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Dragon Wars
Reviewed By Rich Drees
“I keep trying to understand, but none of this is making any sense.”
So states Sarah
(Amanda Brooks), a character who is more of a plot device than
anything else, expressing her exasperation at the strange
circumstances she finds herself enmeshed in. And the viewer can
sympathize, because the plot of Dragon Wars makes as little
sense to us on the outside watching it as it does to the people in
the film itself.
To wit, five
hundred years ago Heaven, or at least someone in charge up there,
decides to bestow a boon on one of the spirits known as Immogi in
the form of the Yuh Yi Joo, which will transform the spirit into a
powerful oriental dragon which watch over the Earth and usher in an
era of peace. Or something. The Yuh Yi Joo is born as part of the
spirit of a girl and will only manifest itself on her 20th
birthday. Growing up, this chosen girl is assigned a young protector
and as often happens in these situations, the two fall in love.
Unfortunately,
an evil Imoogi wishes to take the Yuh Yi Joo for itself and sets a
legion of armored warriors and assorted giant beasties upon the
village where the girl lives. The girl and her young protector flee,
and rather than surrender to the evil Imoogi, leap off a cliff into
the sea and their deaths.
Fast forward to
present times where journalist Ethan (Jason Behr) is investigating a
strange catastrophe for his employer, a cable news outlet. In the
course of his investigation, he discovers two things- that the
mysterious devastation has been caused by a giant, snake-like
monster and that the tales told to him 15 years earlier by a
mysterious antiques dealer (Robert Foster) that Ethan is the
reincarnation of the Yuh Yi Joo’s protector, which will manifest
itself in Sarah in just a few days.
The above
information is all imparted to the audience in the film’s opening
reel. While epic in scope, the exposition is imparted rather
clumsily, through a series of flashbacks and
flashbacks-within-flashbacks. But all of this is merely prelude to
the film’s big moment, a huge battle sequence in downtown Los
Angeles between the police and army and the evil Imoogi’s forces.
It’s a sequence done with a lot of gusto, though there are distinct
echoes of Peter Jackoson’s Lord Of The Rings battle
sequences. Given the care devoted to this section of the film, one
can’t help but wonder if a crazy battle between the military and a
group of mystical beasts wasn’t the starting point for the film, and
the rest of the movie’s plot line reverse engineered to setup the
conflict.
The script also
has its fair share of just plain unbelievable lapses in logic. While
giant monster movies by their nature ask the audience to suspend a
lot of disbelief in order to go along with the ride, Dragon Wars
definitely asks too much of its audience. Just the fact that the
Evil Imoogi, big enough to wrap itself around hospitals and landmark
Los Angeles high rise office buildings, managed to move about the
city for a number of days and the better part of the film's first
half without capturing anyone but its victim’s attention or even
once being photographed by someone with a cellphone strains even the
normal rules that films such as this usually work under.
It’s a shame
that the script, and by extension the performances, are so weak
because there is a feeling that a lot of heart and soul went into
the movie. Essentially a South Korean production, director Hyung-rae
Shim has ambitiously cast his film with American actors, numerous
faces that you make you think “Oh, it’s that guy,” and shot it
entirely in Los Angeles. The result is a giant monster film that
outdoes the 1998 American attempt at Godzilla in its attempt to
provide thrills and does so on a fraction of the budget as well.
Unfortunately, for all the thrills Shim provides, the underlying
foundation of the film, in the form of its screenplay, is just not
stable enough to support the structure of the movie. |
