Dragon Wars - D-Wars
Director: Shim Hyung-rae
Year: 2007
Rating: 5.0
Country: Korea
Clearly, Korean director Shim Hyung-rae likes
dragons. Back in 1993 he directed Young-guwa gongryong Zzu-Zzu about a young
man coming across a dinosaur egg; in 1994 he directed a film in prehistoric
times in which men and dinosaurs were friends titled Tirannoui baltob; in
1996 there was Dragon Tuka about a man sent back in time to fight a dragon;
in 1999 there was Yonggary a remake of a 1967 film about aliens waking up
an ancient dinosaur; and then eight years later along came this film in which
the screen is filled with Dragons. It seems to be a bit of an obsession but
then dragons are kind of cool. With both Yonggary and D-Wars he and the Korean
production company were clearly trying to break into the American market
by having American actors in the major roles. And by most accounts, not very
good ones. Though the script certainly in D-Wars made good acting a near
impossibility.
This is as hokey as a barnyard dance on
a Saturday night. Very little of it made any sense but it has something to
do with an evil dragon and his minions wanting to conquer the world but to
do so they have to sacrifice a young woman with the sign of the red dragon
on her shoulder at birth. And there is a good dragon who needs to meld with
this same woman in order to defeat the evil dragon. Or something like that.
It honestly doesn’t matter. We are here for the dragons. There is a flashback
to ancient Korea in which this plays out. Every 500 years the Evil Dragon
shows up to create chaos and the good dragon stops him. The woman and her
lover have to kill themselves to stop the dragon from sacrificing her. 500
years later, here we go again but the woman is now an American living in
Los Angeles and the man is a newspaper reporter. The dragon comes looking
for her destroying much of LA and what they don’t, the military does.
But again, it is the dragons and beasts
that matter. The battle for LA is actually pretty well done. Enough CGI to
fill a battleship. Helicopters, soldiers, tanks take on the many dragons
and men in armor. It is basically a video game but a fun one. Helicopters
and dragons crashing into buildings, screaming and running pedestrians, cars
being flung, people being eaten. There are no characters given a personality
so when they are killed you feel nothing. Just computer code. But this scene
goes on for about 20 mins and is the only reason to watch this. It was released
in the USA and made about $10 million so not exactly a hit. Also, in
the film – but not the main characters are three recognizable names – Robert
Forster as the reincarnation of an ancient warrior, Craig Robinson as a fellow
journalist and Elizabeth Pena as a scientist.
