My memory tells me that I saw How to Train Your Dragon (2010), though I could not tell you why.  It is animated, and as has been well documented on The Legionnaire, such films are not usually my first choice.  It was released on March 26^th, 2010, which was during my Ph.D. studies and thus I was in Chicago.  As I now do, I saw a lot of movies back then by myself.  If I had to hazard a guess, perhaps it was the year during which I made a New Year’s resolution to go to the cinema every weekend, and to keep a journal about what I saw.  I believe I wrote about all this on a Microsoft Word file, which is probably in a corrupted hard drive somewhere.  Who knows?  Who cares?  The reason I picked it for today is because there is a live version of this hard to figure classic coming out this year and I thought, why not?  If nothing else, it will be good practice for whenever the new one premiers so I can whinge about the differences.

In the fictional Viking village of Berk, the last thing they would want to know is How to Train Your Dragon, and they are more practiced at killing the fire breathing, flying menaces.  Because of regular monster raids, our protagonist Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (voiced by Jay Baruchel) tells us that their settlement is “twelve days north of hopeless.”  He is arguably even more hopeless as he often looks on with envy while all his bigger, older, and stronger neighbors defend against the latest attack.  This particularly includes Stoick the Vast (voiced by Gerard Butler), the chief and Hiccup’s father.  Hiccup is slight and more of a thinker, so he is stuck apprenticing with Gobber the Belch (voiced by Craig Ferguson), the blacksmith who only works in this trade because he has lost a couple limbs.  Hiccup longs to prove himself using the gadgets he invents to fight dragons, but in the chaos, Gobber orders the young man to stay behind.  Part of the reason for this is because among the winged creatures is a breed that frightens the most battle tested Viking: a Night Fury. They are faster than their kin, spit distinct fireballs, and their black scales make them more difficult to see.  Because of their reputation, this is the kind Hiccup feels he must take down in order to gain the respect he desires.  Firing his bola, he believes he has scored a hit, but his triumph is quickly dashed when another dragon spots him and chases after him.  His clumsy attempts at escape lead to more damage in the village, and Stoick’s ire.  Wanting to end the dragon threat once and for all, Stoick gathers a group of men to sail to the fabled location of their nest.  Before departing, he has a discussion with Gobber about what to do with Hiccup.  Gobber urges putting the teenager through dragon training, theorizing that the exposure might inspire Hiccup to rise to the occasion and become the Viking Stoick desires.  Hiccup is encouraged by this, but he now has a secret.  As it turns out, his contraption had been successful in taking down a Night Fury, which he discovers in a gully not far from the village.  With it still trapped in the bola, it is the perfect opportunity to make the kill and enhance his standing among his peers.  Yet, with knife raised, he looks down at the dragon’s dark yellow eye and cannot go through with it.  As such, while being told that he will commence the course, he is beginning to see their ancestral enemy in a different light.  While Stoick is away, Hiccup spends all his free time getting to know the Night Fury he comes to call Toothless.  By the way, the name comes from the fact that it only bares its teeth when threatened.  After the initial awkwardness is passed, one of the first things Hiccup sees is that Toothless cannot fly with missing half of its tail wing.  Being the inventor he is, Hiccup comes up with a prosthetic.  However, it works best when he is on top of the dragon, manually flaring it and furling it when needed.  This deepens the bond between them, and Hiccup begins noticing other aspects of dragon behavior that he takes with him to his training.  It allows him to deal with the captive fire-breathers they have for the course in non-lethal ways, much to the amazement of onlookers.  Everyone is impressed, except for Astrid Hofferson (voiced by America Ferrera).  Hiccup has a crush on her, though she is determined to be the best student.  In order to find out how Hiccup is being so successful, Astrid follows him to Toothless.  She is initially terrified, though following the experience of soaring through the air on the back of a dragon, she forgives him with a kiss. During their flight, though, they learn why the so-called monsters behave as they do.  Inside their volcano nest resides a titanic dragon that they are forced to feed.  Hiccup wants to reveal this information, but is waiting for the right moment.  Being considered the best young dragon killer means that he must take on a fire breather in front of all the villagers, including Stoick.  Hiccup uses this moment to show that dragons are not aggressive, but before any impression can be made, Stoick reacts in anger.  The caged dragon in turn becomes aggressive.  Sensing the danger, Toothless comes to the rescue only to be captured.  Now Stoick has the weapon he needs to find the dragon nest, and he ignores Hiccup’s warning about the larger beast.  Instead, Hiccup gets Astrid and the rest of his classmates to believe him about the dragons, and they all make it to the nest in time to battle the mega monster.  It comes down to Hiccup and Toothless, with Toothless saving Hiccup’s life in the end.

Actually, Toothless saved most of Hiccup at the end of How to Train Your Dragon, the teenager losing a foot in the battle. What I was thankful for was not losing my mind while watching the film.  Because it deals with an actual historical people, it irks somebody like me with a Ph.D. in the subject to suggest that they lived amongst these fantastical creatures.  What bothered me more as a Catholic was the brief mention of the polytheistic religion practiced by the Vikings.  My Spiritual antenna is up on this subject because I recently went through a section in the Catechism in a Year podcast with Father Mike Schmitz about the differences between our God and the way other cultures and societies saw their so-called gods.  From a purely logical point of view, such a belief system makes a certain kind of sense.  Developing humans needed a way of describing the wonder of the natural phenomena around them.  While Christianity says that God is the root cause of it all, people once thought more localized deities controlled all manner of things.  The Vikings were not alone in this kind of religiosity, but they are the ones focused on in the movie, which is why they are being picked on in this review.  And their gods are discussed.  What stood out to this Catholic reviewer is when Hiccup claims that the gods hate him.  That might have been the case for cultures that practiced polytheism like the Vikings, but the One True God does not operate in this manner.  That Hiccup would tell himself such a lie can be paralleled with Matthew 16:23 when Jesus rebukes Peter for suggesting that the Messiah should not be put to death and raised on the third day, telling His apostle, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”  Beating ourselves up as Hiccup does is a sin, just as Peter telling Jesus that God’s plan is wrong.  God could never hate us, and His divine will is often hard to understand, but it is always for the best.

What is best for me is that I avoid movies like How to Train Your Dragon, but I think I am going to stick with it just to complete the series.  Admittedly, this is me thinking in a human fashion, in a manner that is specific to me and not liking to leave a franchise incomplete.  In the meantime, blah, blah, blah.