REVIEW: ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ serves up life lessons and eye-popping action

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There are lessons to be learned in “How to Train Your Dragon,” which tells the story of a weak and skinny teenage Viking who defies his dragon hunter father to, as the title spells out, domesticate a fire-breathing mythological beast. Lessons about generational discord, about demonizing the other – here, one of a different species, not race, religion or political party – and about how, when training, it is the teacher who learns as much as, if not more than, the student.

“Lots of lessons here,” a mother was overheard to remark, with some surprise, after a recent screening. Mom nodded her head in agreement with her young child, who also couldn’t help noticing the film’s deeper meaning.

“Dragon” imparts these pearls of wisdom with verve and delight, in a telling that is as visually impressive as it is emotionally stirring. The dragons – categorized by species like the two-headed Zippleback and the Gronckle, a sort of overstuffed couch with hummingbird wings – are fantastical, but so are the Vikings, whose homeland is entirely that of the imagination, not Scandinavia.

But these things were equally true of the Oscar-nominated 2010 animated film of the same name, on which this live-action remake (live, except for the CGI dragons) is based. Written and directed by Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the original (with Chris Sanders) before helming its two sequels, the new movie need only be no worse than the first to justify its existence.

And it does meet that bar, if you discount the slight bad taste that might be left in your mouth from the naked greed of DreamWorks. Like Disney, which has been remaking its own catalogue of animated classics as “live-action” films – a dubious classification if you consider the number of elves, fairies, genies, flying elephants and other fantastical creatures involved – the studio has jumped on the money train, eager to persuade a new audience to buy tickets for the same thing it sold a previous generation. There’s another lesson there about how Hollywood thinks.

I can’t say that I mind too terribly in this case.

Full disclosure: It may have something to do with the fact that I have an 11-month-old rescue dog at home. The new film’s titular dragon, dubbed Toothless for his retractable teeth, rendered in convincing CGI, is meant to remind viewers of a difficult, irascible pooch – albeit one that also resembles a bat large enough to saddle up and ride through the sky like Pegasus. That makes for some neat aerial action sequences.

And so that’s exactly what our adolescent hero Hiccup (Mason Thames) eventually does, much to the chagrin of his bloodthirsty dad, played by Gerard Butler in a reprise of the fulminating – and inexplicably Scottish – vocal role he originated in the first film as the Viking chieftain Stoick. While, in his village, Hiccup may be forced to train with other teens who are preparing to hunt dragons (who eat the Vikings’ sheep), he’s a lover, not a fighter. More tinkerer than soldier, Hiccup manages to capture a wounded Night Fury dragon with a weighted net, nursing it back to health and eventually teaching it to fly again, despite a broken tail fin.

The real lesson will come later, when Toothless will teach Hiccup – and ultimately the other Vikings – about the perils of blind hatred.

As good as the 2010 film was, there are actually a few more moments here that will leave animal lovers verklempt, given the realism of Toothless’s rendering, especially in his sad, puppy-dog eyes, which are somehow both reptilian green and heart-melting.

But there may be another reason to see this “How to Train Your Dragon” now – to, as it were, relearn its lessons, even if you’ve already seen the first film. (Or, for those who haven’t, to discover them for the first time.)

Loosely based on the 2003 children’s book by British writer Cressida Cowell, the film is, at its core, a cautionary tale about misjudging outsiders. In short, it’s about prejudice. There’s a line in the new “How to Train Your Dragon” that says it all: “I looked at him,” Hiccup says of Toothless, whom he was taught to fear and kill, “and I saw myself.”

The line also happens to be in the 2010 film, whose narrative the remake follows closely. But somehow it lands differently, and with a poignant urgency that startles, in 2025.

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Three stars. Rated PG. At theatres. Contains sequences of intense action and peril. 125 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.