How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Director: Dean DeBlois
Writer: Dean DeBlois
Based on: Cressida Cowell‘s books
Sequel to: How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2
Cast: Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, F. Murray Abraham, Cate Blanchett, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kristen Wiig, Kit Harington, David Tennant, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Gideon Emery
Seen on: 13.2.2019
1-gif-review

Plot:
Under Hiccup’s (Jay Baruchel) leadership, Berk has become a sanctuary for dragons, and a bustling city filled with both humans and dragons. In fact, things are going so well, they are actually running out of space for everyone. But dragon hunter Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham) has set his sight on Berk and its dragons – Toothless in particular. And he finds the perfect bait for his plan.

I loved the first How to Train Your Dragon film a lot. And I very much liked the second one, but didn’t love it as much anymore. The third film, unfortunately, continues the trend and is the weakest one so far. It’s still cute, but it’s probably for the best that they (probably?) won’t continue after this.

I had two big issues with this film. The first already started in the films before, with all its rhetoric about natural born leaders and alphas and I don’t know what. As if leadership is something inherent and not a skill we can learn. This leads to all sort of uncomfortable associations like some people are just better than others and we should really not be doing that, ever.

The second issue was the Light Fury/Night Fury design choices. Making the Light Fury the opposite of the Night Fury because she is female and female is the opposite of male (and also making her white and smaller etc) is such an infuriatingly heteronormative, binary choice of looking at freaking dragons, it made me grit my teeth.

Additionally, the film had some serious lengths in its storytelling and some actually boring moments. That being said, the fun moments do outweigh the boring ones and really, how wrong can you go with dragons? Not all that wrong, I think. Plus, the soundtrack is almost frighteningly effective and affective, giving you no choice but to go along with everything emotionally.

So, I definitely didn’t regret seeing this one. But it just didn’t reach the heights of the first film or what it could have been judging from what came before it.

Summarizing: a little disappointing, but still very cute.