Count me among the skeptical.
When I first heard that a live-action adaptation of the 2010 DreamWorks animated classic, “How to Train Your Dragon” was in the works, my first thought was, Do we need that? Sure, the original is a great and timeless film — and that’s to say nothing of the following two installments that fill out the trilogy. But I don’t think I’m alone in raising a wary eyebrow at any studio’s efforts to drag a beloved bit of animation kicking and screaming across the threshold of flesh and blood acting.
Here’s the thing: I’m happy to admit when I’m wrong. And in the case of this newly released retelling of “How to Train Your Dragon,” I’ll gladly change my initial assessment: We do need this film. The world feels bigger, more immersive and — most importantly — more relevant than ever before.
Making It Real — and Really Big
“We could deepen the mythology,” Dean DeBlois told me in an interview with the Jesuit Media Lab. DeBlois, a Canadian who got his start in animation, has written and directed every feature length installment in the “How to Train Your Dragon” franchise — including this newest adaptation, which doubles as his live action directorial debut. “We could go deeper into characters that were a bit underserved in the animated movie.”
All the names fans know and love from the original film are back: Hiccup, the lackluster dragon slayer with a penchant for getting in the way is played by Mason Thames; Gerard Butler returns to the franchise to bring to life the character he originally voiced, Hiccup’s father, the great Viking chief Stoick; Nico Parker plays Astrid, the up-and-coming dragon warrior who has little patience for Hiccup’s shenanigans — or the favors she believes he enjoys as son of the chief.
Astrid is one such character that receives a fuller backstory. We knew she was a driven and capable dragon fighter — one of the best of the village’s upcoming generation — but now we come to learn why she’s so driven: She wants to become chief. Astrid hails from a poorer tribe and family; she’s had to fight for her status. So, it’s no wonder she finds Hiccup’s lackadaisical performance in the dragon arena to be at best insulting.
“Wiping out dragons is why we’re here,” she tells him. “It’s why the best of our tribes came together.”
In fact, Astrid’s brief retort points to the heart of the expanded worldbuilding DeBlois and his team were able to bring to this live action retelling. We learn that dragons aren’t simply a pest plaguing the villagers; the dragons are the reason they’re living on the isle of Berk. They’ve built their whole society around one thing: slaying dragons.
“We thought it might be fun to expand the world by suggesting that dragon conflict was everywhere,” DeBlois told me. “We supposed that if dragons were a problem everywhere, the idea of building a task force to root them out at their home, to find a key dragon’s nest and deal with the problem with force, would be the best way forward.”
This added mythology explains why the warriors of Berk — the harsh island homeland of our story’s protagonists — elect to stay in such dragon infested lands: They’d chosen to be there. They were making intentional sacrifices to serve the greater good. But despite generations of such sacrifices and the shared efforts of tribes the world over, little to no progress had been made.
“It’s just the perfect setup for this errant kid who constantly gets in the way,” DeBlois said with a laugh. “He happens to be the son of the chief, but he lacks everything that it is to be a warrior of Berk.”
Hiccup, the Teaching Hero
What Hiccup has instead, DeBlois reminded me, is compassion. When given the chance to kill a dragon, our hero stays his hand. Instead, he befriends the deadly Night Fury, naming the black cat-like dragon Toothless. Compassion, empathy and nonviolence — these are not the tools of a dragon slayer and certainly not what is expected of the chief’s son.
“It just starts a journey of discovery, of looking beyond what he’s been taught and finding a peaceful solution that will actually end all of this,” said DeBlois.
It’s that journey that will lead Hiccup to wonder whether the Vikings are in fact part of the problem and if there’s a better way forward. And along the way, Hiccup will convince not only Astrid to join him, but the entire village as well.
“He has the courage and the capacity, the empathy to look beyond that age-old teaching and to find that, oh, there’s more to this story, more to this perceived enemy,” DeBlois said.
Hiccup, DeBlois told me, is a teaching hero — a term I had not heard before, but one that I find incredibly helpful. “Just by having the courage to march to the beat of his own drum and to defy tradition, he finds a way forward that actually uncovers the baseless fear [in his community] and finds the real root of the problems so that coexistence [becomes] possible.”
A teaching hero, it seems to me, is a prophetic hero, one who points the way toward a new way of living and relating that may seem all but impossible given a current broken status quo. But this teaching hero dares to dream, dares to imagine and — most importantly — dares to be comfortable in their own skin. Such a hero both points to a hoped-for future while naming that thing that keeps the community tethered to an undesirable present.
There Be Dragons — and Spiritual Insights
“How to Train Your Dragon” is not a religious movie, but it is not difficult to draw from it spiritual insights for our contemporary moment. The original “How to Train Your Dragon” came out 15 years ago. Now, in 2025, we see a renewed need for teaching heroes. We need those women and men who can point to the brokenness of this moment while also lifting the horizon on our imagination as to what might come next. We know what it is to feel beset by dragons; we need someone to help us imagine what might occur if we befriend those dragons and build a new path forward grounded in peace, dialogue, curiosity and mutual understanding.
We might look to Jesus as another teaching hero — one who named the evils of his day and then proposed a radical way of transcending them: love, inclusivity, compassion and healing. Peace and nonviolence were his tools, too, and Jesus befriended more than a few of his day’s proverbial dragons.
We might look, too, to the Ignatian tradition and wonder how a teaching hero might practice living as a contemplative in action: closely observing our raw and suffering reality, bringing those observations into prayer, and then allowing God to draw out of us something new, something beautiful and something beyond our current imaginings, requiring our committed collaboration.
And finally, we might return to the film itself, remembering that God is present in all things, speaking to us from surprising places. Do we find ourselves trapped in a status quo that sees us trying and failing to defeat an unending swarm of dragons? Are we stubbornly insisting on doing things as they’ve always been done? Or, are we being asked to engage in compassionate listening, in the practice of empathy, in the breaking down of walls and silos to encounter a perceived enemy?
“We have limited knowledge of others outside of our own tribes,” DeBlois said to me, reflecting on the film. “And so, the natural kind of response is to act as humans do: in tribal ways.”
We see this play out day after day, whether on the Isle of Berk or in our own city streets. But there’s another Ignatian tool that might serve us here: agere contra — the challenge to act against. Let us recognize and name this very human tendency. But then, let us push against it. Let us remember that God’s dream for all of creation is one of peace, unity and compassion.
What will happen if we stop trying to kill our dragons? What will happen if we instead cultivate a disposition of curiosity and extend a hand of friendship?