Dragon Wars: D-Wars

I am writing about Dragon Wars: D-Wars (2007) only because I set a goal to write on this blog about every film I see. TV ads for this film, which showed battling dragons in an urban landscape, with one dragon coiled about a towering skyscraper, convinced me that this was the sort of film with brassy digital effects and loud explosions that my son and I might enjoy as a mindless entertainment. So we went to see it. I paid $8.00 each for tickets.

This was the worst film I've written about so far. It is apparently a Korean-made film repackaged for American audiences. To say it is a Korean film in no way is meant to say that it is necessarily a bad film, only that it is not what the television advertisements make it out to be. This film possesses, with one exception, every aspect of badness one can imagine: acting, story, screenplay, editing, continuity, you name it. I knew within five minutes—as scene after scene of subtitled flashbacks and exposition began to unfold—that this film was a mistake. The one minor exception to the wide and impressive array of execrably bad aspects was the digital monsters. The first few times they appeared they seemed impressive. But soon they become increasingly like monsters from a third-rate comic book and they pale in comparison to some of the beasts we encounter in such films as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There we had a good story. Here we have an intricately murky mythology about dragons that come back to life once every five hundred years. There is always a girl who must be sacrificed so that the good dragon can triumph. If the bad dragon wins, then the human race ends. There is a five-hundred year old man who runs a curio shop. There is another man who can walk through walls and leads a troop of soldiers dressed in impenetrable armor. They ride dinosaur-like beasts. Their swords shoot fire. Flying lizards spit balls of fire. There are plot holes (even given the utter ridiculousness of the story) large enough to drive battle cruisers through.

I wondered briefly if my negative reaction was the result of my unfamiliarity with Asian mythology and dragon myths. But surely such unfamiliarity could not lead one to misjudge a good film as bad. Although D-Wars features the only cinematic appearance of an Asian dragon I have seen, Asian dragons do not redeem this film from the dragon excrement that suffuses it from beginning to end.

New York Times reviewer Andy Webster wrote that D-Wars "is such a breathless, delirious stew, it's impossible not to be entertained, provided — this is crucial — you have a sense of humor." I have a sense of humor and laughed often during the film, but virtually none of the humor in D-Wars is intentional (with a few exceptions) , and after a while one tires of laughing at scenes and dialogue and plot turns for their clumsy ineptitude.