Feb 3, 2021

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Saw How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third film in the series.  This time we have a theme of love.  This sort of nicely continues from the themes of the last film: a rise to power.  Now with the power under their belt, Hiccup and his dragon turn their thoughts to coupling up.  The end involves a fairly serious breakup however, which is strange, but these films have always been entertainment vehicles first and treatises on the human condition a distant second.  So, the film is pretty good.

Once again, the dragons are adorable and dog-like and have great silly designs with jutting jaws and goggling eyes.  This film was clearly once projected in 3D as there's a lot of fore-ground/back-ground stuff going on here and things that suddenly get in your face.  There's a lot of flying about however and many scenes that suggest a grand scale and I wonder how well that would have come across in a theater.

Anyway, as with the second film (I've seen the first one so long ago, I don't think I can rely on my memory) I kept expecting the dragons to cohere into a recognizable symbol of like the human spirit or weapons of war or something, but they continued to confound me.  It's really just a film about these Vikings' adventures with dragons.  But it is that very successfully.

It was an enjoyable film and more serious than its first films.  I liked the villain's dead-eyed dourness, even in victory.  Similarly, I just liked hanging out with the characters and seeing what they do next.  A satisfying movie.

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