Reviews WesternAnimation / How To Train Your Dragon The Hidden World

A bewildering amount of positive reviews for a film with worse-than-mediocre writing

You could argue that the following problems aren’t that important because it’s a children-oriented story, but the first two installments were also in the same genre, and they had a much higher writing quality.

• most of the characters were either flanderised or straight out behaved like a 2-dimensional crowd of extras.
  • from the main characters, many had one specific shtick to showcase and that was it. Examples: his "beard" for Tuffnut, her exaggerated stupidity and ability to annoy for Ruffnut, the "Finch-and-Stifler’s-mom" joke for Snotlout, his superstition for Gobber the Belch, etc.
  • the warlord ship crew, and the Viking Island villagers didn’t behave like people. In case of former they were always easily defeated — by the end of the story their entire flotilla was defeated by less than ten people. In case of the latter, they never had much of their own opinions and quickly and easily molded to support whatever Hiccup and others wanted to do.
• the same — unfunny — jokes were used over and over. See higher for examples.
  • the placing itself of the jokes was chosen poorly as well, they were often taking place in the middle of a supposedly-serious scene, which broke all the tension and made the overall plot seem irrelevant and unimportant.
• plot armor was being given and stripped away from almost all the characters (dragons, Toothless, Hiccup and his team, the warlords, Grimmel, etc) according to the design the plot was supposed to take. This made the entire story into a meaningless and inconsistent sequence of events. Grimmel was both competent enough to "sneak" into Hiccup’s house and then attack the village from inside and escape, and also incompetent enough to get his entire flotilla defeated by less than 10 people. Pretty much all the dragons were weak enough to be taken down by a single crossbow bolt. The warlords always failed in their fights against a bunch of children, even when these children didn’t have their dragons with them for support.
• There were also some especially stupid decisions that didn’t even get punished that much by the universe for their stupidity. One example being how the entire village decided to leave their well-established base (their centuries-old ancestral dwelling) just because one enemy managed to sneak in and burn some buildings (wooden ones at that, in a village full of dragons); and also made that decision based on some unconfirmed tale without even sending some people out first for investigating it and finding the location of the supposed haven.

My rating is 6/10.