Written and directed by one of its original writers and directors, Dean DeBlois, the How to Train Your Dragon (2025) live-action remake of DreamWorks’ 2010 animated hit is servicable, but far too dark. To start, Hiccup (Mason Thames) isn’t like the other Vikings. He’s not big and strong like his father (Gerard Butler), the chief, expects him to be. Their home, the isle of Berk, is at war with the dragons that constantly raid their village and killed Hiccup’s mother.
At first, Hiccup wants nothing more than to make his father proud and become a dragon slayer too. But when he captures the most dangerous and reviled dragon of all, Hiccup learns that perhaps the dragons aren’t the threat: humans are. As Hiccup and Toothless the dragon bond, Hiccup has to decide to whom he is loyal and how he can convince the rest of Berk that they have more in common with the dragons than they think.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) works best when it’s about Hiccup and Toothless. The CGI dragon looks pretty good, is rendered fairly emotionally, and gets to inhabit the movie’s only pretty locations. Their relationship is the only one that doesn’t feel either completely contrived or overloaded with annoying expository dialogue. In comparison, Hiccup and his father have plenty of opportunities for emotion, but they’re always burdened with too much machismo and too much of the wrong talking.
Hiccup’s relationship with Astrid (Nico Parker), his peer who is deadset on being the greatest dragon slayer of her generation, is weighed down by a complete change of character halfway through. At first, she’s a stone-cold type who shows no emotion, no remorse, and no interest in kindness. Suddenly, after a pivotal moment in the movie, she’s gentle, thoughtful, and romantically interested in Hiccup. This version of her is far more interesting, but it comes out of nowhere and feels completely disconnected from who she was initially.
There are fun moments that look good, but How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is mostly far too dark.
While the scenes between Hiccup and Toothless are fun and pretty, the rest of the movie is abrasively dark, visually and tonally. Like most live-action remakes, the movie is a dark, sludgy mess. Characters constantly mumble, too many scenes happen in the dark, and there’s a severe lack of color most of the time. When things are bright and fun, they’re usually zoomed out and appear blurry while moving too fast. The score is also too saccharine in these moments, becoming distracting.
Interestingly, the blend of CGI and natural sets is much less uncanny than most movies, even ones that don’t feature large, emotive CGI creatures. When Toothless is in his grotto, it feels natural. When he’s flying, the sky is composed of some of the movie’s only colors.
When dragons are in the arena or even flying around the village in large groups, they’re either so far away and detailless that the CGI is less apparent, or they’re taking up most of the screen, so there are fewer real props or backgrounds to compare them against—for better and for worse.
Definitely for worse, though, is the dark tone of How to Train Your Dragon (2025). The movie is quite dire a lot of the time. The adults are all warmongering, over-the-top Viking caricatures. They’re always grunting and yelling in darkly lit rooms, putting enormous and undue pressures on Hiccup and chastising him for not being exactly who they expect him to be.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is weighed down by confounding gender politics.
All of the early training scenes, before Hiccup and Toothless bond, are also grim battle scenes where all of the other young Vikings are exceedingly mean and quite unfunny. The violence is intense, not in a graphic way, but in a way that feels severe rather than comical or juvenile. The darkness of How to Train Your Dragon (2025) takes away from the emotional beats and overshadows the lighter aspects of the story.
Because the plot is so clear, even just from the movie’s title, let alone that the story is already well-known and originally written for kids, it’s aggravating to constantly have to anticipate the next scene where we return to angry fathers and jealous classmates.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is also weighed down by confounded gender politics. The movie is constantly referring to the way men and women should be, how they’re different from one another, and how they’re inevitably attracted to each other.
The Vikings of Berk don’t seem to assign village responsibilities according to gender—everyone fights, everyone works at home—so why does attention have to be drawn constantly to a gender binary? Why does Astrid have to fall in love with Hiccup just because they go on one dragon ride after a lifetime of Astrid loathing Hiccup?
The relationship between Hiccup and Toothless is the only fully satisfying part of How to Train Your Dragon (2025).
And why does the movie draw intimate attention in the first few minutes to how racially diverse the people of Berk are by panning to three Vikings and describing their homeland with obvious stereotypes? If the movie is trying to signal something politically or culturally, it’s totally failing. These small distractions add up to a movie’s worth of outdated and unwarranted one-liners. They’re distracting and detract from the less-than-ideal dialogue.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is an interesting remake because it is helmed by one of the original movie’s creators. The new medium may attract new audiences or generate income for DreamWorks, but regardless of which version you prefer, they tell the same story and share the same heart. It’s up to audiences to decide how they prefer to experience it.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) certainly has its fun moments, and the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless is always the best part. But the dark visuals and tone do a total disservice to an otherwise fun concept and emotional opportunities. Some parts look surprisingly good, but the film still suffers from common CGI sludgy colors and blurry camerawork.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is in theaters everywhere June 13th.
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
5/10
TL;DR
How to Train Your Dragon (2025) certainly has its fun moments, and the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless is always the best part. But the dark visuals and tone do a total disservice to an otherwise fun concept and emotional opportunities.