Our first official 2019 movie of the year is an animated movie, hooray! This is the first How to Train Your Dragon movie to have no number in the title and it’s also the first one to have a subtitle in the title. (Great unusual facts BC, now can you get on with it!) This movie currently has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes because only me and 5 other people have seen this movie. So depending on where you live you get my super-duper early reaction review from this movie or otherwise here’s another typical review of mine.

So in this third and final movie (it says it’s the final one) our hero Hiccup has been doing pretty well for himself since the second movie. He’s the leader of the Viking Dragon free world, he’s got wacky fun friends, he’s got a girl that’s heads over heels for him (but they don’t know that, TEE HEE) and he’s got his best pal Toothless by his side for every step of the way. But things get a bit rocky in their relationship when Toothless finds another one of his kind and falls madly in love with her. Now Hiccup has to deal with moving into a more serious relationship with Astrid and the potential parting of a close relationship with Toothless. Also in the background there is some evil hunter guy who chases them throughout the movie and is just there so the movie has an antagonist. Another thing too,  Hiccup’s dad aka Gerald Butler was obsessed with this Hidden Dragon land that was never mentioned in the previous two movies. So Hiccup makes it his mission to find this place while running away from the evil hunter guy. That’s the plot of the movie!

I’ll start with positives because I want to be fair because there is alot I liked and also some stuff that bugged me. The thing that drew me in into this movie, besides enjoying the previous two, was the animation, the lighting and the scenery – it all looks amazing once again. The locations look amazing, the costumes and the character design look great. It’s a beautifully shot movie and especially compared to the other animated movies coming out this year like that Secret Life of Pets movie – obviously none of the stuff I just mentioned ever came to mind when making that movie. The only movie that is on a par with how this movie looks is the Lego Movie which makes me feel bad for the kids of the day. (Animation was better when I was your age!)

For the most part I really enjoyed the story of this movie. I liked all the relationships and pretty much all the scenes of the characters just talking or not really doing anything. They all have great chemistry with each other and they all feel like a big happy group of friends. I especially liked Hiccup and Astrid together as their relationship is cute and  the same with Toothless and the girl dragon. By the end of the movie you’ll be smothered with so much cuteness that you’ll be dead. I liked the side characters, they’re used appropriately and they’re not so annoying that they ruin the movie. I especially liked Jonah Hill’s character (I don’t remember the character names) and TJ Miller’s replacement, who also was way better than TJ Miller and I liked his sister too.  They were especially great when they were separated from one and other.

Now onto the negatives and first off is the villain’s plan. He wants the Night Furies because he’s the one who has been killing them off for all these years and he wants the honour of ending them for good. His plan involves sending the female Night Fury to attract the male but he is also following Hiccup and his company across many oceans to collect the rest of his dragons. Toothless and the girl dragon are in secret dragon land and the only reason the villain ends up capturing him is because he had to save Hiccup and Astrid from his followers. I don’t get it!  What was the point of the female dragon??? The girl dragon really showed no allegiance to him and all it did was take his prize further away from him to a place he has never heard of!!!! How she is introduced into the story doesn’t make any sense, why couldn’t she just be in the wild instead of being caged up? Compared to the last villain he poses zero threat to our main characters.

I don’t know about you but I think this franchise has done the super-secret dragon world to death by this point. The first movie had all the dragons being a prisoner of super huge mother dragon and they told us that’s where they all came from. Movie 2 had Cate Blanchett babysitting a bunch of dragons in her secret dragon fantasy island. Movie 3 comes along and apparently the dragons really came from a secret hole at the edge of the world. This movie is great at being visually impressive but the creative concepts are at the literal bottom of the list. My last negative piece is to do with the ending because I have alot to say on that so there’s your spoiler warning so skip ahead if you care until I give the all clear.

Spoilers!

So after escaping death Hiccup decides it’s time to say goodbye to Toothless and officially lets him off the hook. This part I kind of liked with their last goodbye, but I’m a bit iffy on Hiccup immediately giving Toothless up after his girlfriend just saved his life. Also I’m definitely not okay with the scene where Toothless and his girlfriend leave for secret dragon land, they let all the other dragons just leave with them. This is such a big jump in logic. I get Toothless leaving because it had been built up to for the whole movie, but with all the other dragons it’s like they mentioned it briefly at the beginning but never again after that. It’s like, what the hell, are you people just going to let your dragons fly away like that after everything you’ve been through!!! Also they have literally just beaten the bad guy’s army, what if reinforcements arrive and they’ll have dragons on their side and you don’t. I just cannot buy that everyone would be willing to give up their dragons right away like Hiccup was.

After that Hiccup and Astrid get married and they have kids in a dragon free world. But dragons still exist except they’re the only ones who know about it which just makes me roll my eyes in disgust. I feel like this ending was on the bottom of the list with the creative idea pile because throughout the movie I never felt like it was building up to a series ending, besides Hiccup and Toothless’s friendship. It just feels sloppily slapped on at the end, where the DreamWorks execs said ‘Hey we need this to be the last one because trilogies make more money, but end it open enough so we can pick this franchise up again 15 years later.’ So to sum it up, the ending sucks and anyone reading this months later heckle me all you like, I’m not going to care by then.

Spoiler Free

Overall How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is a competent sequel with an interesting story, great characters, visually amazing, dark when it has to be while keeping it light for the younglings. Besides a really awful series ending and the forced conflict it’s a fairly solid movie, 7/10. This feels like the first movie I would strongly recommend to children. It’s got everything a kid would want – dragons, wacky comedy, pretty colours and to parents there is only cartoon violence or slapstick humour, no swear words, no sexual references besides child friendly teenage angst and the movie is filled with strong positive messages so watch this over any of the other terrible kids movies coming to a cinema near you. (Unless I say otherwise, but that’s highly unlikely.) And to everyone else I would only recommend it if you’re already invested in this franchise or just wait until it’s on Netflix because I feel no urgency to see it again anytime soon.

Tomorrow or in the next few days I plan to release the start of that series of reviews I have been planning for the last few months, so stayed tuned as I cannot wait to show you all. That’s about it, I don’t have much planned besides that, if I come up with anything else then it will just pop up.

So Until Next Time, Blog Complainer, Signing Out.