DreamWorks’ first live-action remake of an animated classic lives up to expectations — and then some. How to Train Your Dragon (2025) is both a faithful recreation and a work that feels alive in its own right. Small changes, big emotions, and top-tier performances make it feel familiar and new at the same time — without ever coming across as an empty copy.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Dragons and Vikings?
The film takes place — just like the original — on Berk: a tradition-bound, male-dominated island where nobody asks too many questions about anything, and where dragons are treated like a species of living pest. Hiccup remains the thoughtful, slightly awkward boy in a world that worships strength, decisiveness, and pragmatism. He doesn’t fit in — and that’s part of what makes the film better. His arc follows a classic hero’s-journey structure, but what stands out is how firmly he holds onto his core values. This isn’t the story of someone who grows stronger and wins; it’s the story of someone brave enough to stand by what he has always sensed was true. That gives the narrative a core of integrity that comes through even more clearly in this version, where human reactions and glances are not animated, but bodily and vulnerable.
Stoick the Vast – a father figure with cracks in him
The great revelation in this remake is Gerard Butler as the village leader Stoick. He also voiced the character in the original animated film, but here he gets far more room — and he uses every scene. The role could easily have become a caricatured patriarch, a stereotypical “father who doesn’t understand his son,” but Butler makes him tremble between control and collapse. You can feel that Stoick is wrestling with something he has no language for. His wife was lost to the dragons, and the grief has not been resolved, only repressed. He has built a worldview around necessity and strength — not because it is true, but because he cannot afford for it not to be. Butler plays him with precision: when he raises his voice, it quivers not only with authority, but with fear. When he tries to be loving, you know he has no idea how. It’s clear the role has been worked through carefully — not just in the script, but in Butler’s own understanding of the character. There are moments where he conveys the tension between responsibility and helplessness with nothing more than a look. It feels almost Shakespearean: a man trapped in his own pride, but not blind to it. Just too afraid to do anything about it.
Familiar scenes — new Gobber, new angles, almost the same dragon.
The structure of the film is almost identical to the 2010 original. Some scenes have been trimmed a little, others stretched out. But where the original was tightly cut and energetic, this one takes its time with breaths and exchanged glances. It never feels slow — just more human. You could almost call it a kind of director’s cut with live actors. And if you know the original well, it’s genuinely fun to see how certain moments now carry more weight simply because you see them from another angle — or see the reactions in the eyes rather than in 3D animation. The montage of dragon training and equipment-building is still the heart of the film — and still the best montage since "Fievel Goes West." It strikes a perfect balance between adventure, ingenuity, and character development, and it is just as moving as ever.
Craig Ferguson is missed as the voice of Gobber, but Nick Frost makes the role his own. His slightly lumbering, immediate energy fits Gobber’s mix of battle lust, dark humor, and accidental wisdom perfectly. His lines — especially the inverted pep talks — still work, and several of them drew laughs in the cinema. Some jokes from the original have clearly been left out — perhaps because they worked best in the animated universe — but the balance between humor and seriousness has been preserved. It never feels clownish, only human.
Toothless may be the hardest character to translate from animation to live action, but it has been done. The new version is still charming, curious, and expressive, but with a more realistic texture and movement pattern. Some details have changed, and perhaps he feels a little less “cartoon-cute” — but the emotional bond between him and Hiccup is completely intact. Especially the scenes where they move toward each other in silence — where trust emerges without words — work astonishingly well in this version. The camera lingers a little longer, and it pays off.
Let’s just put it like this…
How to Train Your Dragon, 2025 edition, does the nearly impossible: it respects the original without feeling like a retelling. Gerard Butler brings Stoick to life with a complexity rarely seen in family adventure films, and the movie balances humor, grief, and heroism with surprising elegance. It’s a remake that doesn’t try to replace, but to reflect — and it does so with warmth, style, and substance. You don’t have to choose between the versions. But you will want to see both.
