Tag Archives: How to Train Your Dragon

February’s Failures

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Welcome to my monthly “Failures” column, where I look back at some of the films I could, would, maybe even should have watched last month… but failed to.

It may be the shortest month of the year, and not exactly a time known for its hot box office release dates either, but my list of things I skipped on the big screen is surprisingly long this month. That said, a lot of them feel like smaller titles rather than headline grabbers. Exceptions include Emerald Fennel’s take on Wuthering Heights and the controversy-soaked Scream 7, plus awards season contenders like The Secret Agent and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You making their way to UK screens. Others that stood out to me for one reason or another included Sam Raimi’s Send Help, heist thriller Crime 101, and Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Look for them again as “films I failed to watch on streaming services” later this year, I guess.

A weak theatrical slate can be counterbalanced by streaming originals, especially at times of year with stay-at-home weather, but either I missed whatever the streamers were attempting to push this month or cared so little I didn’t even note it down. The only brand-new release I have listed is Prime Video’s piratical actioner The Bluff, which I may well watch because, well, pirates. The slack is barely taken up by former theatrical releases making their subscription streaming debuts, although I suppose Sky Cinema’s offering of the live-action How to Train Your Dragon and Jurassic World Rebirth is not insignificant. Nonetheless, I only have one apiece noted down from Disney+ (Ella McCay), Apple TV+ (Eternity), and Prime Video (Together), and nothing from Netflix but stuff shuffling around from one streamer to another (Abigail, The French Dispatch, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, etc).

Travelling further back in film history yields nothing from Netflix, as is typical, though it is something Amazon are always surprisingly good for, this month ranging from 8 Mile to Bob Hope comedy The Princess and the Pirate, via Neil “brother of Sean” Connery-starring Bond spoof Operation Kid Brother, and three titans of horror (Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing) co-starring in House of the Long Shadows. iPlayer is better in this regard, too, though they tend to cycle through the same set of films. Coming back into view this month were the likes of Bones and All, The Colditz Story, Malcolm X, Odette, Past Lives, and Women Talking.

Befitting their own paragraph were the many, many reminders of films I’ve bought on disc but not yet watched — David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, in addition to a couple already mentioned for other reasons. I’m not sure it’s better or worse that there are also plenty I bought to rewatch but have not got round to either, like The Fountain, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Miami Vice, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, which I haven’t seen since they were only on DVD, despite owning Blu-ray and 4K box sets (and the latter, especially, wasn’t cheap).

I guess I write these posts somewhat with the intention of shaming me into watching more stuff like that, but it obviously doesn’t work, does it? Nor does it stop me buying more, although this month it’s a short list by my standards. Sticking with rewatches, I insta-bought Criterion’s release of Birth. I normally try to wait out for sales with their titles (though their UK sales aren’t a patch on their US ones, and their US ones aren’t very accessible in the UK, so I actually haven’t bought much in them for a few years now), but Birth is a pretty great film, highly underrated, and long overdue a revisit. Also high on my want-to-rewatch list for some time now is Excalibur, which this month got a lavish 4K release from Arrow. It’s a film I feel I should adore, but haven’t quite on the couple of occasions I’ve seen it so far. I’m hoping one day it will click for me.

Those two labels also dominated by blind buys this month, with Errol Flynn swashbuckler Captain Blood from Criterion (I always feel like I should’ve seen more of those, but I’ve always found them surprisingly unavailable) and American Yakuza, Save the Green Planet, and (most excitingly, in my opinion) Peking Opera Blues from Arrow. Ever-reliable Eureka also got a look in with their Masters of Cinema box set Zen & Sword: The Miyamoto Musashi Saga at Toei, containing a five-film samurai sequence from the ’60s that they claim is the equal of my beloved Zatoichi. We’ll see. And finally, my one studio buy of the month: Predator: Badlands. That seemed a safe bet given how much I liked Dan Trachtenberg’s previous two films in that universe, both of which made it into one of my annual top tens (in 2022 and last year). No pressure, Badlands.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)

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2015 #45
Dean DeBlois | 102 mins | Blu-ray | 2.35:1 | USA / English | PG / PG

Four years ago, DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon came as a pleasant surprise: a film I thought looked weak in almost every respect, but which turned out to be immensely entertaining and beautifully made. This sequel has the opposite level of expectation, then, but fortunately it’s (mostly) up to the task.

Part of its success stems from being bold with the concept. Rather than just rehashing the first film’s story, or taking it in only a slightly different direction, returning writer-director Dean DeBlois (his former co-director, Chris Sanders, having moved on to fellow DreamWorks hit The Croods) jumps the story forward five years, in the process changing the status quo of the film’s world enough to keep it fresh. So whereas the last movie ended with dragon-hating vikings having some kind of grudging acceptance of the titular bewinged creatures, here those dragons have been fully integrated into viking society; and the teenage heroes have been aged up to be young adults.

The latter, in particular, necessitates some great design work to age the younger characters appropriately. It’s the kind of thing that looks obvious in retrospect, but it isn’t — how many animations can you think of that have to reimagine their characters as slightly older; enough to make a notable difference, but not as extreme as, say, turning them from young children to adults, or from middle-aged to very old? I can’t think of any. Nonetheless, the team here have done a faultless job. That applies to the film’s visuals on the whole. It looks gorgeous in every way: the design, the animation, the construction of the digital world, the lighting… and so on.

Tonally, DeBlois has been productively inspired by The Empire Strikes Back: it’s still child-friendly, but nonetheless more mature, and with some striking emotional beats. The main plot — concerning an army that enslaves dragons, vs. our hero vikings who live alongside them — is a little hit and miss, with some construction issues (which I’ll come back to). The characters and their emotional arcs, however, are more consistently realised, sometimes with a less-is-more approach. For instance, it’s quite nice that DeBlois doesn’t introduce needless jeopardy into the romance between Hiccup and Astrid: they’re just a couple, and happy — that’s not rammed home, nor do they quarrel over nothing; they don’t split up only to inevitably get back together. Such beats are overworked and over-familiar, and the film has enough else going on not to bother with some fake-out relationship trouble. However, challenging the relationship between Hiccup and his dragon Toothless, even if only briefly, is a much more emotionally rewarding thread to pull. Of course, to say how it’s challenged would be a gigantic spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that.

The first film quickly and effectively sketched a largish supporting cast, and they’re deftly used again here. Their parts may be doled out in snippets — a couple of lines here, a short scene there — but they build subplots and comic relief, and pay them off too, all without shifting the focus too heavily on to things that fundamentally don’t matter. Perhaps this is, in part, the benefit of a starry voice cast (where the supporting players are bigger names than the leads!)

If there’s a flaw, it’s in some of the new characters. The primary villain is underused, introduced too late in the game to become a palpable threat. More time spent building him up, seeing his evil on screen rather than just being told about it, would’ve been appreciated. So too for the mysterious vigilante dragon-rider, who turns out to have a very significant role. The deleted scenes include a prologue that would have introduced the character at the start, which would have better established the mystery and import of their role. It’s clear why it was deleted (to focus on Berk and keep the initial tone light), but I still think it would’ve worked better in the film. In the final cut, the vigilante is mentioned all of once, then turns up and is unmasked about two minutes later. Really, though, these are niggles — even for them, the cumulative consistency is certainly better than, say, its Oscar conquerer Big Hero 6.

To make another inter-film comparison, on balance I’d say that the first Dragon is probably better, but there’s little between them — they’re just different. By pushing the world and the characters in new, interesting, more emotionally mature directions, this is a sequel that ensures there’s a welcome freshness to proceedings. Too many animated films skimp on that side of things, but thought and care has been put into making this a worthwhile continuation rather than a cash-in re-hash.

4 out of 5