41. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Depending on the kind of person you are and how okay you are with a film series ending in a manner that completely gives the middle finger to the premise and the resolution of the first two films, there’s a chance you might… like How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World okay. You may even love it, probably.
I don’t. Even if it hadn’t done what it did at the end, I gotta admit to myself that the me that watched this film when it originally came out was not wrong in thinking that what was transpiring before me was… kind of boring.
If you had asked me before I saw this film if it were possible for a How to Train Your Dragon movie to be this low on the list I’d have probably balked at the suggestion but man… I can’t lie, this one really disappointed me. It did at the time I saw it and while I wasn’t as festering upset about what I watched this go around the logic of what happened and the decision the characters ultimately came to in the end really just threw me for a loop.
So if you’ve seen the first two films you know how this one starts, basically. Everyone used to hate and kill dragons and now everyone loves them and keeps them as pets. But, uh-oh, Burke has way too MANY dragons now and they’re starting to paint a target on their back for ruffians and would be thieves and shit. This is considered a problem because, you know, apparently there’s a lot of threats out there that can stand up to a town of viking warriors who have hundreds, if not, thousands of dragons at their beck and call.
That was sarcasm. There really isn’t that much to worry about. In the opening scene of the film we see Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and the gang rescue a band of captured dragons from a group of poachers in a sequence that was disorienting and hard to follow, partly because of the questionable choreography but also because of how fucking dark and misty it was. Still, I was able to tell that they had accomplished their mission really easily but for some reason when they get back Gobber (Craig Ferguson) tells Hiccup that this is a really bad thing he’s doing and one day he’s going to get into a fight he can’t handle. He should totally stop. Yeah.
Okay.
I… understand the idea that maybe keeping all these dragons in Burke isn’t the best idea but only really in terms of a space issue. The issue of a target being on their back isn’t super threatening because of just how impossibly huge their military might is. If they’re truly the only land in this world that’s conquered and befriended dragons, the scariest, mightest creatures on the face of the Earth, then what the fuck do they have to fear? Realistically?
Also, what I also find strange is that they’re all vikings right? Isn't this their thing? To go out and fight as warriors and junk? They face enemies every day and because of what Hiccup’s ushered in, the way forward was made easier. They even have Hiccup say that Toothless (and by extension, the dragons) made everything easier during the bit before this film's climax. This was said in a bid by Astrid (America Ferrera) to get Hiccup to realize that he’s a good leader and always has been one and that he doesn’t necessarily NEED Toothless to be one.
But that’s not the same as saying we should throw him away and say goodbye forever. If anything that revelation should have made their partnership stronger. Gobber really confused the shit out of me with his hangups here. Instead of properly making it make sense, he just kept insisting that Hiccup and Astrid settle down and get married.
Spoiler alert, they do at the end of the film and it’s nice but it’s still weird that the dissenting opinion that he provided ended up being the correct thing to do. That’s not just true for him though. Everything that’s said from the lips of the villain and Hiccup’s dad back when he hated dragons is treated as the truth and acted upon by the end of the film.
It’s so strange. There’s a conversation between Hiccup and the main villain guy, Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham), about how foolish Hiccup is for doing what he’s doing. Trying to create a world where dragons and humans live together in harmony? Blasphemy he says. He talks about how Hiccup’s dad was a great dragon hunter and Hiccup sucks cause he isn’t one. When Hiccup brings up that his dad changed his mind, Grimmel says “Look where that got him”.
In any other movie this “good point” would be here as a set-up to be torn down later. The heroes are supposed to rally and rise against, not just him, but his ideals and prove him wrong. Technically, they do. He gets defeated because of how strong the belief in friendship and love between humans and dragons is but… apparently that’s not enough for them to realize he was full of shit.
No. Instead, at the end of the film, after they’ve found The Hidden World that’s full of dragons, instead of going to live there like the original plan was or to just use it as a way to store some of the dragons they can’t keep with them on Burke, it’s decided that the world doesn’t deserve dragons right now and that they ALL need to be let go to live there instead.
They’re just… let go and it’s really sad but not at all in a satisfying way. It doesn’t make any sense to me either. Hiccup and the movie is making the proclamation that this is just until the world is ready to be a better place to accept dragons and what not but… their way of doing this is to set things back so that people don’t even know dragons exist anymore?!
Wouldn't relations between dragons and humans have a better chance of thriving if Burke just expanded their ideals to other nations or something more ambitious? This just feels like they gave up after they already won.
Like, the Hidden World is where they’re all kept now and enough time goes by that I guess the poaching might have stopped but literally only because there’s nothing to poach. If dragons get re-introduced to the world now I’ve, one, no reason to believe it won’t start again and two, no reason to believe that by sectioning dragons off as creatures of legend their introduction to the world is just going to be far worse than what it could have been had they just remained on Burke.
The goal was to make more places like Burke; places where humans and dragons no longer have to fight. We see Hiccup’s dad, Stoick (Gerard Butler), say this to his extremely young son in a manner that almost feels like it’s approaching a re-working of his motivation. Thankfully it still works. He says he just wants the fighting between humans and dragons to stop, even though, in the first movie he’s SO insanely bloodthirsty for them it felt like a little more than that but whatever. It’s easy to let pass.
Still, that was the goal. Harmony between humans and dragons. They were on their way there. Hiccup stated that Burke was the first place to be like this meaning he had his eyes set on there being more places like this one day. Instead of allowing that to happen by having Burke stand as the first and STRONGEST example of what could be and expanding from there, tolerance is instead thrown out the window in lue of just hiding away forever.
It really boggles the mind, honestly. The fact that what the villain was saying Hiccup should do ended up being what they did will never not bother me. Grimmel wanted to do it by killing the dragons but that doesn't matter now. Especially since he's dead.
Grimmel, as a villain, is… meh. I dunno. His design isn’t really all that interesting and he’s… that guy who likes the hunt I guess. He likes to enjoy a good hunt I suppose. Sure. He’s nowhere near as charismatic about it as Kraven was from PS5 Spider-Man 2 though. In fact, I only really recall there being like one scene where the movie leans into this “enjoy the hunt” vibe of his. The rest is just him talking about how he kills dragons and likes killing dragons and shit.
Hiccup points out that he uses dragons and Grimmel responds by saying he uses dragons to kill dragons. He’s got a special, purple, magic potion or whatever that he sticks into them and that somehow makes them only listen to him. The alpha stare makes sense because it’s coming from a specific dragon but I’m not sure how Grimmel calibrates the serum to hypnotize the dragons into working for him.
Honestly, considering how different they look and the weird Nickolodeon green slime gack they spew from their mouths, I wouldn’t have minded it if these creatures weren’t dragons. Would have been cool if they were some kind of new species of animal or creatures he made in a lab somewhere or… something interesting. This world apparently ONLY has dragons because that’s all I’ve ever seen in these movies aside from sheep and fish.
So even if this film didn’t do the Toy Story 4 thing of going against the message it was talking up for the first three films in a flimsy, unjustifiable manner, on its own merits the movie is also just really bland. Especially compared to the first two.
Almost nothing happens in this film. There are long stretches of scenes where all I was watching was Toothless trying to get together with this Light Fury, lady dragon. There was a really long scene of him trying to court her and then another long scene of them flying together. The other scene where they discover the Hidden World was neat and made me want to play in a Dreamworks Smash Bros or Warriors Game where the Hidden World was a level we could explore but that was it. Breathtaking as that scene was it couldn’t save me from the boredom I was experiencing during the other scenes.
If you find the romance between Toothless and Lady Fury compelling then I’m sorry but I didn’t. I need more than that for a film like this. Long stretches of nothing happening can be relaxing but usually it works more for a film where there’s more interesting things to look at or it’s trying to do something a little more nuanced or… something. Anything.
Here they just go from rock formation to rock formation and I think confront the bad guy a total of three times. Maybe four. There’s a scene where Grimmel let’s Ruffnut (Kristen Wiig) escape from his prison so that he can follow her back to where Toothless and Lady Fury are and he very quickly and easily straps them up and flies away with them both captured despite Hiccup being so close to them when it happens.
Then after a pep talk from Astrid they just use wing suits to fly down to the fleet of ships the villains are docked at and rescue them. It’s just one long fight scene that mirrors all the other fight scenes in the film. It made my eyes glaze over. It was a collection of stuff happening and occasionally the running jokes in the film will have its pay off. The pay off for Gobber being all “that’s a bad omen” to a certain type of dragon creature that keeps showing up is him being saved by a bunch of them attacking and him going “maybe you’re not so bad” as it knaws on his fake leg.
Riveting stuff right? Glad I waited till the end to see that get paid off.
Out of all three films, this one truly did feel like it was going through the motions the most. It was still really well animated. It was still beautiful to look at (at times). It still had really goddamn good music. I still like the characters too. The relationship between Hiccup and Astrid is still cute and has ONLY gotten better. They really nail these two and the way they play off of one another. Kudos on that. I love the playful banter and the adorable teasing from both of them. It’s really nice.
Still, it felt like there was only so much they could do here. Perhaps the ending was what it was because they knew they had no more ideas for what to do. It’s a pretty definitive feeling ending with Hiccup all grown up and with kids now.
If they did a fourth one I could maybe see the focus being on the children or something and they just go “Nah, hiding the dragons is stupid. If the world needs to learn to live with dragons then the world should KNOW about the dragons. You did it once with Burke, a place that used to be famous for killing dragons, but you gave up on doing it with other places? Why? Because a bunch of poachers that are far weaker than you and don’t have dragons want to capture them? You’re lame dad. I’m wearing your pants now. Gimmie those!”
Or something like that. Yeah, I’m sure a sequel would be just like that.
Not everything needs to be a trilogy. Maybe the second film didn’t necessarily feel like the story was over-over but if they hadn’t made a third one no one would have felt like there was stuff left unsaid either. It’s a bit of a shame.
Damn. I’m so not looking forward to that live-action one. Skip.
