In Review Online

How to Train Your Dragon — Dean DeBlois [Review]

2025's How to Train Your Dragon drags and loses its way under a strained and failed effort to make everything bigger and bolder.

Joshua Polanski

18 Jun 2025 • 2 min read

Cinematographer Bill Pope must have done something awful in 2022. Maybe he ran over some studio executive’s cat or perhaps his children beat out the wrong financier’s kids in soccer tryouts. Whatever it was, the film gods have been out to get him ever since. He once worked with The Wachowskis on The Matrix trilogy, Sam Raimi on the majority of his best-known works, Edgar Wright on the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, and even with Robert Rodriguez on his underrated Alita: Battle Angel. In other words, he enjoyed a remarkable, even if entirely pop-leaning, prime, but the slop hasn’t stopped for a while now. In 2023, his name was attached to the hideous Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — on second thought, maybe entering the MCU was his sinful deed — and the once-heralded cinematographer even shot Jerry Seinfeld’s unspeakable Pop-Tarts movie last year. Hopefully, the hideous-looking live action How to Train Your Dragon marks the end of Pope’s penance for Ant-Man and he can go back to making good movies.

It can’t be overstated what a truly unsightly film 2025’s How to Train Your Dragon is. The opening scene, which features the Vikings of Berk being attacked by dragons at night, is the film’s worst, appropriately setting the tone for the ugly mess to follow. Dean DeBlois, who also directed the animated film in tandem with Chris Sanders, has never worked in the realm of live action before (and thus, has never had a real night shoot). This introduction to Berk offers some of the ugliest cinematography yet seen in 2025, and it’s a shame because Pope has historically been a photographer quite capable of elevating material. But here, the deep darks fail to hide both the wounded visual effects and costuming that seems more suitable for a high school theater production than a grand-scale Hollywood blockbuster. The only upside in this sequence is found in the way its darkness establishes such strong negative space for the dragons’ fire; the black skies and photorealism introduce a more “realistic” world, with Game of Thrones-ified dragons and the attendant self-seriousness.

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