After much anticipation I saw Dragon Wars (aka D-War) yesterday. It’s a strange beast because it really is about 50% eh, 50% awesome, and ymmv as to whether the latter outweighs the former.

In terms of the awesome, the monster material is really dynamite. I’m baffled by the complains alleging that the CGI work is SciFi Original-level terrible. You can certainly tell it’s CGI–at the risk of repeating myself around here, we’re not talking Weta Digital–but (again at the risk of repeating myself) you could tell King Kong was stop-motion animation, couldn’t you? The real issue is the visual imagination behind the effects, and in this case it was excellent. Several images made me gasp out loud or laugh with delight: A giant serpent weaving its way up a crowded city avenue loaded with cars, tossing them into the buildings lining either side with explosions and debris galore. A helicopter pilot flying low down a skyscraper-lined street, looking up to see the side of a massive building literally crawling with winged creatures, then a cut to a shot nearly straight-down the building right at the creatures themselves. Cut-away vistas of a bustling metropolis engulfed with combat between the military and the invading army of creatures and their demonic warrior handlers, on the streets, on the buildings, in the sky. A Korean dragon hovers vertically in the air against a backdrop of stormclouds. And most breathtaking of all, the two protagonists isolated atop a towering skyscraper as the giant serpent, coiled around it, rears its head yards above them, while the camera swirls around to offer a vertigo-inducing panorama of the city that surrounds the scene. At their best–and their best is very, very good–Dragon Wars‘ giant-monster images offer the same terrifying, awesome (in the original sense) sense of scale, sweep, and immensity as The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, even that masterful bird’s-eye-view shot in the clouds from Hitchcock’s The Birds.

The problem, as you might have guessed, is a script that’s almost completely inadequate to the task of supporting these images with an involving plot or interesting characters. Time and again, when it comes to developing its leads, delineating relationships, or creating a sense of the stakes at hand, the film is content to assert or intone rather than establish through dialogue, performance, or visual framing. We’re required to believe that leads Jason Behr and Amanda Brooks are reincarnated lovers whose passion is destined by heaven, but it’s tough to imagine them calling each other after an awkward first date. Poor Robert Forster really phones in a role as the wise old man, with his tough-guy accent marring every attempt at playing Basil Exposition with regards to the Good Imoogi and the mark of the red dragon and on and on and on. Contrary to several reviews I’ve read, the constant mystical mumbo-jumbo infodumps didn’t bother me at all–I mean, I wasn’t expecting Ursula K. LeGuin, I just wanted some basic set-up for the giant monsters, and that’s what I got. But the film’s ability to sell the mystical mumbo jumbo, to create a sense of urgency without resorting to a giant snake showing up to eat a house or whatever, was nonexistent.

I hit a matinee (score one for unemployment!) and thought it was seven bucks well spent; the strength of the monster stuff was worth sitting through the weakness of the other stuff. If you’re an intolerant type you might wanna wait for a rental. I think all of us are waiting for someone to apply that visual imagination–a “what if the Battle of the Pelennor Fields took place in Manhattan?” imagination–to a film whose other aspects are its equal.

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