That title is a joke, yes, but it's revealing a real truth underneath.
Of course a movie in which dragons play a significant role is not realistic in any strict sense of the word. But we all know that a good movie strives for its version of realism within the larger fantastical context it is presenting.
And on that front, the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon fails spectacularly.
I don't want to hear "but that's how it was in the original!" I'm sure it was. I haven't seen that movie in a long time, but these live action remakes -- Dreamworks is getting into the game after Disney has been doing it consistently for the past decade, most recently with Lilo & Stitch -- tend to be slavishly devoted to the source material, so that wouldn't surprise me at all. So let's just take this movie on its own terms, as we really should with any movie.
The people in this movie should all be dead a hundred times over.
Let's start with the living conditions.
To set the stage, we open on a dragon attack on the Viking island of Berk, where the story takes place. Apparently, these attacks are a semi-regular occurrence as the character infrequently narrating the story, Hiccup, tells us that all the buildings are new, suggesting their recent rebuild.
And what about the people? Are the people new?
What we see here is no less than 70 dragons bearing down on the village with the full brunt of their firepower and other destructive ability. Even if it is only 17 rather than 70, it's enough to kill every living thing in the village each time they attack, not to mention razing every manmade structure in town. I mean, you saw what Khaleesi and was it one? two? dragons did to King's Landing.
And yet these dragons are likened more to pests, to rats, than to killing machines the size of four elephants that also have flamethrowers in their throats. The narrative considers their attacks whimsical, unlikely to result in even a single death on any given attack. And true enough, the only actual character we have heard of losing her life to a dragon is Hiccup's mother, and this seems to have occurred many years ago.
We are also told, by the eventual trainer of the teenage characters, that a dragon "always goes for the kill." Then how to explain raining fire and fury down on a village for something like 45 minutes straight and not claiming a single life? Let's consider the ways a dragon can kill you:
1) Fire. Of course.
2) Biting you in half with their mighty mouths and sharp teeth. (The main dragon we meet here, Toothless, actually reveals teeth, so I'm not really sure of the origin of the name.)
3) Stepping on you with one of their heavy claws.
4) Running into you in flight, which would be something like a train hitting you at 150 miles per hour.
Not only do they not kill anyone, but any significant edifice in the city -- like the meeting hall where they all gather for inspirational speeches from the chief, Stoick -- seems to be completely undamaged by their fury.
Okay let's leave the opening attack alone there for a bit and move on to the training.
Soon after this attack we learn that Hiccup and a quintet of is friends -- actually more like jerky rivals who happen to be his same age -- are about to start training to be able to slay dragons. This is conducted by the aforementioned trainer in an arena which, very much like a Roman coliseum, is rung by contained cells where something like a half-dozen dragons are held just so they can assist with this training.
I don't understand why all six of the trainees are not killed on the very first day of training.
On this first day, they are engaging with an angry, vengeful dragon who has been chained up and probably not fed enough, for God knows how long. A dragon that always "goes for the kill." And they are, it would seem, barely 16 years old, and in some cases -- at least in Hiccup's case -- utterly unacquainted with combat, with evasive action, with the tricks you learn in training to emerge from an interaction with a dragon alive.
But let's say that even one of the trainees died on the first day. You have to agree that an angry, vengeful dragon let loose in an arena with six children, who have only the barest of protections from shields and other obstacles, should be able to kill at least 17% of them? That would be an awful tragedy that would immediately put the value of the whole training program into question, causing intense soul searching in the village about whether these trainees should have just been abstractly training against large Vikings pretending to be dragons.
But not only do all the trainees emerge intact from the first training, they emerge intact from every training, every day, for what we can only imagine is weeks worth of training in order to give them the necessary skills to fight dragons.
Now let's skip ahead to the end, when the Vikings, through the unwitting help of Hiccup, find the nest from which all the dragons originate. In this scene, we realize the estimate of 70 dragons may have been way, way on the low end, as there are hundreds of them here.
How the hell do you expect to dive into what amounts to a volcano full of dragons, one of them the size of 50 whales, with only 50 warriors, and a) do anything meaningful to capture or kill any significant portion of them, and b) expect not to lose a single one of your warriors in the process?
Of course, whether that was the expectation or not, it is the reality.
As they arrive, a bunch of smaller dragons are expelled from the cave, these ones maybe the size of cows. Even a dragon the size of a cow flying through the air, if it happened to hit you, would completely and utterly kill you, knocking that Viking helmet right off your head and smashing your head on the rocks.
Look we're not going for realism in a movie like How to Train Your Dragon, and we're certainly not going for a bunch of gruesome death in a movie aimed at children.
But did they really have to spit so mockingly in the face of any shred of realism?
Other than that it was fine.
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