Name: Merlin and the War of the Dragons
Production: The Asylum
Director: Mark Atkins
Theatrical Release Date: 2008, Direct-to-video
DVD Release Date: November 25, 2008
Genre: Fantasy
Rated: N/A
Running time: 91 min.
Budget Estimate: N/A

Dragon Contents:

This rating only indicates the dragon contents and importance they play in the movie/game/episodes reviewed.

R a t i n g :

This rating indicates how good or how bad was the movie/game/episodes reviewed. A rating of 5 stars on 10 is considered as the average which mean it is not good but not bad either.

Merlin and the War of the Dragons is a low budget movie produced by The Asylum, a American independent film company. The movie is based very loosely on the legends of King Arthur and was filmed entirely on location in Wales. Low budget is often used to describe movies but here it won't take long for the viewers to notice some serious shortcomings especially when Uther, the King or Hengest talks to their soldiers, which are shown to be about a dozen people on a field when they are supposed to be armies clashing with each others. There are some cgi created soldiers at some point but they are more or less dots on a field. Of course, there are tricks to make a small number appear bigger, like using a low camera angle showing a limited number of soldiers in close ranks and thus hiding the fact that there is no one else behind the third or fourth line but a dozen people simply does not cut it. It's even confusing sometimes because it will make the viewers wonder: is that all of you? Is the rest of your army hidden or waiting somewhere else? But no, even the king and the commander of the other army is always shown with only a handful of bodyguards and always in the middle of nothing. It's hard to believe they are important people when they just wander around without much (if any) protection and the audience may be forgiven if they think that this whole story is about a power struggle between two chieftains over who will rule over a small hamlet.


Story line:
The story begin in the 5th century Britain with a narrator explaining that the Saxons and Pics (we barely see the latter) are invading Britain while Britain is torn apart by infighting. We are then presented with the birth of Merlin who was seen by some sort of oracle as the offspring of a human and a deamon who need to be killed while still an infant. Ultimateltly, The Mage (Jürgen Prochnow) convince them that killing the child would do more harm than good (risking the wrath of the dark gods for killing it) and want the child as an apprentice.

20 years later, Merlin and Vendiger are apprentices to the Mage and learning how to perform simple magic tricks and how to actually acheive results without necessarily needing magic at all to accomplish a task if it works equally well. As The Mage seems to be witholding secrets from them in the form of a spell book that has been handed down from one wizard to another containing thousand of years of knowledge. Vendiger convinces Merlin to steal The Mage's Book of spells for themselves in order for Merlin to find the truth about who he really is. Merlin steal the book and while successful, Vendiger is unable to control the magic of the book properly when asking the book to show Merlin his father, which makes Merlin see some sort of dark and undefined nightmarish creature. Merlin fall on the ground in pain and The Mage manage to dispell the magic. The Mage is obviously upset and disapointed in Vendiger but the later take the incident as a sign that his master favors Merlin over him and decides to leave.

Later Vendiger manages to find a dragon egg that apparently was laying around in a cave. That dragon is seen grown up in the next scene and attack against a couple of villagers. Vendiger defeat the dragon with a single arrow (the attack is quickly revealed to have been staged), and as a collective reward for "their" victory over the beast, he makes them drink some of the dragon's blood, which has the property to turn a human beings into... dragons. The villagers presumably get corrupted in the process but I prefer to think that it liberated them after being mere paysant for all their life and burning down a lot of people was an opportunity too great for them to pass but I digress... Vendiger with half a dozen dragons, decides to switch side with Hengist, the commander leading the Saxons invasion of Britain, in order to get his revenge against the Mage and get access to his Book of Spells while Merlin is trying to learn magic and train to become a proper wizard and fight against Vendiger and the invading Saxons...


Images:
If it could be summed up in one phrase, I would say that it's low budget. You won't be impressed with the magical effects, characters like Lady Nimue and Lady Vivianne, just appear wihout the slighest special effect after the camera pan away and the costumes are okay but generally they don't look too real; they look like costumes. The camera is also a problem here because in all those close-up shots, there is a noticable shaking most of the time. I understand that close-ups are used to prevent people from seeing that there is only a dozen different actors in the whole movie and that it was filmed in a limited number of locations but they should have used a tripod. I can't stress this enough that if you can't afford tracking shots or camera stabilizers, tripods are a cheap way to improve the quality of the pictures and this is especially true when most of the time they were filming people standing still and talking.

Now the dragons look nice, it's not great or anything remarkable but they are okay. There is a white one that its significance isn't fully explained and the other are black and they are all the same model. They could have varied the colors just a little to show that each dragon is more or less unique since they already did it once but this is what we got. One thing however about them is that they are flying painfully slow, up to the point everyone would easily be able to get out of the way after they spotted one of them.

Also how hard it is to have a person on the back of a horse galloping on a road that isn't asphalted? I'm sure they could have found a plain that was safe enough for the horse and its rider for a scene like this especially since they used that scene twice by having the rider move to the left and then to the right using the same angle. This shot was taken with a drone, there was so many possibilites to make it appears as something new.


Sound & Music:
The music and sound effects are okay in general. The title music is quite good but at some point there was once scene where I felt that the music was clearly out of place when the paysants were being tricked into drink the dragon blood, it felt more like carnival/circus music than something that would relevant to what is occuring on-screen.


Acting:
Actors did okay I suppose, but I wouldn't qualify this as good. Sometimes, they just stand still screaming while being consumed byt the flame of a dragon (which seems like something normal people wouldn't do) and the pep talk by Uther while clearly not being in control of his horse (the horse jerks and makes turns) make the whole scene weird, but generally speaking, there is nothing too out of place even if the script could have been a lot better in many places.