Cinematographer Bill Pope must have done something awful in 2022. Maybe he ran over some studio executive’s cat or perhaps his children beat out the wrong financier’s kids in soccer tryouts. Whatever it was, the film gods have been out to get him ever since. He once worked with The Wachowskis on The Matrix trilogy, Sam Raimi on the majority of his best-known works, Edgar Wright on the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and even with Robert Rodriguez on his underrated Alita: Battle Angel. In other words, he enjoyed a remarkable, even if entirely pop-leaning, prime, but the slop hasn’t stopped for for a while now. In 2023, his name was attached to the hideous Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — on second thought, maybe entering the MCU was his sinful deed — and the once-heralded cinematographer even shot Jerry Seinfeld’s unspeakable Pop-Tarts movie last year. Hopefully, the hideous-looking live action How to Train Your Dragon marks the end of Pope’s penance for Ant-Man and he can go back to making good movies.
It can’t be overstated what a truly unsightly film 2025’s How to Train Your Dragon is. The opening scene, which features the Vikings of Berk being attacked by dragons at night, is the film’s worst, appropriately setting the tone for the ugly mess to follow. Dean DeBlois, who also directed the animated film in tandem with Chris Sanders, has never worked in the realm of live action before (and thus, has never had a real night shoot). This introduction to Berk offers some of the ugliest cinematography yet seen in 2025, and it’s a shame because Pope has historically been a photographer quite capable of elevating material. But here, the deep darks fail to hide both the wounded visual effects and costuming that seems more suitable for a high school theater production than a grand-scale Hollywood blockbuster. The only upside in this sequence is found in the way its darkness establishes such strong negative space for the dragons’ fire; the black skies and photorealism introduce a more “realistic” world, with Game of Thrones-ified dragons and the attendant self-seriousness. (The only concession to the more “adult” world of this version is Toothless: he is still shiny and plush.) But this reveals a fundamental mistake: the animated film’s whimsicality was a integral part of its magic, and despite this live action version operating as an almost shot-for-shot remake, the DeBlois mistakenly forsakes the fanciful allure for a more “grounded” and mostly lank Berk.
Elsewhere, the casting direction seems to take a Las Vegas approach by seeking impersonators rather than new interpretations. Gerard Butler returns as Stoick the Vast, and he’s the best performer in the film by a sizable margin. (Butler has become something of an action film staple, but it’s never a great sign for a film’s quality when he is the best actor.) Nick Frost, meanwhile, is at least mostly tolerable as Gobber the Belch, the peg-legged blacksmith who teaches the new dragon-fighting recruits, but that’s because he plays precisely the same kind of character he always does — reliable but uninspired. The rest of the cast function mostly as charisma black holes. One has to assume Mason Thames scored the role of Hiccup because he looks just like the character, as there is little else brought to the table here. Original voice actor Jay Baruchel lent a comedic touch to his Hiccup that Thames isn’t able to match, which means that nearly all of this remake’s attempts at humor fall flat. There’s also a distinct lack of chemistry with Nico Parker’s Astrid, which is a big problem given that the elevation of her character is perhaps the film’s biggest change. And then there are the talents tasked with playing the other young dragon fighters, who largely deliver cringey and influencer-cadenced performances in service of characters have been written only as caricatures, their efforts rendered wooden and amateurish as they do their best to replicate their cartoon versions. But that this is an across-the-board problem points to larger failures of concept and direction.
Even John Powell’s score stumbles in this soulless money grab. Admittedly, the composer is stuck between a rock and a hard place with his responsibility here, as it’s difficult to imagine any alternative than basically re-mixing his work from the original… which is what he does. His 2010 score is a remarkable achievement, transcending the sphere of animated cinema and making a staking solid claim as one of the great scores of the century. The great cues are at least nearly fully preserved, though in slightly more modernized iterations: more guitar, less bagpipe, more focused melodies, and smoother mixing. Elsewhere and more frustratingly, unless the ears deceive, it seems like Powell also dials down the ethereal woodwinds on several of the best songs, an element that gifted the original score much of its pop. And while it might seem a trifling critique to lodge, to reduce the primacy of the woodwinds and almost entirely erase the use of bagpipes is a confounding choice, given that those two aural influences formed so much of the sonic backbone of the entire animated trilogy. The added choral components and the angelic respite to “Test Driving Toothless” (previously “Test Drive”) also are a clear step down from their momentous original versions, and the changes introduced to “A Romantic Flight” (previously “Romantic Flight”) nearly outright ruin a masterpiece of film composition. Only “This Is Real Berk” (previously “This Is Berk”) offers any noticeable improvement, delivering a much more aggressive sound to a scene that benefits from that intensity.
2025’s How to Train Your Dragon also ends with the same ideological faux pas as the 2010 original. “Dragons aren’t bad. They are good… Other than the big red one. He must die.” This verisimilitude draws more attention to the violence committed against Red Death and in its own way contributes to the moment of solidarity felt between the oppressed dragons and humans. But any incremental improvements of this sort offered in 2025’s (relatively) more grounded live action don’t linger long past their individual scenes. Rather, much like the action delivered in the film’s climactic fight sequence, the whole of How to Train Your Dragon drags and loses its way under a strained and failed effort to make everything bigger and bolder.
DIRECTOR: Dean DeBlois; CAST: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler, Nick Frost; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: June 13; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 5 min.
Published as part of Tribeca Film Festival ’25 — Dispatch 4.
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