How to remake your dragon

I put this down as a topic to write about last weekend, when my son made us leave four-fifths of the way through the partially-live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, but the general state of affairs of the world (Tuesday night's win by Zohran Mamdani in the NYC mayoral primary excluded) has left me disenchanted with writing about something that I was far less enchanted with the second time around.

I'll have a more substantial installment of the newsletter for you all on Friday, so let me just distill the talking points about HTTYD down to a few core bullets.

• Yes, we're all quite tired of live-action (and in the case of things like Jon Favreau's The Lion King, animation-approximating-live-action) remakes of things, even though (as in the case of the recent Lilo & Stitch) they can be totally adequate and even worthwhile. But in the case of the new How to Train Your Dragon, I'm allowing an awful lot of grace, since it is written and directed by the guy who wrote and directed the three theatrical How to Train Your Dragon animated films. That's burgeoning on auteur status, and if someone is going to insist on making a live-action remake of a beloved and/or successful film or franchise, shouldn't the bare minimum be tabbing the people who were responsible for those movies in the first place? Getting a chance to try out your signature piece of art in a completely new way seems like a neat experiment, and it's more akin to a (Taylor's Version) than a crass remake. (Also, bonus points for retaining Gerard Butler as the sole member of the voice cast to return, and he really goes for it getting a chance to add physicality to his extremely Scottish viking.)
• Although all of the marketing exclusively consisted of 1:1 shot and scene recreations from the original film, I was pleasantly surprised at how much the remake actually did diverge from the original in terms of storytelling and shot composition. Yeah, some sequences were straight-up redone, as if traced, but when you nailed it the first time, why fuck it up now?
• That being said, huge thumbs down to whoever decided Toothless should be much catlike in "live action." People love Toothless because he's a big stupid cat of a dragon. I also think if they had built just, like, two puppets of Toothless it would have gone a hell of a long way to making the movie feel a lot less antiseptic. (Or maybe I mean sterile? Who can say.) Like, they already made an animatronic Toothless you can meet at the new Universal Studios' Epic Universe in Orlando. It can't be that hard to bake a practical Toothless into your film budget.

• And that being said, the remake really doesn't look very good a lot of the time. But sometimes it looks great! There are some windswept hilly vistas that look incredible, and then other entire segments are just the usual sort of muddy fake-background look that most movies have nowadays.
• They did a good job casting people who are the extremely "sliders at opposite ends" body types of the main group of characters from the animated movies. Perhaps too good a job casting them, because there end up being some uncanny valley situations in the movie based on how people look, and none of it has to do with special effects.
• You don't need to see this movie.

That'll do it for me today. See you Friday!