by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler, Nick Frost, Gabriel Howell, Julian Dennison
Intro:
... packs just as much spectacle and heart as its animated counterpart ...
The modern animation-to-live-action pipeline is getting so out of control, it is now affecting films that are barely older than the trend itself. Yes, not content with letting Disney have all the fun (?), DreamWorks are now at it with a ‘realistic’ remake of one of their biggest successes. The original film’s co-director/writer Dean DeBlois has been brought back to steer the ship, which feels like a kernel of hope stuck inside the ever-piling heap of bad news that is the realisation that we are once again dealing with an animation studio thinking that animation just isn’t good enough anymore.
Or maybe that kernel is much bigger than any of us could have expected…
All of the important emotional moments and beats from the original are kept intact, as is the vast majority of the dialogue. Rather than trying to fix what isn’t broken, as happens far too often with these productions, a lot of it is basically the same as what came before, just with less CGI. The biggest changes that have been made here, aside from lengthening some of the set pieces to add an extra half hour to the run time, are with the comedy and the drama. Comedy-wise, a small handful of the jokier jokes, like the twins arguing about a tattoo, have been removed.
Drama-wise, DeBlois leans into the inherent tragedy of the whole situation – Vikings on a self-made warpath against the Dragons, and vice versa. The colonial mindset at the heart of Viking myth is emphasised, Astrid actively checks Hiccup’s privilege as the well-off kid wanting to keep the peace (giving him an odd post-hippie framing that works surprisingly well), and while the main plot developments are the same, they end up amplified because so much has been added to the why behind them.
Of course, the script is only part of the larger picture; how about the way it looks? What made the first How to Train Your Dragon so spectacular is that it was one of the earlier mainstream computer animation efforts to highlight the importance of artificial lighting effects. DeBlois keeps that in mind throughout this reimagining, playing light and shadow against each other to amp up the moodiness of many of the scenes, like the extended sequence of the Vikings setting up war trenches as they storm the Dragons’ nest.
How to Train Your Dragon may not be wholly necessary as a film, but if it has to exist, the filmmakers went about making it in precisely the right way to justify the exercise. It packs just as much spectacle and heart as its animated counterpart, the performances do justice to the familiar dialogue, the location scouting is on some Peter Jackson-tier magic (as is Bill Pope’s phenomenal camera work), and it stays close to the outsider parable that makes the original story worth revisiting in the first place.
