Released: 12th June
Seen: 16th December
In 1998, Gus Van Sant remade Psycho. He had just come off the monster hit that was Good Will Hunting and used the reputation he had built to get Universal to foot the bill. The remake is infamous, a largely shot-for-shot remake that puts the film in colour and uses modern actors while replicating the original visual style as much as possible. The idea was to basically make fun of remakes, to show how it’s truly impossible to copy a film exactly as it originally was and have the same impact. That film definitely proved Gus Van Sant’s point because his remake of Psycho was a box office bomb and a critical punching bag. One would hope that maybe Gus’ experiment would’ve stopped others from trying to do the same thing again but no, we’ve lately been inundated with remakes of classic Disney films and now How To Train Your Dragon gets the same treatment and while it might be better than Psycho (1998), that doesn’t mean it deserves to exist.
How To Train Your Dragon (2025) retells the exact story from the 2010 DreamWorks animated film. You’ve got a bunch of Vikings who have a problem with dragons, the Vikings are led by Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, reprising his role from the animated film), who is trying to get his son, Hiccup (Mason Thames) to learn how to fight dragons. Of course, Hiccup doesn’t want to do that, and especially not after becoming friends with a dragon called Toothless. You know the drill because you probably saw the 2010 original, Hiccup trains Toothless, his friend Astrid (Nico Parker) is there to be the cool girl, and also his love interest, lots of flying and fire-breathing battles, all capped off with an emotional catharsis about how we shouldn’t kill things that are different from us… We should enslave them and turn them into flying cars; that’s much healthier.
To give this remake its due, it’s hard to deny that it looks absolutely stunning. As fantastic as the original How To Train Your Dragon was, 3D animation has improved dramatically in 15 years, and the difference in visual quality is stark. The use of practical sets in this remake for a large portion of the film is welcome and really makes for a lot of genuinely beautiful shot recreations. It’s also impossible to deny that they really worked hard to take the cartoonish designs from the original and adapted them to a more realistic world. Every single dragon looks incredible, especially in flight. While I sadly was only able to watch this on a TV, it’s not hard to imagine how impressive this would’ve looked on the big screen because they really put in the effort to make sure every image was as gorgeous as could be… sure, it helps that the work to figure out what the shots should look like was done 15 years ago by the original film, but it still takes effort to recreate them so perfectly.
When I say that they recreate the shots perfectly, I mean it’s almost identical. Yes, this version of the film is a half hour longer but that’s mostly because the human actors can’t move quite as fast as the animated ones; some scenes just have slower pacing to make up for it. You could literally play the original and this film side by side at several points and they’d sync up perfectly, it’s honestly kind of impressive in its own unique way. There is a certain skill to recreating classic shots and it’s not uncommon to do, Zootopia 2 recreated a lot of the shots from the maze scene in The Shining, Barbie recreated the opening to 2001: A Space Odyssey, recreating shots is a very common thing… but usually it’s as a knowing reference to other films the director enjoyed, not just xeroxing an existing work and changing the format.
The ultimate problem that How To Train Your Dragon (2025) slams headfirst into is that we’ve seen it before, every single frame of this is a frame we saw 15 years ago. This isn’t your normal remake where they use the bare bones of the original concept to update it for modern audiences or retell it in a new way, this isn’t like the 4 iterations on A Star Is Born. The closest comparison one can reasonably make with this version of How To Train Your Dragon is that 1998 version of Psycho that was made basically to mock the very idea, except this isn’t a mockery of the idea. This is DreamWorks being deadly serious, no irony whatsoever, they just remade their old film and hoped it’d work and they’d make so much money from doing it. It might have been popular, but it sure as hell isn’t creative or interesting. There’s undeniable talent here, it’s pretty hard to call the film bad for any real reason, but it’s not the kind of film you really want to praise.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that it’s trying so hard to remake the original as exactly as possible that it feels restrictive, down to what the performers on camera are allowed to do. They aren’t really doing their own interpretation of these characters, they’re mimicking the originals as much as possible to the point where it feels a little cartoony. Cartoony is a fine thing to be when you’re an animated feature-length film, but when you’re trying to be a live-action epic then that kind of performance stands out. You almost feel like the actors ran off, watched the scene from the original, then ran back to recreate it right then and there, which begs the question “Why bother?”. If you’re not going to offer anything new besides mildly improved graphics, what have you got for the audience? Nostalgia? For a 15-year-old movie? Is that what we’re reduced to at this point?
The annoying thing is that I can’t even call it a bad film, it’s genuinely quite good. It looks spectacular and the performances, despite being cartoonish and copying ones created by animators in 2010, are committed to the central idea of the film. It’s hard not to be wildly impressed by the craftsmanship on display here, the actual talent that is obvious in every shot is commendable. The first time that Hiccup flies on Toothless is a powerful moment, the final battle is epic in scale and in detail. It’s a good film, I’m prepared to admit to that… but it’s a good film that offers nothing truly different from the original. it’s a great display of talent but the warmth is all gone.
Every film student has undoubtedly been forced to read the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. Very basically, it talks about how mechanically reproducing an artwork makes it lose some of its intrinsic value (also known as “Aura”) and its authenticity. Let me give you a quick example (I promise this is relevant!).
This is a digital copy of the Mona Lisa, a classic painting that can be found at notable crime scene, The Louvre. You can admire it, enjoy the image, even print off a copy for yourself to hang on your wall, but you know what you can’t do? You can’t enjoy the authentic feeling of seeing the real Mona Lisa in person. You can’t take a close look at the brush strokes that give the artwork dimension, you can’t admire the aging of the canvas and how it’s held up over the last 50- years, you don’t get the sensations that the real work of art causes you to have because the copy I just put here has no authenticity which is a large part of what Walter Benjamin talked about (yes fellow nerds who read the damn essay, there are other things, I’m focusing on this one element to make a point)… If he were alive today, Walter Benjamin would point to this remake of How to Train Your Dragon as a modern example of how mechanically reproducing a film causes it to lose its authenticity.
How To Train Your Dragon (2025) doesn’t need to exist, it offers nothing new as a remake other than some improved graphics and that’s about it. It’s good because the original film was good and this one copies it well enough to keep it from being god awful. It’s a step up from the Disney Remakes because those looked awful and changed so much that it was disrespectful, this one looks amazing but changes so little that it’s effectively pointless. I guess Gus Van Sant should’ve tried a little harder to make his Psycho remake work, he might’ve had a hit on his hands.
Movie Meister Reviews 