 2025
Rating: PG
Length: 125 minutes / 2.08 hours
With Disney making so many live-action adaptations of their previously successful animated movies, it was only a matter of time before other studios like DreamWorks would do the same. Enter How to Train Your Dragon (2025), a live-action, almost shot-for-shot remake of the 2010 movie of the same name. While most of these live-action adaptations are much worse than their source material, somehow this one works. The slight changes are mostly beneficial, but the few cuts from the original erase a setup for the climactic battle.
Of course, one issue with an almost-faithful adaptation of the original movie is that the cadence and tonality of some lines just feels off from how they were said in the previous version. Probably not noticeable to people who haven’t seen the 2010 version dozens of times, but it just felt off to me. Additionally, while I understand cutting some scenes for run-time, one of the ones that was missing laid out a notable weakness of dragons that plays into how they manage to defeat the enormous beast on the dragon island. Without that foreshadowing, it still works, but it feels less earned.
Casting-wise, the characters in this version are pretty spot-on from their animated counterparts in terms of feel. One of the bigger changes was with Ruffnut (Bronwyn James), which made for much better jokes with her twin Tuffnut (Harry Trevaldwyn). The dragons themselves definitely got an upgrade as CGI has improved in the 15 years since the original. Granted, this may make the movie scarier for the kids who have watched the original a lot, since the realism of the dragons is harder to ignore with real people standing there on screen.
A somewhat faithful live-action adaptation of the original that mostly works, I give How to Train Your Dragon 4.0 stars out of 5.
