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.