‘How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World’ Review

Solid trilogies have proven to be difficult to deliver through history of film as many like for example The Godfather, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Star Wars thrice certainly have tried. Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, directed and written by Dean DeBlois, is the closure to the trilogy about a young man (Hiccup) and a dragon (Toothless), expanding the story this time for an adventure to find a safe haven for all dragons to live peacefully in. The film manages to conclude the series in fairly fashionable way, closer to Christopher Nolan’s Batman and The Lord Of The Rings rather than to those previously mentioned.

With each three films the level of animation has stepped up immensely from the previous one. There’s a name that you might miss in the credits who probably had the most to do with this: Roger Deakins. It’s likely thanks to him that on top of the great character designs, the setting looks even better and more vibrant. Everything in this viking world feels alive, moving and detailed so make sure your eyes are on the screen whenever the dragons take flight. Jay Baruchel as Hiccup continues to be an incredible asset in the vocal booth just like Craig Ferguson as Gobber is as well. Baruchel brought a distinctive and an emotive voice to a film series that didn’t even need a superb voice acting to be good. The last 30 minutes of this is the payoff that any trilogy or franchise deserves by being so heartfelt, tear-jerking and in line with everything that happened before. The story clearly mirrors the premise of the first film where the dragons were hunted just to be hunted.

While the movie does stay in line with its themes, there still are some (avoid the obvious pun) obstacles the writing creates for itself. Ruffnut (voice of Kristen Wiig) and Tuffnut (Justin Rupple) are overbearingly used as they are type of characters that deserve a minimum amount of lines to be useful but here they have way too much to say (literally and Literally). There is also weird banter between Valka (Cate Blanchett) and Snotlout (Jonah Hill) which is so left-field that I don’t know why it was not cut. One problem I had with the film was the score by John Powell which definitely isn’t worthy of a frowney but it’s not quite up to the level of the first two where it was really bombastic.

Smileys: Animation, ending, Jay Baruchel, story

Frowneys: Dialogue

The Hidden World shows that the story never stopped soaring through the skies.

4.0/5