How to Not Train Your Dragon After All: A Review of The Hidden World

“This is Berk, son. It was the home of your grandparents, and their grandparents before them. But out there, beyond the edge of the world, lies the home of the dragons, and I believe it’s your destiny to one day find this Hidden World.”

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)

 

Impressed thanks to wesambjusdem at newgrounds.com for the truly beautiful fanart.

Well, let’s start with the positives. I mean, it’s only polite to scrape together such compliments as one can before launching into the bitterly disappointed criticism, right? And it’s not as if there were absolutely nothing I enjoyed or appreciated about How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.¹ Visually, it was stunning, especially the scenes that relied heavily or even entirely on visuals rather than dialogue to tell the story, such as when Toothless and his new Light Fury love-interest were getting to know each other and flying about through the pretty clouds. That visual gorgeousness included the costume and set design, which has come on in leaps and bounds since the first instalment of the trilogy. In terms of plot content, there was a good deal of cute paralleling with the events of the first film, which lent a pleasing air of the tying up of established storylines to the whole affair. Ruffnut and Tuffnut, meanwhile, really came into their own as the comic relief in a world already populated by comedic characters, a particular highlight being Ruffnut’s simply annoying her villainous captor into letting her go. And, as expected, John Powell’s soundtrack was utterly brilliant.²

That’s probably about the extent of what I actually liked about The Hidden World, which is a bit of a sorry state of affairs given that the first picture of the franchise held, for quite some time, the lofty honour of being of my favourite film. So yes, I’m here to vent about the major ways in which this latest sequel disappointed me, in the hope that putting them into words and casting them into the seething mass of opinion that is the Internet will get them out of my system effectively enough that I can stop boring all my friends with them in face-to-face conversation.

First off, there was the whole Toothless-gets-a-girlfriend plotline. Look, please don't imagine that I’m automatically opposed to anything resembling a romance story; it’s just that I’m really tired of female characters being introduced purely for the sake of their getting together with preestablished male characters. I’m really tired, furthermore, of the setup where the girl is this really pretty, elegant, composed, talented person, a bit shy, perhaps, and certainly a bit proud, but not in a way that explores those things as plausible personality traits or flaws – instead, only so as to render her more unattainable for suitors; and the guy besotted with her, meanwhile, is this rather daft and goofy so-and-so who makes a total laughingstock of himself and his principles in the process of trying to impress her – which he is of course obliged to do in order that she deign to step down from her ivory pedestal and date him – but usually somehow ends up obtaining her affections anyway. It’s a formula you find in most sitcoms with male leads (which is to say, in most sitcoms).³ I have to wonder, is this actually how men typically view romance? Is it actually your typical man’s envisioned ideal in that sphere to pursue a woman whom he perceives to be stratospherically out of his league, and somehow persuade her to be with him through endearing incompetence? Where on earth does that leave us as women? And I hasten to remind you, in The Hidden World, that pattern is replicated even among dragons, the functional equivalent of domestic pets. They’re not even human and they’re still displaying the same clichés.

Mind you, the human cast wasn’t much better, with the matter of the prospective pairing up of the various major characters providing much of the incidental dialogue. Some of it was funny, sure, but much of it was just a bit dull. And while we’re on the major characters, can I take a moment to call Hiccup’s style of political leadership severely into question? In the previous two films, it made sense that we never really saw any of the processes whereby the society of Berk was governed, because Hiccup’s father Stoick was in charge of that, and the story wasn’t really about him. One received vague impressions of him going about his chiefly business, and occasionally being surrounded by a crew of lieutenants, and that was enough to satisfy one that, you know, there was some kind of government happening and that was fine. But now Hiccup’s in charge. And he is jaw-droppingly irresponsible. First off, he spends all his time rescuing captured dragons from raiding ships instead of caring for the needs of his people. Second, judging by the village-meeting scene early on in the story, his cabinet consists of his mum, Valka (which is kind of fair enough, though she had been living wild with dragons for twenty years before the events of the last film and so isn’t exactly an expert on the functioning of Berkian society); Eret son of Eret (who has, again, only been living on Berk since the end of the last film, having started out as an enemy of the island); and finally his five fellow youths (most of whom are total morons). In favour of these, he has bypassed every respected elder on the island, everyone his father used to work with, except possibly his old tutor Gobber. I mean, I get that we want to see plenty of the characters we know and love, but purely from the point of view of story plausibility, I can’t imagine a village of Vikings meekly submitting to the governance of a team like that. And yet, bizarrely, they do, even though Hiccup makes decisions of profound impact on all his citizens – like uprooting the entire community and moving them to a place that may or may not exist with only what they can carry, or sending away all their beloved dragons never to be seen again – based on nothing more than sentiment and possibility. The same story told a little differently could very easily cast Hiccup as a volatile dictator. And granted, a film about him settling neighbourhood disputes and discussing town planning strategies would probably have been deathly dull, but equally, I don’t see how I’m expected to root for him as a leader when I've seen no evidence at all that he's a good one.

One task that it probably is fair enough for Hiccup to undertake as chief is working to combat the machinations of the villainous Grimmel in his quest to capture Toothless: because Toothless is the dragons’ alpha, he can control them, which means that if he fell into the wrong hands, the consequences could be deadly for everyone. Specifically, Grimmel has made a deal with a gang of forgettable miscreants who are trying to create a dragon army; they’re paying him to bring them Toothless so that they can use the alpha to take control of all the other dragons. Said forgettable miscreants are certainly one of the weaker aspects of the generally weak plot: they’re neither intimidating, nor empathic, nor successfully comedic, and they cease to be relevant to anything as soon as Grimmel appears. Their character design also seem to incorporate some vague hints towards ethnic diversity, and frankly, if you’re going to try for that in a film filled with white Europeans, I tend to feel that minor villains are just about the worst possible place to start. Grimmel has a bit more about him in terms of his onscreen presence, but his backstory – that he killed a Night Fury once and everybody loved him for it, so he decided to kill all of them – is very brittle: he hardly seems like the kind of person who craves society’s approval, and yet no other motivation for his dragon-killing habit is specified. Incidentally, he also keeps a team of war dragons “drugged with their own venom” (however the heck that works) so that they obey only his commands, not an alpha’s. Arguably this feature has its necessity for the plot, but given Hiccup’s single-minded focus on rescuing dragons, you’d have thought a bit more would be made out of the plight of these indentured and biologically-abused battle-animals. I mean, fair enough, our hero has quite a lot on his plate already, but it was jarring to see no particular expression of sympathy from him when Grimmel explained about his draconine minions.

As always in nice family-friendly films, though, Grimmel is duly defeated: he falls to his death in what is probably the finest scene in the film if visuals and plot are given equal weight, though I perhaps only say that because it involves an act of heroic self-sacrifice and I’m an absolute sucker for acts of heroic self-sacrifice. Anyway, with the threat neutralised, you’d think it would be all back to normal and happily ever after, but no: it’s at this point that Hiccup decides that all the dragons need to leave New Berk and live in the Hidden World. The Hidden World, by the way, although, again, visually magnificent, is another rather irritating plot point. Hiccup claims that his father was “obsessed” with it before he died, but that obsession, or indeed any mention of the thing whatsoever, was entirely absent from either of the first two films. In the first, indeed, Stoick was certainly obsessed, but with finding the dragons’ nest, not this mysterious realm of their ultimate origin. On top of that, the flashback in which Hiccup recalls his father telling him of the Hidden World is phrased in a painfully ambiguous way, so as to gloss over Stoick’s ugly past as an enthusiastic maimer and killer of dragons. The whole thing is unbearably contrived. And while we’re on the flashbacks, the other one involves Stoick telling Hiccup, in the context of a conversation about Valka, that love is the most important thing, on the strength of which statement Hiccup decides that it is of primary importance that Toothless and his new girlfriend be allowed to be together whatever the consequences might be. On one level, I'm totally on board with the idea that love is the most important thing, but from context, the love in question seems to be specifically ἔρως (érōs, romantic and sexual love) rather than, say, the rather more commendable ἀγάπη (agápē, selfless love), or even φιλία (philía, friendship); it's specifically at the expense of his long-established, fiercely-loyal, heart-meltingly-strong friendship with Hiccup that Toothless is encouraged to prioritise his relationship with a lady dragon he met literally yesterday. This is a baffling turnaround given that Hiccup and Toothless’ bromance, a bond as unbreakable as it is unlikely, is the big deal of the first two films. The whole point of the earlier parts of the story was that humans and dragons could get along after all; that they might be bosom friends instead of bitter enemies; and, crucially, that each group might reap great benefit from that symbiotic relationship. Humans have the skill and technology to care for the well-being of dragons in ways that would be impossible in the wild: recall, for example, that without the prosthetic tail-fin Hiccup made for him, Toothless would be unable to fly, which is pretty much a death sentence for a dragon. Dragons, meanwhile, offer transport and defence options that far outstrip anything humans can access elsewhere: the second film was all about how dragon-riding opened up vast new swathes of the world, and even in the latest one, new advantages like fireproof dragon-scale armour emerge. Humans and dragons are better together. That was the principle that the original and the first sequel wanted us to buy into.

 

So it would have been around when the second film came out that the talented tbcoop at newgrounds.com thus imagined Hiccup and Toothless, to use the artist’s own words, "at there mid 50s with there bond of friendship still as strong as ever". Little did poor tbcoop know then that ’twas not to be.

But then, at the end of the latest film, Hiccup turns round and denounces all of that. Humans present too much of a danger to dragons, he declares, and for their own safety, the latter must retreat into the Hidden World and remain ensconced there exclusively among their own kind. This is rather a bizarre conclusion to reach right after the human who presented the biggest threat to the dragons, Grimmel, has been successfully defeated by a community of humans dedicated to the good of the dragons. Surely the stronger testimony here is, again, that humans and dragons can live in harmony even despite forces that seek to disrupt that harmony, rather than that living alongside humans is inherently dangerous for dragons? After all, I reiterate, Toothless would probably be dead without Hiccup, and he’s not the only dragon who owes his good health to human intervention, either.⁴ I’d also like to point out that it’s only been a few years since Berk adopted its pro-dragon outlook: it’s bound to take time for minds to be changed further afield, in a world where hostile relations between humans and dragons are the norm. By sending the dragons away, Hiccup is essentially capitulating to that norm. He’s proved that the assumption of natural enmity is a wrong one, but he’s not prepared to persist in the fight to go on proving it.

In this manner, the ending of The Hidden World is a betrayal of everything the first two films stood for. I suppose we’re meant to be satisfied with the hint that maybe this is set in the real world, where dragons are indeed the stuff of legend, and that if humanity manages at some stage to become more tolerant and compassionate, we’ll find ourselves blessed by their return from the Hidden World to our one. But how are humans supposed to become more accepting of dragons if there are no dragons, and there haven’t been any dragons, furthermore, for hundreds and hundreds of years? With Hiccup and his friends, it was their own personal encounters with dragons that persuaded them to treat them as friends rather than foes. Total segregation hardly seems a viable route towards mutual understanding. That’s on top of the fact that preachy little statements like this – yelling at the audience to be better and nicer and kinder and more loving, as if that had never occurred to anyone before – are inherently annoying on the grounds that all humanity is born dead in sin, and is never going to get any better or nicer or kinder or more loving without literal divine intervention.⁵

Hiccup told Toothless that humans didn’t deserve dragons. Well, maybe not. Maybe none of us deserves any of the people who make life suck for us a little bit less. Maybe none of us deserves those symbiotic relationships whereby desires and deficiencies in one party are supplied by the other. But that doesn’t mean you send them away. The first two parts of this cinematic trilogy proclaimed that there is hope of reconciliation between the bitterest of enemies, and indeed that former enemies can go on to become one another’s greatest friends and mutual benefactors. The third, by contrast, proclaims that it’s better to isolate vulnerable people in communities of others like them than to strive for a society where everyone can belong. Call me crazy, but I have to say, I much prefer the former message.

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a trailer if you want to start by taking a look at the film as its creators would portray it before launching into my less-than-fawning review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ7XUCQ6pbE.

² My favourite track from it is ‘Third Date’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYvveytyCLM.

³ Just off the top of my head, I cite Not Going Out, Bad Education, Plebs, Flat TV … as with all things, the inclusion of the trope does not automatically make the programme bad, but it certainly doesn’t do it any favours in my view.

⁴ I recall, for instance, a bit in the spinoff series Riders of Berk where Gobber cures Snotlout’s dragon Hookfang of a terrible toothache.

⁵ Just to be clear, I’m not trying here to hold the filmmakers to a Christian worldview to which they have never claimed to subscribe. You don’t need to believe in total depravity to be cynical of humanity ever progressing into a state of General Moral Betterness; surely the past few thousand years of history are enough to evince that. The difference with the Christian way of looking at things is that it still has hope in the face of that. Try Isaiah 59, zooming in on verse 16: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+59&version=ESVUK. If the LORD’s own arm brings him salvation – well, it’s not his salvation, is it (as in, objective genitive)? He doesn’t need saving from anything. Rather, his own arm achieves the salvation of others that they could never achieve themselves.

Say What You See

“Well, of course we wish you to roar. All the great orators roar before commencing with their speeches. It is the way of things.”

Blackadder the Third E4, ‘Sense and Senility’ (1987)

Somebody's about to make a speech.

The poem I'm about to inflict on you (sorry) is one I wrote a few months ago, and one crucial thing I hasten to assure you of about it is that I had no particular preacher in mind when I wrote it. The object of my criticism is not an individual but a culture, and a culture, moreover, which I too am sometimes guilty of buying into. I harbour a desire to impress people, which is dangerous enough all by itself, but couple it with my gifting to teach and that danger multiplies manifold. Paul wrote specific warnings against emulating human ideas of what impressive teaching and preaching ought to look like in more than one of his letters: he reminded the believers at Corinth that the message of the cross is folly to the dying world and to preach it with words of eloquent wisdom is nothing less than to empty it of its power; he told the Colossian Christians of his hard struggle for the sake of people attaining to greater knowledge of Christ, in whom is all knowledge, precisely in order that nobody might deceive them with plausible arguments or take them captive with philosophy. This stuff does not pull punches. It's not a case of, well, just make sure you're not too snazzily eloquent; on the contrary, there's categorically no room both for the message of the cross and for smart-sounding rhetoric in the same speech. Yet how far does much of the gospel preaching we encounter really differ in its delivery from a talk you'd hear in a worldly context?

If the cross is folly to the world, then preaching that portrays the cross rightly should actually come across to most people as kind of stupid. Right? And if the effect of grasping that all knowledge is contained in Christ is that you're not deceived by plausible arguments, then preaching that makes use of plausible arguments should really set the alarm bells going. Right? If the one who boasts is only to boast in the Lord, then preaching that causes its speaker to come across as worthy of boasting in herself is to be determinedly avoided. We should not be doing anything clever with the scriptures at all, because human cleverness is idiotic beyond belief next to even the least impressive facet of God's wisdom. Good teaching is just opening the Bible and saying, look, it says this. That way God gets all the glory.

I harbour a desire to impress people, but that’s the very last thing I should be aiming to do when I’m supposed to be pointing them to the wisdom of God already revealed in the Bible. And so I put together a few lines of rhyming verse on the subject that are an exhortation as much to myself as to anyone else.

Bro, just open the Bible and tell me a thing.

I don’t need any beautified rhetoricking.

I don’t need three neat points that alliterate well.

Bro, you don’t have to pitch here; you don’t have to sell.

I don’t need your charisma as earth gives the name,

But the gift of the Spirit one might term the same,

‘Cause you’re gifted to teach and, my gosh, that’s enough:

Don’t encumber that gift with mellifluous fluff.

You can use illustrations, analogies, sure,

But don’t let me escape what they’re metaphors for,

As if they were the point and God’s word an aside.

All you need for this, bro, is what he has supplied.

Don’t suppose my attention’s a prize you must win

And retain by your eloquence, reeling me in.

Or did I miss some memo that said we all feel

That the scriptures need something to boost their appeal?

Look, if mere entertainment were all I were after,

The world can supply inspiration or laughter.

Contrarily, I’m after truth, which is never

Enhanced when it’s packaged all shiny and clever.

If I walk off thinking, Wow, what a great speech,

Not, Wow, what a great God, something’s wrong. I beseech

You, don’t siphon off glory from who set you free:

Bro, just open the Bible and say what you see.

Overpowered

Whitney:          With all his power, why does he even need martial arts?

Aaron:              I don’t understand the question.

Studio C, ‘The Birth of Superman’ (2018)

 

Hearty thanks to TheUnseriousguy at newgrounds.com for this stunning bit of One Punch Man fanart. (Keep reading; we'll get there.)

So here’s a fun game to play over dinner or on long journeys with fellow geek-culture enthusiasts. First, everybody picks a different superhero. Then the players take it in turns to describe perilous situations or demanding tasks which might plausibly face your average superhuman vigilante. The aim of the game is to come up with a compelling and creative way for your chosen character to escape the situation or perform the task using his or her canonical powers. It’s good fun, especially since every player has to come up with a different approach to the challenge according to the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant hero. When I play this with my siblings, we impose only one specified restriction: nobody’s allowed to pick Superman. Superman’s powers are way too overcharged compared to other heroes: super strength, super speed, super senses, flight, X-ray vision, heat vision, invulnerability, you name it.¹ Superman can escape any perilous situation and perform any difficult task with ease – unless, that is, the player posing the challenge has the presence of mind to append ‘made of kryptonite’ to the description, in which case Superman can’t do anything and may as well just forfeit his turn. Either way, the thing gets very dull very quickly.

I tell you what, though, Superman’s not the only crazily overpowered superhero in the world of fiction. I was recently introduced, for example, to the thoroughly ludicrous adventures of a character known as One Punch Man, through his eponymous anime.² I’ve not seen very many episodes, but those I have seen basically seem to consist of the mightiest heroes the world has to offer exhausting themselves to the point of utter collapse, or nearly, in their efforts to defeat whatever the latest prodigiously powerful threat to civilian lives is, only for One Punch Man to show up at the eleventh hour and utterly destroy the evil at hand by throwing a single punch. That’s why he’s called One Punch Man, you see: just one punch from him and that’s the end of the story for his opponent. Everybody else is striving and scheming and working terribly hard for every inch gained towards victory, but One Punch Man can bring affairs to a decisive conclusion with just one blow. He doesn’t even have to try.

Perhaps the most ludicrous thing about One Punch Man, though, is how stupendously successful he is. The anime is based on a Japanese webcomic self-published by its author on a site called Nitosha. Apparently, the bar for a successful comic on this site is the receipt of about thirty comments per chapter, but by the time it reached its thirtieth instalment, One Punch Man was getting nearly a thousand comments per chapter. The ensuing print manga has sold thirteen million copies, with its first issue topping the New York Times list of manga bestsellers two weeks in a row. As for the anime, its second series is due out this year and its first has been dubbed into a number of other languages.³ And all right, that’s not the most unbelievably dizzying height of success you’ve ever seen a piece of fiction attain to, but I hasten to stress – all this for a story about a guy whose entire thing is that he can defeat literally any opponent by just punching him or her really hard. It’s not exactly what you’d call an intricately woven premise. What is it about One Punch Man, then, that has so captured people’s imagination?

Well, here’s what I think: I think we love the idea of a character who doesn’t have to try at all in order to win at everything. I think we love the idea of someone who can casually waltz in and save the day, guaranteed, with a single stroke of his hand. Life in the real world is hard; you struggle and struggle and sometimes even then you don’t get what you worked so hard for. Like the secondary characters of the One Punch Man universe, we exhaust ourselves over every inch of progress towards our goals; of course, then, the idea that it might be possible for someone to breeze in and overcome every obstacle with an absolute minimum of effort appeals to us.

So yes, as strange as it may seem, I am indeed arguing that one can infer, from the popularity of this delightfully daft comic about a guy who punches stuff, some tiny corner of the human longing for God.

“Is anything too hard for the LORD?” So he asked of Sarah, when she laughed at the notion that she would bear a child within the coming year, as he’d just said she would.⁴ I mean, sure, she’d been incapable of conceiving her entire life, and was now post-menopausal, but more to the point, guys, is anything too hard for the LORD? The fact that everybody else has been unable to defeat the monster doesn’t mean One Punch Man can’t floor it with a single blow; the fact that all the worldly factors that can be measured seem stacked against something happening doesn’t mean God can’t bring it about merely by saying that it will be so. We’re dealing with a totally different level of being here, a totally different level of power to the one that even the mightiest humans the world has to offer operate on. And the extent to which God’s powers outstrip everybody else’s puts One Punch Man and Superman and everyone else to shame: trying to play the superhero scenario game with God as your chosen character would be a very dull business indeed. Because nothing – no situation and no task that could ever be conceived – is too hard for him.

Nothing is too hard for the LORD: do we believe this, adelphoi? Do we understand that our longing for someone to be able to just show up and straight away, effortlessly, overcome every obstacle, defeat every evil, right every wrong, is satisfied in our almighty God? Do we understand that even if every human effort we’ve been able to chuck at achieving something has yielded nothing but exhaustion to the point of collapse, our heavenly Father doesn’t even have to try to make said something happen, if it is his will that it should?

Are we expectant that we’ll see the humanly impossible come to pass? Or do we laugh? Do we suppose that because we couldn’t achieve it, neither can he? If so, let’s repent of that, and instead turn and praise God that nothing is too hard for him – not even raising dead spirits to life and making sinners righteous. After all, if that’s not humanly impossible, I really don’t know what is.

Footnotes

¹ As hilariously detailed in the delightful sketch from which I took my opening quotation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMf3dvNzXbU.

² You can get it on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80117291.

³ Thanks to Wikipedia for compiling so much relevant information on one heavily referenced page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Punch_Man#cite_note-tokyo-reimei-note.com-18.

⁴ Genesis 18 for that one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+18&version=ESVUK.