What Year?:
2007
Classification:
Mashup/ Runnerup
Rating:
Who Cares??? (2/3)
In the course of my reviews, there’s a certain genre I’ve come to think of just for me: The movies I watch while I’m working on reviewing something else. This has come to overlap with another category, movies I watch while I’m recovering from one of the things that leaves me the equivalent of totally and terrifyingly stoned. This time around, I’m back with one of those, and it happens to be the previously chosen example of what the youngsters have probably forgotten was a trend. I present Dragon Wars, as nothing less than the worst CGI monster movie, and I still barely have an idea what actually happens.
Our story begins in the mythic past of Asia, when evil warlocks commanded armies of dragons, and feared only a prophesied avatar of good, born as a child with a special birthmark. Skip forward to modern times, we meet a young man and a lady named Sarah who happens to have the same birthmark. Of course, the dragon lords have reemerged, with dragons of a range of shapes and sizes plus humanoid assassins to do their dirty work. As the dragons overrun the city, Sarah must stay ahead of the beasts and government agents sent to find. It’s up to her to command a good dragon against the forces of evil, or something. But victory requires sacrifice, for some reason, and the cost may be her life!
Dragon Wars was a 2007 South Korean fantasy/ action film directed by Shim Hyung-Rae, also responsible for a1999 remake of Yonggary. It was the most expensive Korean film produced up to that time, with a budget estimated as up to 99 million US dollars. The film was reportedly made over 5 years, with most of the time and budget going to post-production CGI effects. The film starred American Amanda Brooks as Sarah and Jason Behr as Ethan, with The Office’s Craig Robinson as the journalist Bruce. The film was released theatrically in South Korea and the US in 2007, with an estimated box office of $75 million. Reviews from western critics were negative. The film remains available on digital platforms.
For my experiences, I watched this as a machine rental around 2008, which was the time and provenance for a lot of the worst kaka I can recall. At the time, it made little impression on me, beyond the fact that I brought it up in certain circles as the worst use of CGI I had encountered. (I’m sure there were others who agreed with me.) I further assessed it as an example of a low-budget movie with better effects than it deserved because of the advances in technology, which I now know was a serious underestimation of its cost. I got hold of it for this review while I was dealing with my review of Return of the King and my “worst” movies list and also recovering from a very bad cold. I ended up coasting through a viewing paying intermittent attention. What I was struck by was the effects, which are good enough that I’m no longer sure what I was complaining about back then. Everything else, on the other hand, was so dull and muddled that I came out with only a marginally better understanding of the film than I would have from my own recollections.
Diving right in, if there’s any redeeming virtue here, it’s that it takes its monsters seriously. It displays a convincing grasp of the underlying mythology, as one would expect from an Asian production, and it conveys its symbolism even across a non-trivial cultural divide. I find it all the more telling that the dragons are treated as “real” and vulnerable animals. They tend to look like things that really exist, with an emphasis on dinosaurian designs. They move and react convincingly within their environments. What really breaks the kaiju genre mold is that we see some of them actually die from conventional attack, though they certainly take a lot of punishment. The overall scenario becomes one of attrition; you can clearly kill one dragon, but taking down a whole horde of them without levelling the city they’re attacking is another matter.
That already brings us to the human element. This is where I freely admit my attention was very strained, but I don’t hesitate to offer that as a commentary in itself. You can kind of get interested in Sarah as played by Ms. Brooks, and even her arc is mostly running and being chased. The rest of the cast is outright filler, with little if any of authoritative exposition that can redeem the kaiju genre. And that leads into the one thing I find worth further comment: Having reviewed public information on the film, I found that there were even fewer actual Asian actors than I would have said from a casual viewing. That in itself presents a fascinating, frustrating snapshot of a nation’s cinema. An especially significant datum is The Host, which I was already pretty sure would come up here. Among other things, that film had a commercially successful international release with an Asian cast starting the year before this one. Perhaps, given its longer production history, the present film was made without the confidence that The Host could have inspired. On the other hand, the American faces are still just a symptom of the glossy, western-friendly feel already pervasive in the production. Ultimately, the impression I get, right or wrong, is a movie that isn’t original enough to challenge Hollywood at a genre the East invented
Now, I’m already up to the “one scene”, and I’m going with the one action sequence I found intriguing. As the dragons rampage through the city, the military sends in aircraft. In response, some of the creatures run or even hide as best they can (shades of the 1998 Godzilla???). There’s real tension as the “viewpoint” follows the pilot’s view from inside the cockpit of one of the attack helicopters. It builds to one single moment, as the pilot looks up and sees a whole swarm of the dragons clinging to the upper floors of a building, above the aircraft. Of course, the dragons take off, as two more choppers join the battle. What’s interesting, as noted above, is that both sides take real losses in the fight. Then there’s one more thing I’ve been holding in a rant about, the soundtrack before and since has kept reusing a few odd and rather irritating notes that sounds like the famous “Dies Irae”. (It’s most likely to be familiar to lay audiences from The Shining, which now makes me wonder if someone didn’t realize the original is in the public domain.) Here, mercifully, there’s only the sound of the beasts, the machines and the guns.
In closing, the real
question is, can I really stand by my title and tagline? As I have freely
admitted, it certainly doesn’t have the “worst” CGI, but that was never what
this meant to me. I must further admit that nothing else about it is “that”
bad. On its own merits, it’s no more or less than a forgettable exercise in
mediocrity. What it really represents, with the full benefit of hindsight, was
the point when genre fans like me got tired of CGI. For us, it was never
about the technology, and the proper effects men and genre filmmakers knew
that. If Steven Spielberg had made Jurassic Park with all stop-motion or
animatronics or guys in rubber suits (a body of lore I know well), it would
have been just as good and just as loved. The problem was people who thought “good”
effects could take the place of story, character development and world-building,
when in reality it didn’t even make for effective monsters. In those terms, I
absolutely stand by the present film as the definitive example of a very
unwelcome trend. With that, I am happier than usual to bid this one goodbye.
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