I went into this movie with high hopes. Normally, I'm not too picky about my movies and creature movies are *always* fun to watch, or so I thought. I'll list the good parts of this movie: -The creature effects. All of the creatures were well-done, their movements were realistic, and they fit into the other imagery well. To be honest, the creature effects were the ONLY reason I gave this movie a 2 rather than a 1. Now, the bad things: -The acting. Good Lord, I've seen bad acting, but this movie takes the cake. Not a single one of the characters is even *close* to believable. It's like the director sent out a casting call and picked all the worst try-outs from it. I tried very hard not to giggle too loud, cause I didn't wanna upset anyone else in the theatre, but the acting really was THAT BAD. -The storyline: The entire story is full of plot holes from beginning to finish. You can pick at least 5 plot holes out of any given 30 minutes of film. The plot holes, of course, are complimentary with the cheese. This is probably one of the most clichéd, not thought-out, and outright dumbest stories I've ever seen put on screen since I had the grave misfortune of sitting up one night and watching Parasite on the SciFi channel. -The dialogue: This is a world where everyone says the cheesiest and most clichéd thing they possibly can, at every chance they possibly can. In this world, it seems like every line has been spoken before in at least 30 other low-budget creature movies. It is the world of cheese and cliché. -The special effects. While the creature effects were downright awesome, the special effects fail miserably. Yes, they are better than those seen in other movies, but a lot of it is in the presentation. And this movie has no presentation whatsoever. It looks kinda like the special effects used on the Power Rangers TV show, to be honest. To sum up: Dragon Wars is worth neither your time nor your money. The concept is good, but it is trapped in the bad directing, acting, dialogue, and cheesiness of the film. Wait til the next big monster movie comes out. It's gotta be better than this, cause Dragon Wars is absolutely horrible.

Apparently "D-War" was originally a Korean film. But instead of simply translating it into English (either with captions or dubbing),they separately filmed some American actors and inserted them into the movie. Then, during portions where the Koreans talk, occasionally the narrator summarizes what they said...no captions, no dubbing...but a LOT of confusion. This is a case where a film bombed and much of it simply was because the film wasn't translated well to English-speaking audiences! It fel much like watching a film in a foreign land and understanding nothing until, on rare occasions, someone sitting behind you explains a BIT of what is going on! I think the filmmakers would have been kept the film in Korean...period.

The story, because of the way it's told, is pretty confusing and I'm not going to bother recounting the script. Suffice to say that there are a lot of CGI monsters, explosions and wire fu.....all set to a story that just left me baffled. And, it left me wondering what non-Korean speaking person would sit through the movie.

Overall, there is some nice CGI, some lovely acting by Korean folks and nothing of any value for non-Korean speakers! Next time you want to market a film abroad, do a better job of it! And, in light of this, I can understand why the film is #68 on the IMDB Bottom 100...at least the international/English speaking version. Pretty much unwatchable....but at least it looked nice.

Dragon Wars did have potential to work and ought to have done. But what we had was a film that did have that potential but wasted it with poor execution. I will give it some credit and say that the scenery and settings are beautiful and the effects while not great are at least decent, an asset I was dubious about in all honesty. The dragons do look imposing and do have presence which does elevate things a lot. But oh my goodness so many things spoilt Dragon Wars. The direction is nothing but flat, everything just lacks life and nothing stands out. The dialogue is very poor, with cheesy one-liners and hackneyed flow of the overall script, while no time at all is spent developing the characters, all they are at the end of the day are standard and in some cases annoying clichés. I have no better news about the acting either, Jason Behr is hopelessly wooden and has no charisma whatsoever. Robert Forster was the best of the entire cast, and even he was generic. But what really made Dragon Wars as bad as it was was the story. It is one thing to have a simple story, but when it is over-simplistic and structurally thin that is another matter entirely. Everything lumbered on with no sense of heart, surprises or excitement while any climatic scenes felt rushed. Overall, the production values and dragons are not bad, but everything else pretty much is. 3/10 Bethany Cox