★★★

Imagine. You wait 23 years for Hollywood to carbon copy a Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders animation in live action form and two come along at the same time. And they say creativity is dead. What’s more, each facsimile is proving a monster hit in its own right. One can but imagine the wild ride 2025 is proving to be for DeBlois and Sanders. With Disney now no longer the sole studio exponent of the toon-to-live cash in, the form is more genre than trend these days. AI should make the process quicker. Feed the original through an app, with ‘remake in live action’ as your filter and the new-ish How to Train Your Dragon is your result. 

Unlike Lilo and Stitch, which at least boasted a fresh director and writing team, if not vision, How to Train Your Dragon finds DeBlois back atop the jukebox. He’s even playing the same tunes, courtesy of returning composer John Powell. Detailed recreations precisely replicate scenes, shots, lines and beats from the original, skating, on occasion, within a whisper of the Gus van Sant does Psycho territory. Minor tweaks do little to adjust the general trajectory, serving mostly to bolster the role of kick-ass love interest Astrid, here played with gusto by Nico Parker, and extend the runtime into a second hour.

To this end, plot summation feels somewhat perfunctory. As before, the story is that of seemingly hapless Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (Mason Thames), heir to the chieftain village of Berk, a northern outreach beset with dragon issues. His father is the indomitable Stoick the Vast – Gerard Butler, reprising his animated turn in the flesh – a renowned dragon slayer. Whatever Stoic’s ambition, 16-year-old Hiccup’s a lover, not a fighter and more technically brawny that physically potent. Sure enough, it’s only when Hiccup manages to wound a Night Fury – and takes it upon himself to nurse it back to health – do his true strengths reveal themselves.

Ably steered by DeBois, How to Train Your Dragon is pretty hard not to like on a basic level. It’s a well cast affair – the youngsters are great, while Nick Frost brings more seasoned comic chops to local blacksmith Gobber the Belch – and impressively rendered. When Hiccup takes to the sky, astride his trained dragon, the effect is as extraordinarily realistic as ever achieved in film. If Bill Pope’s cinematography isn’t quite so artistically enlivening as Roger Deakins, originally hoped for the film, might have mustered, it’s a pleasingly Celtic visual experience nonetheless.

Numerous shot-for-shot recreations notwithstanding, a sense that pace does not come just as easily to the remake as its predecessor occasionally rears its head. Scenes without Hiccup, Astrid and the winningly goofy Toothless want for their presence. Butler’s general bankability, for instance, does not exactly translate to engaging dramatic heft in the film’s muscular backbone. Berk’s want to rid their island of dragons and search for the dragon nest teeters on boring when compared to Hiccup’s more wholesome journey through the narrative.

Perhaps, then, we might say this new How to Train Your Dragon flies in fits and bursts beneath the shadow of a soaring original. It has its moments, sure, but, save for a touch more contemporary political relevance, brings little new to the Viking table. Certainly, it would be highly tedious were sequels to the film simply to recreate the second and third in the animated franchise. That’s not to say Cressida Cowell’s fire-breathing world has not scope for further adventure – quite the opposite, in fact – merely that there are avenues yet unexplored. DeBois finds little more evidence here than did Disney’s Lilo and Stitch that live action remakes serve any greater relevance than the financial dividends won for struggling studios.

T.S.