Full transcript of “How To Train Your Dragon (2025) - Movie Review”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Oh man, I got this forehead line right there. That's not actually a forehead line. That's a riding my motorcycle and I wear the cap under the motorcycle helmet to keep the hair out of my face line. This is the me you're going to get a lot this summer cuz I'm going to ride my bike a lot this summer. Anyhow, so another liveaction adaptation of an animated classic. Those have been going well lately. Silver Lining, How to Train Your Dragon is not owned by the mouse, so there is that yet anyway. So, this How to Train Your Dragon is a 2025 liveaction remake of the 2010 classic animated film How to Train Your Dragon 2010. This 2025 remake and the 2010 original is as far away as the 2010
0:47 original. And Assassins, Braveheart, The Net, Batman Forever, Water World, Mortal Kombat. Anyhow, that'll be a nice existential crisis to unpack later. So, moving on. And for this live action remake, director Dean Delah, who actually directed the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, returns as director for the remake. And it's it's How to Train Your Dragon. This is actually a closer one:one translation than a lot of live action remakes have been. You got Hiccup. He's an outcast. He's the son of the Viking king. He's not living up to those expectations. He befriends a little dragon called Toothless, who is a night fury, the most feared of all the dragons, and then he kind of changes the game of the village, though runs into some tension while doing it. And it was
1:34 clear early on, a thing that would probably bother me in this movie, is that it was taking longer to get to the point than the animation did. In terms of the characters, Mason Thes plays Hiccup. He was the kid from Black Phone. I guess didn't recognize him. They grow up so fast. But he actually had some big shoes to fill. Jay Barishell as Hiccup is just kind of perfect in the animated version. The awkward feels awkward. The comedy feels like he could have very well adlibbed a lot of the lines. If there is someone I could cast to voice a Viking, it would not be him, which is why he's perfect for Hiccup. But Mason Fames actually did a great job bringing that to live action. The awkward still felt awkward. Most importantly, the heart was there.
2:21 That's really what we're here for. It's the heart between Hiccup and Toothless. It's that story. You feel that connection in here. The biggest connection you feel is between this kid and his CGI dragon that's not actually there. And the flying scenes with Hiccup riding Toothless in live action every bit as fun as it was in the animation or is animation still exists. Gerard Butler returns as stoic. I say returns because he voiced Stoic in the animation when we heard that How to Train Your Dragon was getting a liveaction adaptation. I feel like that's what we all thought. We were like, "So Gerard Butler is going to be in it because animated Stoic's pretty much Gerard Butler." Segueing, I felt Astrid was pretty wooden in this movie.
3:07 I'm going to be honest with you. Granted, Astrid's always been that really hard wannabe best at everything. personally seeing Hiccup as a rival and wanting to beat him at the games, though he's just gaming the game better. But in the animation, I remember her being a little more expressive. That's for everything else. And that's for everything else. I did not buy their romance or chemistry in this movie at all, which is a bummer because when you see interviews with the two of them, they do have good chemistry together. This movie apparently just didn't pull from any of it. Now, Astrid and Hiccup's romance has always played second fiddle in How to Train Your Dragon. For me, it is a love story between a boy and his dog who's a dragon
3:54 and the father-son story that too. But I feel one of the things this movie does to its detriment of the characters pertaining to that in particular is it wanted to show you more. So, we have extra scenes in here with the youth. We see how it feels more like a high school cafeteria scenario in which all the cool kids led by Astrid are sitting over there and Hiccup's over here. He's away from them. They don't respect him. They don't like him. But it spends a lot more time showing how Astrid doesn't like or respect Hiccup, creating more of a chasm, but doesn't spend more time mending it. So when she gives him the kiss on the cheek, you're like, I kind of came out of nowhere. This is a case of the jokes that are here that were in the animation, they landed just fine. the new ones. Eh, this liveaction version is a solid half an hour longer
4:41 than its animated counterpart. The problem is, as much as this movie feels like it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel too much, it's a wheel that's not as smooth as its animated counterpart because How to Train Your Dragon, the animation, it's pretty perfect. The thing that is to be gained is, okay, let's see it with a new coat of paint. Let's see how it would look in live action. And there is a market for that. If there wasn't, the PS5 would have died long ago because a large section of the PS5 library is a PS5 remaster of a PS4 game. It kind of feels like that if the game was 33% longer, but for no reason. The real standout returning character is the music. Composer John Powell returns to compose the music in the liveaction remake as he did in the animated classic. Having that connection of the How to Train Your Dragon theme feeling
5:28 the same because the same person's composing the music in here as did before. That was a smart connection for them to have. But the problem with this as well as a lot of liveaction remakes is to what degree is it liveaction? To what degree does it feel live action? We know a lot of movies these days are 95% CGI. Those behindthe-scenes videos of Avengers Endgame, Avatar, Way of Water, looks like they're all just hanging out in someone's garage. I'm just saying if you're going to live action remake, can we make the green screen and CGI blending look like, I don't know, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest or At World's End feels like we capped on the CGI 20 years ago. And it freaks me out because the gap of time between now and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is the same amount of time between Pirates of the
6:14 Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Running Man, Predator, Lost Boys, Superman 4: The Quest for Peace. You know, it it feels wrong. It feels like we should have leapt a lot farther at this point. But I suppose as long as computer animated departments are underfunded, underpaid, but all the time crunch, I guess it's going to be that way. Feel like I'm going in harder on this movie than I meant to. I do appreciate the fact that the dragons in this movie look like the dragons from the animation. Like the character models are very much the same, but the movie's perfectly enjoyable. So, if you liked How to Train Your Dragon, you'll probably like this liveaction adaptation that does pretty much the same thing and same story, just takes longer to tell it. And that is a thing that a lot of these liveaction adaptations are going to run into, no
6:59 matter how well they do the adaptation. It's a good time. You also have the better time with a shorter run time that doesn't waste your time at home in some capacity most likely. This kind of feels like, you know, that movie that's such an excellent movie, then later on an extended cut comes out in which it has some scenes that are longer, has more content in those scenes. Maybe there are extra scenes and you watch it and you're like, "Yeah, I can see why those scenes were cut short or cut out for the sake of flow. I prefer the theatrical cut myself." That's what this feels like. This is like How to Train Your Dragon, the extended cut. It's worth checking out. Wait for it to come out on streaming. What's the over under? A month. It'll be out on streaming. It's why more people don't go to movie theaters these days cuz they're conditioned to be like or I could wait a month and watch it at home. So, How to
7:46 Train Your Dragon, the liveaction remake comes out this Friday. So, at a point you do see it. What did you think about it? But what's your favorite animation that man, you should probably just leave alone because it's that good. Whatever it is, whatever you think, comment below. Let me know. And as always, if you like what you've seen here and you want to see more, click right here to see more.
