Live-action retread of How to Train Your Dragon is an unnecessary two-hour PR stunt for a theme park

Courtesy Universal

I’ll make this short and sweet: the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon is not a bad movie. It’s perfectly fine. But, like so many of the Disney live-action remakes that Universal is taking cues from, it’s totally unnecessary.

It’s the same story, note for note.

Original co-director and co-writer Dean DeBlois is running the show.

The cast members that haven’t been copied over still look slavishly like their animated counterparts, with a few notable exceptions.

The actors and sets may be real, but the…y’know…dragons are still CGI. That would defeat the purpose, except the purpose in this case isn’t art at all. The purpose is for Universal to make more money off their IP and get extra oomph out of its Dragon-themed park at the newly opened Universal Epic Universe.

I’m not going to stop you if you want to participate in a blatant capitalist cash-grab. That’s your decision to make. Just know that you can do a lot better.

If, for some reason, the remake is your desired entry into a franchise that’s spawned three very good animated movies and a TV show, here’s a plot synopsis. The Viking-inhabited island of Berk has a dragon problem. The fire-breathing lizards routinely terrorize the farmland, burn down houses and turn flocks of sheep into wooly mutton. Everyone on the island is adept at fighting both fire and dragons themselves, except for awkward, nerdy Hiccup (Mason Thames), the son of the island’s chief, Stoick (Gerard Butler).

During a dragon raid, Hiccup accidentally manages to bring down a night fury, one of the most dangerous dragon subspecies. It turns out he didn’t kill it, but merely wounded it. Hiccup develops a bond with the dragon, which he names Toothless. He builds the Axolotl-faced critter a nifty prosthetic tail, and discovers dragons aren’t the nasty scourge his dad thinks they are. At the same time, Hiccup is training to become a dragon slayer so he can finally take his place alongside the rest of the community, and his tough, super-capable crush Astrid (Nico Parker).

While fans may find some delight in the locales of Berk reimagined as actual places, the live-action How to Train Your Dragon loses some factors that made the original such a delight as an animated movie. Animation allows for settings to be as colorful as you want to make them, for the laws of physics to be suspended, and for character design to get kooky and weird. As it stands here, the locations are muted, the dragons (aside from Toothless, who looks mostly the same) are more realistic-looking. Some of the dragon flight scenes are suitably thrilling in IMAX, but they were thrilling in animation too, and all the more so because they were excellent examples of the form.

Courtesy Universal

There’s also the problem of Astrid, a smart, skilled, independent young woman whose whole arc centers around being proven wrong by a dweeby dude who she then falls for. That was annoying in 2010, when the first movie came out. Nobody’s bothered to update it for the reboot 15 years later, because god forbid this movie do anything new. Parker does a serviceable job of making the character fun (and, admittedly, adds to a cast that’s overall a little more diverse than the original). But the panache she brings only makes the film’s betrayal of her character that much more disappointing.

As a critic and a movie lover, I’m all for encouraging people to go see movies in theaters. In this case, though, if you need something to do with your kids this weekend, you can save a lot of money by staying home and watching the original How to Train Your Dragon together.

Use that money to see any of the other deserving movies in theaters this weekend (The Life of Chuck! Materialists! The Phoenician Scheme! Bring Her Back! Final Destination: Bloodlines, for God’s sake!) on your own instead.