Don’t talk to me; I’m entering my “dragons era” once again.
But, on a real note, the live-action How To Train Your Dragon has finally happened, guys. It’s finally here. It feels like just yesterday that the 2025 movie release was confirmed, and we started to get casting news, story updates, filming posts, and so much more. Now it’s dropped, and honestly…I think it’s the best live-action adaptation I’ve ever seen.
Before we delve into that, however, we need to address the actual concern I had going into this film and how the movie addressed it in a matter of seconds. Let’s talk about it.
How To Train Your Dragon movies, you’re going to enjoy this film. It’s essentially the same story, and it feels like it was ripped right out of the animation and brought to our eyes in live-action form, which is something that I am so freaking happy about.
It’s not even just that which made this good – the characters’ mannerisms were there, the dragons were there – Toothless looked so good, and I literally felt tears come to my eyes when John Powell’s score swelled as he and Hiccup took their first real flight together. It was like a blast to the past.
This is what a lot of Disney live-action remakes are missing – the heart of the story, the fact that we all love the original – so if you’re going to remake it, keep it relatively the same. We don’t need flashy changes, or at the very least, I don’t. And, this movie had everything you could want and more.
However, like I said, there was one concern I had going into it.
Halle Bailey’s Ariel from The Little Mermaid, who is literally just a made-up fantasy character and could look like anyone. However, with the Vikings – the group this is based on – it is historically accurate that most of them were white, and Nico Parker is not.
Again, I don’t care about race 99% of the time as long as you give a compelling performance. However, Parker’s casting did turn some heads, and then when I saw that there would be more characters of that race within Berk, I started to wonder how they would explain this.
Then I saw the movie, and everything fell into place.
Mulan remake, I couldn’t tell you how many times it repeated the phrase “Mulan can’t fight because she’s a woman” over and over. We get it. We don’t need to hear this explanation time and time again when that premise was clear the first time we heard it.
This movie did it right – where the explanation was just said, very quickly, so we don’t really have to even think about it – and then we move on to the main story. You know, fighting dragons and stuff, cementing this as one of my favorite fantasy movies ever because yes, it’s so much fun.
some fantasy TV shows.