Review of How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) by Crackerjack77 — 04 Nov 2015

How to Train Your Dragon 2 is a mixed bag for me, on the one hand, its disjointed, annoying and preachy, but on the other its gorgeous, thought provoking and deep. It has many amazing shots and touching pieces of dialog, but it has just as many polar opposite moments. If I had to sum up my thoughts on this movie in one word, it would be disjointed. There are many amazing scenes in this movie, when Hiccups father is reunited with his wife it is truly touching and extremely emotional. But the surprisingly plentiful scenes of the girl twin swooning over arin son arit son of arene son of Arathorn, is strait up stupid, its totally disconnected from the tone of the rest of the movie and was clearly thrown in there because every family movie needs to have comic relief characters. Ugh, actually the friends in general, aside from Astrid, are painfully stupid to watch. They don’t add to the story and they do not need to exist, why are they even such main characters in this movie? You could have had just Hiccup, Astrid, Stoic, and hiccups mom be the main characters, it’s really baffling. And while you’re at it, add Gobber to the list. He is probably the worst offender aside from the twin girl. When he interrupts the scene where Stoic and Hiccups mom are singing to each other just pulls me out of the scene every time. He completely breaks up the scene and it feels completely separate from what we are experiencing. In the first movie he was the kids mentor and he taught them and the audience about dragons, but here… he’s just pointless! Except for creating laughs for the kiddies to giggle at, and that’s not a character. I don’t care about Gobber when him and Stoic are going after Hiccup, I care about STOIC! Gobber is one dimensional and not funny… to me anyways. *sighs* and all of these points can be put towards the twin girl and the rest of the friends as well. Its funny they actually have a resolution for the two guys trying to impress the twin girl, like what the heck? Why should I care about that? Short answer, I don’t. Its jarring compared to what’s actually happening and it just pulls me out of the movie and leaves me wishing they were just eradicated from the whole movie. And if they did that, then it woulda been like 20 minutes shorter!

But other than that, I really do like this movie. While I do have more negative reactions inside when I here this movies name, I do like quite a lot in this movie. Like the animation, its stunning. Anything to do with water, ice, or hair looks photo realistic. Its insane. The character models have gotten a MUCH needed upgrade. Hiccup ACTUALLY looks like a freaking human! But I do think that because they used motion capture, the people do seem a little jerky… particularly in the first act. But its not really a problem, just an observation.

The relationship between Stoic and the mom is really heart wrenching. I do feel like these two are in love I believe their story, and it really is heart breaking when Stoic dies, while I don’t think Hiccups reaction is handled very well at all, I do feel for him and when they send him to… val hallah? Right? Right. The relationship between Hiccup and Toothless is really the anchor for the whole thing. You really get the idea that these two have been best friends for a while and they have gotten really good at working together. However I do have a problem with toothless, and the portrayal of dragons in general.

I think they went a little over board with the intelligence of dragons and they make them borderline human. In the first movie, Toothless was intelligent, he had coherent thoughts and a distinct personality. But he was still an animal, it never felt like he was just as smart as his human companion. In Dragon 2, he is borderline human. And it is really disjointed from the first movie. Now, the designs of the new dragons are far, FAR better than the first one. They look truly awesome. One.

Last thing about the dragons, is anyone else perplexed at why night furies would evolve to have their back spikes be split in two, without them knowing? Like toothless almost lost hiccup twice because he couldn’t fly alone, but he had this hidden feature that his species hid from themselves? What’s the evolutionary advantage? Why would toothless not know about this super useful ability that is a part of his physiology? It makes zero sense, but that’s really just a nitpick and doesn’t affect the overall story.

Overall, How to Train Your Dragon is a mixture of downright amazing, and painfully silly. It’s deep and emotional, and stupid and silly. I have quite a few problems with it, but all in all it is a great time.

HtTYD2 gets a 6/10, stunningly beautiful, yet painfully silly.