Summary:
After a dragon hunter threatens Berk, Hiccup and Toothless search for a place where dragons and humans might live together in peace.
My Thoughts:
I love the first “How to Train Your Dragon”, and I think “How to Train Your Dragon 2” is a very good sequel. Up until the last ten minutes of this film, I was ready to give this movie a 3/5 star rating, and even now as I think back on the uneven pacing and somewhat forgettable, mustache-twirling villain, I probably could give this film a lower score.
As a stand-alone movie, this film is incredibly average, but as conclusion to the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, I think this is an absolutely marvelous way to end the series, so that bumped my rating up a bit.
I’ll talk more about the ending towards the bottom, but I’ll be sure to throw up a big spoiler tag.
“It’s you and me, bud. Always.”
One year after the events of “How to Train Your Dragon 2”, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel, “Million Dollar Baby”), Toothless, Astrid (America Ferrera, “End of Watch”) and a few other Berkians are still working to free dragons from trappers, but Berk has become overcrowded. To make matters worse, a new dragon hunter named Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham, “Inside Llewyn Davis”), who has a knack for hunting Nightfuries, has marked Toothless as his next kill. Hiccup must find a way to protect the humans and the dragons, and he believes his only option is to seek a legendary place known as The Hidden World.
So there are some pretty good parts about this movie. For one thing, I think the animation throughout the series has continuously improved (though, I suppose that makes sense as it’s been nigh a decade since the original hit theaters). This movie in particular has some pretty impressive improvements in the way water and hair move specifically, but in general I think the animation felt a little smoother. The flying sequences in this movie were even enough to send a couple of chills down my spine.
Perhaps the coolest part of this movie was actually how little dialogue there was. There were plenty of scenes where most of the action is between the two main dragons, so we get to watch them interact and learn as they learn. Some of these scenes do go on a bit long while trying for a laugh (that’s part of the uneven pacing), but for the most part those scenes really worked for me.
I thought there were a couple great locations as far as production design go. Once the Berkians leave Berk, we visit a couple new places, some of which reminded me of the gaping abyss in the anime show “Made in Abyss”, and there were other places that were electrified with glowing neon, reminding me of “Avatar”. As a whole, it was the locations that stole the show in this film; most of the dragon designs were those that we’d already seen.
I honestly thought the villain in this film was pretty weak, and that was my biggest qualm with the whole story. Honestly, our villain felt like he was used more as a plot device to get our characters to where the writers thought this trilogy should end, so all of Grimmel’s plans and motivations felt a little stilted, as did the Berkian’s reactions. The battles, though there were more of them, didn’t feel as intense or exciting.
I feel like the writers were trying to touch a bit on xenophobia, as Grimmel kept making comments about how the dragons were less than human and to live in a world where the two lived as equals was silly. I just felt as if the themes could’ve been flushed out a little bit more if they were actually trying to say something; those themes felt halfhearted, as if they were just tacked on as an afterthought.
I suppose I have the most to say about the ending, so the rest of this review will be spoiler filled.
This story ends with Hiccup sending Toothless away to live in the Hidden World, safe from dragon trappers. It feels like a bittersweet storybook ending in which the magic leaves the world, and what remains is something like the world we live in now. That kind of ending is kind of common in fantasy novels, but I rarely see fantasy films end this way. As a huge fantasy geek, the ending worked perfectly for me.
Verdict:
I honestly don’t have too much more to say about this movie. It isn’t as good as the first two, but it does end the series in a way I find relatively satisfactory. As a standalone, it’s fine. It doesn’t really do so much for me that I’ll watch it repeatedly, but at the same time its very existence doesn’t offend me. At least the third entry in this animated fantasy series was a heck of a lot better than the third entry in Dreamwork’s other major animated fantasy franchise (I’m talking about you, “Shrek the Third”), that’s for sure.
SIDE NOTE: I did find it sort of funny that after T.J. Miller’s (voice of Tuffnut) inappropriate conduct (you can Google that if you really want), they ended up getting a different voice actor to replace him; and not only that, they gave that voice actor more lines than T.J. Miller had in either of the first two films.
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