Dragon Wars
January 10, 2008
Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 90 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
The setup is so bad on this movie, and the acting so incredibly stilted that I figured Uwe Boll must have been involved in some way. But then I noticed the budget… $75MM… and who would give him that much money to play with? No, I can’t blame this one on Uwe, it was written and directed by first timer Hyung-rae Shim.
I’m going to start with the things that are wrong with this movie, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. The story itself is kinda lame, every 500 years a serpent is chosen to become a celestial dragon. If it’s a good serpent, then things continue as expected for the next 500 years, but if it’s a bad serpent then life as we know it on Earth is over. Isn’t this a recipe for disaster? Only one failure and the world ends? To become a dragon the serpent has to join with a mystical force contained in a chosen girl when she turns 20 (the girls dies in the process of course), but we have a loophole! If the girl dies before the serpent joins with her the clock goes for another 500 years. For the humans who protect this girl the logical choice is to kill her at birth, or at least sometime before she hits 20. Let’s see… a few billion people or one baby. Tough call. Time to go all Spock on her ass!
There’s not much to say about the acting, it’s just bad. Not bad as in “these people couldn’t act their way out of a cut rate community theater production of Hamlet” but bad in the “I don’t want to be doing this, please pay me so I can go home” kind of way. The interaction between characters is just horrible in parts, enough where you just want to press fast forward and spare yourself the agony. This leads to the writing, which is also pretty bad. There are HUGE plot problems, HUGE. There’s a 1000ft snake (did I mention those serpents were kinda big?) slithering around Los Angeles, tearing down buildings and causing lots of havok… but nobody notices it. The opening scene of the movie shows a path of destruction through LA caused when the serpent first arrived, but the big snake itself wasn’t seen.. and wasn’t captured on any cameras.
That’s so stupid it was hard to keep watching.
But now for the good, the special effects. I think all but about $3.50 of the movies budget went into the CGI, and it’s really pretty good. Little details like a flag moving out of the way when a big creature walks past help set the scene for the battle in downtown LA. The obvious thing to compare the battle to is Transformers, and surprisingly it holds up pretty well. Scene after scene you see building being damaged, a big snake slithering up a sky scraper, weird dinosaur type things flying around and huddling on buildings, and it all looks good. It’s far from perfect, but much better than expected.
And that’s the only thing good I have to say about it, but it’s good enough for me to award a second star and to actually recommend that some of you give this movie a shot. If you can’t stand the 15 minutes of story setup at the beginning, just jump about 50 minutes into it and enjoy the eye candy. If you’re a big fan of sci-fi/fantasy films you might even like the story. I doubt it, but anything is possible.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Seen it? How many stars do you give it?
(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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[...] just posted a review of Dragon Wars over on the mothership. Honestly, it was much better than I expected it to be. I’ll hopefully [...]