Fifteen years later, and also a remake, and I’m only just now seeing the original How to Train Your Dragon. In fact, it’s because of the remake. There are new toys, and my kids like dragons, so they have the new toys, which begged the question, shouldn’t they know what’s the deal with these toys? And Bob’s your uncle.

The plot twist [that I’ve already revealed] being, shouldn’t I know what’s the deal with these toys? Which brings me to a fun fact, in which I can objectively prove that previews are getting worse. I did not learn until 2025 that the dragons were nominally the bad guys of the movie. I always took it straightforwardly that the loser kid who never fit in found a way to be awesome via dragon training, not that he was supposed to be dragon killing this whole time! And I mean, it’s not really a spoiler for the movie, since you learn it during the opening scene narration. But I thought it was a clever subversion of the original previews’ expectations, and now the current previews are all, we cannot subvert anything, as our audience is dumber than ever. Or something like that. My point is, fuck[1] screw previews.

Anyway.

So there’s this Viking kid who is scrawny and engineering-minded, instead of being large and strong and (let’s say) single-minded. Which means he doesn’t fit in. Oh, sure, he still wants to kill dragons, same as everybody else, he just wants to use tools instead of muscles to do it. What a maroon! But once he actually manages to use said tools to get a dragon in a position where he can kill it, he… comes up with a new plan.

This is a kid movie, so the result of the new plan is that he ends up fitting in after all, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about accepting people for who they are. And, okay, as a parent, that’s a good lesson. Also, as a parent, I recognize that sometimes it’s a lesson parents need to learn as much as kids do. But the real point is, the actual plot underlying these lessons is at least halfway decent as well. Plus, riding around on a dragon is cool. I would not, I think, affirmatively recommend this movie to anyone unless you really like dragons and can live with kid movies, but I would not disrecommend the movie to anyone, if they were about to be in front of it. Because, you know, it’s fun!

[1] Family movie, I should watch my language.