Movie Reviews

I'm going to do something very unusual for me and attempt to review a couple of movies I've recently seen. It's unusual because I don't usually even watch movies, let alone have my thoughts together enough to actually write reviews of them.

If you're looking for indepth analyses of cinematographic techniques or ten-act Campbellian breakdowns, this won't be the place for it. I'm just not that into movies. I'm just going to write down what I thought of these movies.

For a start, they were both really terrible movies. The two movies I'm going to review are Dragon Lore: Curse of the Shadow (aka. Saga - Curse of the Shadow) and Age of the Dragons. I'll talk about the second one first.

Age of the Dragons is a retelling of Moby Dick. They don't even try to hide it - even the character names are the same. When we meet the protagonist, the first line of dialogue is "So - Ishmael, is it?" "You can call me that." Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask - if you're familiar with Moby Dick, then these names will be familiar. The only real differences are that the White Whale is actually a White Dragon and there is an introduced female character - in fact, the only female character - named Rachel. I'm pretty sure she's only there because you're not allowed to do a movie with an all-male cast any more. She was also, obviously, the focus of the inevitable romantic subplot, which seemed to exist only because there was a woman in the cast.

The Pequod was not a ship. Since dragons are not whales, Ahab did not need a boat to go hunting for it. Instead, the Pequod was a weird land-ship which rolled across the tundra on wheels. Yes - tundra. Most of the movie was set in snowy regions - perhaps ultimately due to the Dungeons and Dragons trope that white dragons are associated with cold. This dragon definitely breathed fire, though.

The movie was pretty hard to get through. It had the same overblown overdramatic dialogue as the original novel - in fact, I'm pretty sure there were some direct quotes - and there was a weird combination of overacting and underacting on the part of the cast. I'd say that the movie was as hard to watch as the book was to read, except that the movie was a little easier because it was shorter.

I would not recommend this movie unless you are a fan of both Moby Dick and the fantasy genre.

The other movie was better, but it still wasn't great.

This was a more generic fantasy movie - I'm pretty sure it was based on the Saga video game, though I've never played that game. The main characters are an elf bounty hunter, a human cleric (maybe a paladin) and a genre-breaking "nice" orc who was betrayed by his more evil comrade. The plot was fairly generic fantasy - stop the evil cult before they summon the god of death.

But it was solidly done. Because of my background I particularly notice the combat scenes, which were... let's say competent. There were a few spots where it looked incredibly faked - especially if you paid attention to the background characters, but that's hard to avoid unless you're Bob Anderson. In general the fight choreography came from the "make it fun and flashy" school, with many kicks and spins, rather than the "make it realistic" school.

The makeup and visual effects were actually not bad - except for the big evil god at the end, which totally looked rotoscoped. Badly rotoscoped. But the elf looked like an elf, and the orcs looked like orcs.

This was a much more fun bad movie than the other one. It wasn't of the quality of Dragonslayer or the Conan movies, but it wasn't hard to watch. I'd recommend it if you have an hour and a half to kill and you felt like a bit of mindless fantasy.