Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. This one sounds like delirious trash, and when I published that review last night, several of you piped in with your own take on the picture that’s already open and doing big business in Korea. Check out this first one:
That was your best D-WAR review so far? I'm surprised more geeks from the East have not emailed you yet. DWAR opens with a giant, slithery-shaped trail of wreckage mysteriously appearing in LA one day. Police and FBI are on-hand, looking vaguely bored. Jason Behr shows up, flashes his press ID and gets to see it all. From there, he starts to remember an old antique shop he went to when he was a boy. Robert Forester sees the boy and tells him all about this 500-year-old Korean legend. Yes, Jason's flashback has a flashback. We see a village get its ass kicked by an army of evil (no word on where they come from... 500 years ago, so maybe it was the Imjin War?). Big, big snake tries to devour a young maiden, all Freudian-like, but the girl kills herself rather than face the snake. Words like "Imoogi", "Baruki" and "Yowijoo" get mentioned a lot without anyone laughing. Return to the first flashback. Then return to the present. Jason figures out he needs to find some girl names Sarah... only knows she is 19, lives in LA and has a dragon birthmark (at least the movie recognized this is kind of ridiculous). Eventually he finds he at a hospital, but the snake is there, too, leading to a chase. They outrun the giant snake. Jason and Sarah go to a dream therapist... big snake finds them again. Now the snake gets a big army, like from the 500-year-old story. Army is dorky, but I liked the giant monsters with rocket launchers attacked to them. Snake and army ravage LA, while Jason and Sarah just drive off. Then the bad guys catch Jason and Sarah in the countryside. Jason wakes up tied to a snake in Mordor. Then, at the last minute... well, something happens to save the day. A few random notes about D-WAR: Totally through-the-glass-darkly stuff. It looks like an American action/fantasy film, you can recognize all the bits and pieces... but it feels constantly unreal from start to finish. As if the whole film was out of focus (mentally/metaphorically, that is). Feels like Lord of the Rings meets Chinese Ghost Story... with a little Star Wars (and a lot of stupid) thrown in on the side. It is barely 90 minutes long now. Down from the 107 minute version Variety reviewed last November. Craig Robinson (Darryl in THE OFFICE) is awesome. He must have re-written all his lines, because they are the only natural-sounding, believable lines in the whole film. Actually funny in parts. Robert Forster... not so much. He is still better than most people, given his endless exposition... Really bad job on his hairline by the makeup folks. Looks like a big hit in Korea. Over $17 million in its first five days (which makes it the biggest film since THE HOST, I think)... But I would be shocked if it holds out more than a week or two. Ends with a funny bit of Korean nationalism... a little on-screen essay about the director and how hard he worked, while Arirang plays in the background.\ Will be called DRAGON WARS in the US when it opens September 14. - Haisan
September 14th? That’s right around the corner. I haven’t really seen any ads for an American release, so that date kind of shocks me. You would think they’d be working harder to create any sort of impression of the film if it’s coming out that soon. Here’s another review from the Korean run:
Hi M. here's my D-WAR review. The Korean financed and directed, yet American acted fantasy Sci-Fi movie ‘D-War’ opened here in Korea this past Friday, a month before the US release, so I checked it out with some of my Korean friends this evening. Sometimes if you go into a movie with low expectations you can be pleasantly surprised. Being very weary of wise cracking pop culture referencing animation flicks, I sauntered into my local movie theater here in Seoul one evening last week when I had nothing to do and saw ‘Ratatouille’ which I wasn’t even that interested in. I found myself in total awe at Brad Birds artistry and craftsmanship and totally won over by the charm and beauty of the film. Nnnnnnnot so much D-War. D-War is the second outing for Korean director ‘Hyung-Rae Shim’ who seems to have switched careers as he was a comedian in the past. Maybe he hopes to follow Beat Takeshi’s course but according to my Korean friends his first outing, a monster flick made in 1996 was laughed out of cinemas. He’s back with a vengeance this time though and somehow managed to secure 30 million dollars in funding for his Sophomore project which isn’t that impressive for an American movie but is a huge budget for a Korean film. His passion to do his nation proud showed through at the end of the film with a cringe inducing montage of photos of the director himself along with a text scroll extolling his philosophy of how he intends to take the movie world by storm. The previous 90 minutes fare begged to differ though. The movie its self is loosely based on a slightly obscure Korean legend. Something about a Giant serpent needing to devour a pure maiden, born with a birthmark of tattoo parlor quality of a Dragon on her shoulder, in order to become an all powerful deity. Augmented by Shim to include a goody serpent for the final battle the film started with a flash back within a flashback. Jason Behr a Dimitri Martin look-alike plays Ethan, A CGNN news reporter (Who walks around his TV station building with a big id card on his lapel that actually reads ‘PRESS PASS’) who as a child was zapped by some magic plasma in an antique shop and imbued with the reincarnated spirit of a mythic Korean Romeo like hero from five hundred years ago. Robert Forster plays the levitating, shape shifting, wise old shop owner who is himself the reincarnation of the half a millennia past master who taught version one of our Romeo. The idea is for the intrepid hero to locate total stranger Sarah who is the reincarnation of the love of his past life and... er not to be too blunt, feed her to the Dragon in order to stop it and its hoards messing up the world. So basically it’s a human sacrifice legend. As with his previous self, Ethan tells his master to go screw himself and tries to save Sarah. Even though he’s never laid eyes on her before they end up necking within an hour of meeting each other. Most of the remaining story is them on the run in a stolen pizza delivery Chevette while being chased by half mile long snake. The GC work is passable although now and again its rivaled (and inspired) by some video game cut scenes. There is one awful moment though when the giant serpent chases a SWAT team out of a tunnel in the side of a mountain. The soldiers hoof it then upon exiting the tunnel veer left, turn and start shooting into the air at the exit of the tunnel. The Problem being that the serpent hadn’t appeared yet so they are shooting into empty space. Eeek! I’m sure the actors were doing as they were told as some production assistant stood in front of them with a green picture of a Dragons head on a long pole but the CG artists really should work on their timing. In downtown LA, dragons, trolls, minions and serpent battle with the military they might as well have just airbrushed the Transformers out of their own scene and substituted the monsters as it’s basically the same battle on the same streets... only lame. If you could re master some seventies fantasy Sci-Fi movies such as ‘Krull’ with decent CG then it would look no worse than this movie. The end scene with the inevitable good serpent, bad serpent battle takes place in front of the evil snake general dudes lair which is basically faux Mordor, so identical is the architecture. I expect the producers will be getting a call from Peter Jacksons’ Lawyers. As tepid as the GC and battles are, the scripting and acting is worse. I didn’t stay for the final credits but I wouldn’t be surprised if a ‘Dirk Diggler Productions’ credit rolled up at the end. The script was obviously written in Korean then translated for language but not screen. This means that even if the script ‘was’ any good in Korean then the translator, whether Korean or Western, did a fairly accurate job in language translation but that doesn’t guarantee there will be any artistry of dialogue. In one scene a scientist describes the monster as not being of any Xeno type known to Earth and therefore concludes that it must be ‘foreign’. I’m guessing that the Korean term for alien and foreign are interchangeable as are our own and so the translation suffered from literalism. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a movie with an English speaking cast that feels like it was dubbed, so bad and stilted is the acting and dialogue. I really wanted this movie to be great as I love Korea but as with the great food critic ‘Ego’, I have to give a true report of what I saw. The best that I can say for D-War is that it was a brave effort, had a pretty nice looking GC battle between the two snakes at the end and most of the clunkers throughout the film will go right over the heads of most viewers under the age of 12. Seen as a children’s film it is a nice romp. D-WAR, with a little less effort could have been so bad that it was good but it failed even to reach that depth. You will be wincing and laughing at all the wrong moments but perhaps at least Shims’ sincerity will impress. This isn’t the best that Korea has to offer to don’t be put of checking out movies from the land of morning calm by this monstrosity of a monster flick. Korea still has a quota system so a certain percentage of movies in Korean cinemas ‘must’ be Korean made which, along with government subsidy for production costs can remove some of the market forces drive for excellence in film making but then again it also allows for some experimentation. As you know, some gems do come out of the Korean film industry. Most of you are familiar with the work of Chang Wook Park with such films as ‘Oldboy’ and ‘Sympathy for Lady Vengeance’. There are less well known ones though and I recommend that you search out two great films in order to balance out the negative of D-WAR’. The first is ‘Oasis’, the transcendent friendship and love story of a quadriplegic woman and a mentally impaired man. It’s not the Oscar bait that many Hollywood movies create and is in fact inspiring and touching rather than depressing and ‘encouraging’. The other is ‘Bad Guy’, a sleazy gangster flick that is so well acted that I didn’t even realize the main character was a mute until halfway through the film (that shows how observant I am as he has a massive scar on his throat). His brooding, simmeringly violent performance is so great that I at first watched the movie all the way through on cable with no subtitles before renting it to re watch it. Ok, sadly D-WAR sucks but you might want to give it a shot when it comes to DVD if you can at least get some enjoyment from the now obligatory big CG battles. FilmRage
