If you’ve seen the original any time in the past few years, there’s really nothing about Dean DeBlois’ live-action adaptation of his 2010 film How to Train Your Dragon that will surprise you in any way, shape, or form. It’s remarkably faithful and doesn’t just retain the story beats – it preserves entire gags, shots, and so forth as if any deviation would be considered heresy – yet still finds some way to tack on an additional half-hour of new material that I genuinely couldn’t distinguish from the old. As such, I won’t bother you with an extensive summary – it would be just the same as what I would have written in 2010. Vikings hate dragons. Dragons hate Vikings. Outcast Boy captures dragon. Boy likes dragon as a friend. Boy and dragon save dragons and Vikings. Without any decent reason for making this new version any different, it all looks pretty cynical, doesn’t it? The “15th-anniversary” egg timer neared its final ticks in the Dreamworks offices, and the machine woke up and went to work. Upon seeing the grosses for all those Disney pictures, Universal realized they could do the Scrooge McDuck and swim in a giant pool of gold coins as long as they could get it out before the new Jurassic World took over IMAX screens.
Yet there’s enough here to justify the transition to live-action, in the casting and the effects work. The VFX used to bring the dragons to life is nearly good enough on its own. DeBlois continues a trend that’s more than welcome in the remake space by eschewing the kind of heady “realism” that renders a once-vibrant stable of animated characters, like the pride in Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, completely inert and expressionless in the faux third-dimension. Instead, he hews closely to the original designs, maintaining their essential cartoonish quality, occasionally punctuated by an added touch of realism – scale, snot, and so forth. This ensures that the creatures blend more seamlessly with the new environment and the actors, yet maintain the qualities of expression that an entirely “realistic” design would preclude. It is a genuinely stupid idea to hold a fictional creature to that standard anyhow, and anyone who tells you as much probably thinks too much about the designs of the robots in the Transformers movies and how “practical” they are. They can just look cool – it’s okay!
The other big reason why this works is, frankly, Gerard Butler. I’ve long appreciated Butler’s third act in popular cinema, and this is a sterling example of why it goes so hard. A brief recap: His first act was when he was turning in solid performances in mediocre films like Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera or Richard Donner’s Timeline; the second was his Hollywood Heyday, in which 300 opened the doors for large-wattage movies both good (RocknRolla, Law Abiding Citizen) and bad (The Ugly Truth, The Bounty Hunter). His third act, the “counterprogramming” era, has been his most bizarre, but it’s also been his most consistently brilliant: Between the Den of Thieves and Has Fallen series, he’s found his groove, turning his swarthy charisma into blunt force entertainment. Here, as the Viking chieftain and protagonist’s father, he tones it down a bit, in keeping with the original direction he received from DeBlois and co-director Chris Sanders (who is having a hell of a month between this and the Lilo and Stitch adaptation), and manages to hit some unexpectedly graceful notes when he’s not punching dragons. The way he handles a conversation with young Hiccup (Mason Thomas), in which he believes his nerdy son has finally become a dragon-killing badass, strikes chords both awkward and sweet, tinged with a real sadness – after all, he was the only parent left alive to see what their son would become. It’s tough work that, somehow, manages to outshine his voice performance in the original, even without Craig Ferguson to bounce off of (replaced here by the perfectly cromulent Nick Frost).
This is part of what separates Dragon from the other live-action remakes – its faithful but not ironically self-aware approach to the material is more of an asset than one might expect. It’s rare for a director to return for one of these adaptations (a snarky post online compared it to Van Sant’s Psycho, which is fair, but Hitchcock wasn’t exactly afraid of remaking his work himself), and the continuity could perhaps be attributed to DeBlois knowing what works and refusing to fix it any more than he already is. After all, it was a massive hit for a reason, and I don’t think it’s aged poorly enough not to be one now. Then again, this is the trap that all of these films fall into: If you do things too differently and the audience gets mad that it’s not a shot-for-shot remake, but if you’re too faithful, you’ll get scoffed at for the inherent purposelessness of the adaptation outside of a need for a studio head to stack paper and ride on 28-inch chrome.
Trust me; I wish these adaptations were replaced on the schedule by original ideas as much as anyone else — they’d be more interesting to write about, for one, but they’d help us break free from the cycle of cultural regurgitation. But when they’re made with enough conscientious care as what DeBlois has done here, they’re genuinely inoffensive nostalgia-stirring entertainments, which aren’t without a few unexpected moments of magic along the way. Anyway, your kids will love How to Train Your Dragon and will not be bothered by the faithfulness or whatever, and you won’t hate yourself for taking them to see it. That’s about as good as it gets, honestly.