Okay, this is going to be a bit more subjective than usual. I have never been on board with the "How To Train Your Dragon" movies. I thought that the first film was a generic mix of "ET" and "Dragonheart" and while the second one had interesting dragon-based world building, it was still another generic family film with an especially dumb retcon surrounding the main character's mother. Not to mention the film's questionable depiction of motherhood as something you can just abandon in order to go save the whales instead. Despite of its myriad of problems, however, the series has garnered a dedicated following due to its unique viking setting, endearing character designs and relatively mature storytelling when compared with other modern kid's films. The third and final chapter in the series not only carries the weight of increased expectation behind it, but also the baggage of being released under a new studio. In 2016, DreamWorks Animation was bought out by NBCUniversal. This wouldn't usually be a big deal, but the rub is that NBCUniversal also owns Illumination through its subsidiary Universal Pictures. Illumination, in case you didn't know, is the creator of the "Despicable Me" franchise, which includes the Minions characters. If the prospect of the studio behind the Minions making a "How To Train Your Dragon" movie doesn't make you a little nervous, you clearly don't have much investment in this franchise.
Main character Hiccup, now chief of the island kingdom of Berk, finds himself face to face with a new enemy. While finding a way to defeat his new foe, he must also help his dragon Toothless unite with a female of his endangered breed.
It's a pretty standard setup for this franchise and would've served perfectly well as the second installment or even an episode of the tv show. However, with this being the final installment of the trilogy, that's kind of a problem. The stakes aren't higher in either the scale or emotional impact needed to make this feel like the monumental conclusion to an epic trilogy.
One of the major problems with the sequels is that you can tell that the writers are just making up plot points on the fly. They didn't have a full arc planned out from the start and it really shows. Backstory that was never even hinted at is revealed for the sake of a new villain. Hiccup's mother came back to life for no reason in the second one and all of the films feel thematically disconnected. Each one feels like its own separate story instead of one part of a greater whole. And while it's important for each film to be able to stand up without the others, you also need to be sure that they are all helping tell one bigger story. It's a tricky line to walk, but unfortunately the creators of "How To Train Your Dragon" weren't able to pull it off. Probably because they didn't expect they'd have to.
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This especially shows in the theme of the film, which I'm just going to give away. When boiled down, the lesson we're supposed to have learned from these three films is "The dragons are gone, but if we're all nice to each other maybe they'll come back." Eat a basket of rotten squirrel droppings, movie! What kind of moral is that to leave the audience with? What did that have to do with the lessons of any of the other films? Where did it even come from? Every human being we meet in these movies besides the villains are obnoxiously nice, so where did the total depravity lesson come from? You did nothing to set this up, not in this story or any of the previous ones.
Well, if the film is thematically empty and obnoxious, hopefully the characters can pick up the slack. Yeah, that's a nice dream, kind of like world peace or the Green New Deal. This is going to sound odd, but compared to how he is now, Hiccup was much more compelling in the first "How To Train Your Dragon" film. Sure, his personality was the cliched snarky outsider nerd, but at least it was a personality of some kind. Nothing about him stands out. The snarky nerd factor is gone because he's no longer the underdog outsider. He's not socially awkward or charismatic. He's just a generic main character whose only defined motivation is "Protect my dragons."
The other characters aren't great either. Hiccup's girlfriend Astrid has lost all of her personality in a similar manner. Any interesting interaction we might have with Hiccup's mother is pushed off to the side just as she is. All the members of Hiccup's little dragon-saving squad are all obnoxious and while I get that's the intent, it doesn't change the fact that I was cringing for half the movie.
Speaking of cringing, the movie places a weirdly strong focus on romance. Toothless discovers a female of his kind, Hiccup and Astrid are trying to decide whether to get married and even the side characters have their own romantic goals. While this wouldn't be a bad thing in principle, it's the presentation that's the problem. It reminded me a lot of how romance was portrayed in kids movies from the 2000s: immature, awkward and chronically uncomfortable. The funny thing is, the films were going in a perfectly acceptable direction with the romance already. Up until now, the relationship between Hiccup and Astrid seemed to naturally grow in a sweet and affectionate way. The choice in this film to suddenly make it uncomfortable seems like a contrived step backward. I guess you could make the argument that it's awkward because they're trying to take that next step into marriage. However, it's not uncomfortable in an interesting "Wow, this is a new responsibility in our lives; how do we prepare for it?" sort of way. Rather, it's more uncomfortable in a "People are pressuring us into doing this" sort of way, not at all fun or insightful.
The choice to give Toothless a love interest is also weird. For one thing, it's profoundly unnecessary. For another, it sort of takes away from the film's mythology. Before this, night furies were sort of a mystery in the film's universe, a dragon rarely seen or heard about except in legends. Confirming that there are more of them in the world feels disappointing. It's peeling away one last level of mystique from these larger than life creatures.
Despite its myriad of problems, however, the "The Hidden World" has continued some of the good habits of its predecessors. The animation is sublime and not just in the sense of visual pleasantness, though some of the landscape shots border on photorealism. The animators should all be commended for the amount of effort they have put in to the dragons. Each type of dragon is given a unique, memorable design and painstakingly animated in different ways. Their different sizes means they don't just look like they're bigger or smaller than one another. They feel that way as well. The way they move and fly is unique to their size and shape. They even show a lot of personality with subtle twitching of their ears, heads and tails. The amount of time and effort needed to do this must've required several caffeine-fueled late nights, so a thoroughly deserved round of applause to you, animation department.
The world building also continues to be excellent. The clothing and architecture of Berk has adapted to life with dragons just as the last film did. Armor made out of shed scales, buildings adorned with perches and dragon-modeled Viking masks are all great ideas and help show progression of time within the world. Honestly, it's the most consistently excellent part of this whole trilogy.
I don't know how so many critics and film fans fooled themselves into thinking that the "How To Train Your Dragon" movies have elements for adults. Sure, they put in a little more effort than your average kid's film, but let's be honest with ourselves: these movies are for children. The dialogue is awkward and obvious, the characters are either cartoonishly nice or cartoonishly evil, and the themes are less mature and applicable than an average episode of "Captain Planet." While the films may be beloved now, I strongly suspect that "How To Train Your Dragon" will ultimately be lost and forgotten to time. It barely has any thematic substance, the characters aren't interesting enough to come back to and besides their setting and basic premise they're pretty generic kids films. If you took your kids to see it it wouldn't make them less of a human being, but it wouldn't give them anything to chew on after leaving the theater.
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