Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/15/07
When I first saw the trailer
for Dragon Wars (or D-War as it was known in its' home country
of South Korea), I'd had such high hopes. Here, in the middle of
September, was a Fairy Tale Monsters Attack LA spectacle filled with top-shelf
visual effects. As a fan of the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie school
of monster mash, how could I not expect greatness? Alas, as a movie,
Dragon Wars is a great trailer. 20-odd minutes of remarkably
imaginative CGI effects come wrapped in a silly, amateurish package in
which a cast of familiar faces muddle through an incomprehensible plot
while speaking Online Translator English and waiting to run from something
cool.
Ethan (Jason Behr) is a reporter
for CGNN (you may roll your eyes now) who sees authorities unearthing a
giant scale that reminds him of a strange incident from his childhood.
At an antique shop, he met Jack (Robert Forster) who told him (in flashbacks-within-flashbacks)
a story about how every 500 years giant serpents called Imoogies and Burakis
fight over the Yuh Yi Joo, some kind of spiritual thingie that's inside
a woman born with a dragon birthmark on her shoulder. Passing it
along kills the girl, but once the serpent consumes it, the creature becomes
a full-fledged dragon and can ascend to heaven (I use the lower case because
the movie's subtitles do too: I suspect we're getting “heaven” when
Korean audiences are getting a local concept that makes the story make
a little more sense). Jack claims that both he and Ethan are reincarnations
of characters from his “500 years ago” flashbacks, and that the boy is
destined to help a girl named Sarah fulfill her destiny on her 20th birthday.
Back to the present, where Ethan still doesn't seem any more like a reporter,
but does a quick job of determining who his Sarah (Amanda Brooks) is:
she too has been tormented by visions of her destiny. Soon enough,
she and her new pal Ethan are being pursued by the gigantic Buraki and
an ever-growing army of warriors and monsters. Meanwhile, a couple
of FBI agents (Chris Mulkey and John Ales) are tasked by the Secretary
of Defense (Geoffery Pearson) to hunt her down and kill her to end the
supernatural onslaught. And those attacks are only just beginning:
soon the streets of LA are crawling with monsters. Is there any way
Ethan can save Sarah?
As the moviemaking business
becomes more and more International, we're likely to see more and more
movies like Dragon Wars: a massive FX spectacle that thinks
it can translate regional success (it WAS a smash in its' native land)
into Worldwide Blockbusterhood by using the same formula smaller-scale
productions have for years: hire American actors and set your action
in the good old USA. The biggest problem Dragon Wars faces
on this front is that the filmmakers seem to know even less about America
and Americans than the average American movie knows about that movie Paris
where you can see the Eiffel Tower out every window. The movie knows
the Types it should include: courageous hero (Ethan), hot, younger
girlfriend (Sarah), wise mentor (Jack), streetwise black sidekick (Bruce,
played by Craig Robinson), the girl's sassy ethnic roommate (Brandy, played
by Aimee Garcia), mean Feds (Mulkey and Ales), babbling scientist (poor
Elizabeth Pena as Agent Perez), etc. But it doesn't seem to know
anything about how these American archetypes work, what US people do in
their jobs, or even how English sentences are structured. TV Reporter
Ethan keeps talking about “writing” stories, FBI agent Mulkey calls the
Bureau “The Department” at one point, Brandy's pleas to Sarah to forget
this prophecy stuff and go partying with her seem deranged, and The
West Wing's NiCole Robinson has a hysterical scene as a psychiatrist
who keeps referring to a man in a straight-jacket as “tied up”. Everything
Forster says is either impossible to comprehend or utter idiocy.
And why does everyone keep calling the Imoogi the “Good Imoogi”?
It makes them sound like preschoolers! Typical of foreign films about
the US, we learn that every American owns a gun and is quick to use it,
and that our government's Plan A always involves killing innocent civilians
(between D-War and The Host, I can't imagine
that Washington gets a lot of fruit baskets from South Korea).
The actors are routed by
these roles. Behr seems throughout like he's about to break down
and cry. Forster, whose charisma has buoyed many a stock role, is
barely able to suppress a smirk. The way many of his scenes seem
to have been created in the editing room, I half suspect he walked off
the set refusing to go on. Both Robinsons do nothing to prove they're
professional actors: The Office's Craig sleepwalks through
his turn as the sidekick and NiCole reads her lines in a staccato monotone
right out of an Ed Wood movie. Even the actors speaking their native
Korean in the flashbacks are nothing to speak of. By seeming like
nothing more than a stock damsel in distress, Brooks can actually be said
to be giving the movie's best performance.
The movie does have one saving
grace and it's the effects. The notion of having a Lord of the
Rings-style army of fantasy warriors and creatures attack a modern
city and its' army is a really good one, and the visual novelty of it is
as impressive as the top-shelf effects themselves. I really liked
the way the creatures interacted with the surfaces around them: the
crumbling marks left by the Buraki's ascent up a building and the way walls
gave way under the pressure of creatures pushing on them made these monsters
seem far more realistic than their weightless counterparts in other movies.
If only the characters had gotten to interact with them a little:
while faceless victims run through the streets and previously unseen military
men do battle with the hordes, our characters mostly just... run.
The whole attack sequence would have seemed a lot better if Transformers
hadn't done so much better with the same concepts just two months ago.
The effects in a climactic return to the bad guys' lair are also impressive,
including the reveal of the movie's best monster, but that whole sequence
is brought down by the utter nonsense that brings the story to a merciful
end.
Dragon Wars pretty
much corners the market on nonsense. I'd be faster to attribute some
of this to the difference in the fantasy worlds of different cultures if
this year hadn't already produced an entertaining and lucid Korean monster
blockbuster in The Host. I'm sure D-War
would be a mess in any language. |
