MOVIE REVIEW: How To Train Your Dragon (2025)

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Little Intro

*All names used in this post have been changed for privacy.

For months, Han has been so excited for the live-action How To Train Your Dragon movie to come out. We were going to make a date out of it, but he and I have been together for almost nine years now, so when my sister Lottie and our friend Dory asked if they could come along with us, we just said sure.

On one condition.

Lottie and Dory could not sit next to each other. If you couldn't tell from the name I chose for him, Dory basically has no attention span. I tried to show him Star Wars once, and he started talking less than five minutes in. And it wasn't even about the movie. (Sorry, Dory. You know we love you.) Anyway, Lottie and Dory get along a bit too well, and if we let them sit next to each other, they'd be talking and giggling through the entire movie, so we weren't going to let that happen.

I think Dory was a little sad about it, but the movie was blissfully quiet with this arrangement.

Anyway, I think almost everyone has seen the original How To Train Your Dragon movie by this point, but in case you haven't, I have provided a plot summary below. If you've seen it, go ahead and skip the summary.

Plot Summary

Hiccup (Mason Thames) lives on the Viking island of Berk, a land regularly raided by dragons. He is the son of Chief Stoick the Vast, and all Hiccup wants is to prove himself as a true Viking to his father the only way he knows how: by killing a dragon. The only problem is … Hiccup isn't strong, fierce, or brave. And he most certainly isn't a warrior. Instead, Hiccup is an inventor.

Using his brains rather than brawn, Hiccup builds a contraption and during a dragon raid, he uses it to shoot down the most deadly dragon of all: a Night Fury. Tracking it down the next day is easy, but he cannot bring himself to kill the wounded creature. Instead, Hiccup secretly befriends the dragon he calls Toothless and learns that everything they know about dragons is wrong.

As Hiccup undergoes Viking training to learn how to fight and kill dragons, his relationship with Toothless allows him to find other--more effective--ways of dealing with the beasts without hurting them. Hiccup quickly goes from being the worst dragon-fighter to one of the best, which makes him popular among all his classmates except for Astrid, the girl Hiccup is crushing on, and the most skilled dragon-fighter of them all.

When Astrid learns Hiccup's secret and Hiccup is chosen for the honor of killing a dragon, everything begins to unravel. Can Hiccup find a way to protect his home and the dragons without ruining his relationship with his new (human) friends and his father?

This is a story about a father and his son, about tradition and legacy, about confronting beliefs we hold dear. It is a story about the importance of making the right choice, even–and especially–when it is hard. And most of all, this is a story about finding friendship in the most unexpected places.

My Thoughts

Starting with the Good

If you've seen the original animated How To Train Your Dragon (2010), you won't find any surprises in the live-action version because it's almost line-by-line and shot-for-shot the same. It is cinematically gorgeous. They somehow managed to make Toothless look like he could be a real dragon while simultaneously keeping him adorable. The other dragons also look fantastic in live-action, and–at least, to my untrained eye–seem to fit seamlessly alongside the actors.

The acting was also wonderful. I'll admit, for the first minute or so of the movie, I did miss Jay Baruchel's voice for Hiccup, but Thames transformed into Hiccup perfectly on-screen. Nico Parker, the actress who plays Astrid, was also incredible to watch. She may not physically resemble the 2010 animated Astrid, but she brought Astrid's spirit to every scene. Gerrard Butler was great as Stoick the Vast, but I think that was expected since he also did the voice of Stoick in the animated version.

Honestly, no complaints about the casting. Everyone did a fantastic job with their roles, and I don't think they could have picked a better group to truly embody the characters they were playing.

Moving on to the Bad

There really wasn't anything new.

Normally, when we get remakes of movies, there's usually some "reinterpretation" of the original, some new added flair. And yes, most of the time, people hate the remakes because they're "not the original." And I get it! When you really love the original version of a movie and you hear they're doing a remake, or redoing it in a different art form (animation to live-action, book to movie, book to TV series, movie to TV series, etc ... etc ...) you obviously want it to be perfect!

But this How To Train Your Dragon movie kind of proves that we--or at least I--don't actually want a perfect scene-for-scene remake. Like ... what is the point of even watching it?

Don't get me wrong, I really did enjoy watching this movie, but I could have just stayed home and watched the animated How To Train Your Dragon movie from 2010 and had just as much fun--and spent last money.

The other thing is ... some of the humor that worked perfectly in the animation fell short in live-action. There are things we accept in animation that just doesn't work well in live-action, and while there were surprisingly very few of these instances, they were there.

This is just a personal thing, but ... I literally could not watch the scene where Toothless throws-up the fish and gets Hiccup to eat it. I almost gagged even knowing it was happening. In animation, it was a little gross but also adorable. In live-action it was disgusting.

Comparing the 2010 Animation to the 2025 Live-Action

Here are the differences I could find.

We definitely got a bit more context and lore for the HTTYD world, and that was cool! It was just a few lines scattered here or there, but it did make a slight difference.

I also think the scenes with Hiccup and his father might have been slightly more emotional in live-action. I'm not sure if they switched up dialogue, if they used different music, or if just seeing real people act it out made a difference, but something added emotion in those scenes.

We also got to know Astrid a tiny bit more, and there was a bit added with Snotlout--the other guy who has a big crush on Astrid--and his father. I'm pretty sure that stuff wasn't part of the original animation. Again, it wasn't very much, a quick three or four second scene here or there that's mostly little comments or showing body language, but enough to mention.

There are also little cosmetic differences that have nothing to do with the plot that I'm sure people will complain about. Like the fact that Astrid was not played by a white, blond girl, and the fact that the cast as a whole was a lot more colorful than the animated characters. They also changed some of the minor clan leaders to be women instead of men.

Here's the thing.

If your argument against the diversity in the live-action How To Train Your Dragon movie is: "They're Vikings, they should all be white and all the leaders should be men, it's unrealistic, it isn't historically accurate."

My response will always be: "There are dragons in this movie."

This is a fantasy movie. It isn't meant to be historically accurate. But even if we pretend for a moment that it should be "historically accurate," these arguments would still fall short because there were Viking women who held positions of power in Viking societies, and there were Viking women who were warriors. The Vikings were also incredible explorers, sailing all the way to America almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus, but their adventures also took them as far south as North Africa.

Was Viking society as diverse or female-led as shown in the new How To Train Your Dragon movie? Most definitely not. But my point remains.

If you can suspend your belief for the dragons–creatures that literally don't exist–but you don't have the capacity to imagine non-white Vikings or Viking women in leadership roles–things that were improbable, but not historically impossible–the problem isn't the movie.

Conclusion

It was nice having an excuse to go to the theater, but if I was at home and felt like watching How To Train Your Dragon I'd probably put the original animated version on so that I could watch the other two animated movies that followed it: How To Train Your Dragon 2, and How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World. The live action was enjoyable, the acting was great, the cinematography was great, but we really didn't need this.