| Sep. 21st, 2007 @ 11:06 pm In which sucking is discovered as an artform |
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Current Mood:  hilarious
Current Music: Human Waste Project - Shine
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, dear me.
John and I just went to see Dragon Wars at the cinema in Union Square.
Ladies and gentlemen, this was a bad movie. I cannot communicate its badness. It was so bad that the audience was laughing at the sheer idiocy and incogruity of it all. It transcended badness and reached a whole new upper plane of pure entertainment, simply because we were so bemused.
I am now going to detail a rundown of the movie and my impressions, because, my people, it was so bad that I literally must share. I cannot contain the bad. The bad needs to be free, to share its bad self with all of you. Massive spoilers to follow, so if you're planning to see this movie and don't want it spoilt for you (inasmuch as a movie called Dragon Wars can really be spoilt), let your eyes wander away; but if you want to take a journey with me through a hilarious land of mistaken ideas and intensely bewildering execution, by all means continue.
The movie opens with a police crew checking out a recent disaster site, at a resort in California. Something appears to have leveled a bunch of trees and buildings and left no clues other than a lot of smashed stuff and a wide track in the ground. Some dudes dig up a big, weird rock, which we as the audience immediately recognize as a scale because, duh, the movie is called Dragon Wars, so we're prepared for this. It is at this point that the protagonist, a guy whose name I keep forgetting (I think it's Ethan, actually), wanders in. He's a mild-mannered reporter with scraggly facial hair and an earnest look in his eye, which cannot quite make up for his complete inability to deliver a line with any kind of emotion not found in your average two by four. I like to refer to him as Kutcher-Lite.
Anyway, he waltzes his ass right into the disaster zone and under the "Do Not Cross" tape, flashing his press badge and somehow miraculously ninjaing past all the uniforms situated around the tape to stop people like him from doing this. In fact, he does this several times over the course of the movie; no matter how restricted the area, he somehow manages to make it in unmolested. He flashes his little laminated press badge, and the police are always like, "Well, fuck, he's the press. He's practically FBI." Improbably permissive police force aside, this dude sees the scale and immediately knows that Something Is Up. It may look like a piece of slate to the untrained eye, but luckily he has seen something like it before in--hang on, this will make sense later, I promise--a glowing box he saw when he was six years old (this is communicated via 10 second flashback, with no warning and no explanation. Beside me, John threw his hands up in classically Italian astonishment, as though expecting the film reel to apologize and explain itself). He returns home after finally being shooed away by FBI agents, and obsessively investigates the Case of the Piece of Rock. Because he has an awesome, vaguely knife-shaped jade necklace (the first of many, many phallic symbols to make their appearance), he is convinced that this has something to do with him.
Now we plunge into a flashback, prompting most of the theatre to sit back with a sigh of relief that now, at least, they were going to explain the tantalizingly brief glowing box episode. Six-year-old Ethan is wandering around the back of an antique shop, poking at things and generally hanging out around immensely old and valuable things that nobody should be letting their child anywhere near, while his father haggles with the shop owner over a family heirloom knife (another one!) that he's attempting to sell. Those of us waiting for enlightenment were disappointed. Ethan walks in front of the box, and the lock spontaneously breaks and falls off it. Of course, like any six-year-old boy, he doesn't call out to his dad, back away, or in any way indicate that boxes suddenly and forcefully ejecting pieces of themselves without any kind of contact is in the slightest bit, you know, alarming; he just stares at it like a vaguely curious head patient (staring at things instead of doing useful things will also become a theme in this movie). The box opens, lots of light pours out of it and there's the scale, the light engulfs Ethan who continues to find this about as strange and frightening as, say, making a sandwich.
In the front of the store, the proprietor, a crotchety old man who is currently refusing to buy the offered artifact for any decent amount of money, suddenly fakes a heart attack that would not fool an autistic toddler, including clutching at his heart, glaring at Ethan's father, and informing him in a perfectly normal tone of voice that, oh dear, it's his heart. He refuses ambulances and doctors, and instead asks the father to haul ass down the street to a little Chinese apothecary and get his medicine from there. Daddy dearest, like any concerned parent, immediately tells his six-year-old to watch the creepy old dude while he runs out to look for an apothecary, because it seemed like an excellent idea at the time. Right. I mean, who doesn't sort of forget to take their kid along when they're in a strange store? I know loads of people who are forever misplacing their offspring or leaving them with suspect strangers.
Of course, the second Ol' Pa is out the door, there turns out to be nothing at all wrong with the proprietor (who is ingeniously named Jack), who immediately tells young Ethan that he has been waiting for him, and please sit down, he must tell him something. The subtext, it is creepy. He begins a long rant about something called the Imugi, and how the light of heaven is in the box in his back room, and a lot of things that make absolutely no sense to anyone not versed in Korean mythology. The audience obligingly says, "What are you talking about?" along with young Ethan. Only with more profanity.
So now we go to another flashback--a flashback to explain the flashback; flashbacks within flashbacks!--this time to circa 1507 C.E. in rural Korea. The premise is explained to us, mostly through Jack's dry overlying dialogue (heaven forbid there be exposition through action; that would take valuable time that could be used to make the viewers say, "What the fuck?" in increasingly bewildered tones): the Imugi are a race of gigantic serpents, and once every five hundred years Heaven decides which one is the most benevolent and good, and endows this particular serpent with superpowers, turning it into a dragon. A lot of time is spent driving home that dragons are really cool, yo, they are all-powerful and dude, did we mention that they're totally powerful? They are. Heaven, for reasons that are unclear--perhaps Heaven is sadistic, or easily amused, or they have a strange snake-eats-woman fetish--will only allow this to be accomplished through the following method: the power to become a dragon, called Yu Hi Ju (I am probably spelling this wrong, but as the subtitles couldn't be bothered to spell it the same way more than a few times, I feel I can't be making things much worse) will be housed within a young woman who is born with a dragon birthmark on her left shoulder, and become active when she turns twenty years old, at which point the chosen serpent has to eat her to take on the power and ascend to dragonhood. Fun. Maiden eating and you get to be a god! Woo!
However, there is an Opposition (isn't there always?). There's a dude named Buraki, and he's a Very Bad Snake who wants to be a dragon but is too much of an evil douchebag ever to get picked for the honor, so instead he just plots to steal it from the Good Chosen Snake. Giant snakes fighting over who gets to eat the innocent maiden. Subtext, anyone? No? GIANT SNAKES. FIGHTING OVER A VIRGIN. No? Never mind.
Well, obviously, Heaven can't just let Buraki get away with not playing fair. Instead of just laying the smack down on his snaky ass, they instead send down a couple of dudes to act as bodyguards to the girl in question until she's of age to be fed to the correct snake. I had trouble throughout the movie figuring this out, as presumably there were a lot of dragons in Heaven at this point from this continual process of snake-to-dragon evolution, and as we've spent a lot of time being told forcefully that, dude, dragons are totally more powerful than everything ever oh my god. So why doesn't Heaven just have a dragon or two go tell Buraki he's being an asshole and to stop it, possibly by dropping him off a cliff? No idea. They're busy. They have important swanning around Heaven to be doing. At any rate, the bodyguards consist of a Wise Old Master and a Young Apprentice, who is coincidentally the same age as the girl, because Heaven apparently felt that two Wise Old Masters would just be gilding the lily.
After an amusing interlude in which the Wise Old Master informs some poor guy that his daughter is future snake-bait ("How dare you? My wife has just died bearing my daughter!" "Yes, well, we're still going to need to feed her to a snake. But hey, not for twenty years. It's cool, you have time to do some bonding and stuff."), the master gets down to the business of teaching his apprentice the ways of badassery while twenty years go by with lightning speed so we can get to the interesting part of the story. An aside: supposedly this snake-to-dragon thing happens every 500 years. It's 2007 in the movie, so they have the flashback with the birth of the chosen girl set in 1507. Yet, she has to age 20 years before anything can happen, while shit is happening in the modern age already, and not 20 years ago. Ergo, it's only been 480 years. Good game, guys... good game.
Inability of the directors to do math aside, twenty years go by, and (no way!) the Apprentice accidentally falls in love with Future Snake Bait Girl, putting him in a Conflict of Interest. He somehow manages to keep this a secret from his master, who gives him the knife-necklace that Ethan is wearing in the beginning of the movie and informs him that it is a talisman which will allow no harm to come to him, the better to aid him in defending the virgin sacrifice from Mr. Bad Evil Snake.
Then we are introduced to Buraki's army. Yes, Buraki, despite (or maybe because of?) the fact that he is an evil shithead giant cobra, has a vastly devoted following for some reason. They are called the Atrox Army, which John could not pronounce and first called Zatrox, then Zaroff, then Zanax, and then proceeded to refer to them as the Zoloft Army for the entirety of the evening, making us snort and giggle in our seats like retarded teenagers. The origin of this army is unclear. Maybe they want him to be a dragon so he'll get his snaky ass off their planet and go chill in the stratosphere. Whatever the reason, it is a massive army, made up of A) dudes in crazy spiky armor that look suspiciously like the orcs from The Lord of the Rings, B) funky giant beasts of burden that look like some kind of massive rhino-slug, called (I am not kidding) Dawdles, C) spiky dudes, only these ones ride dinosaurs (!), D) flying critters that look pretty much like our western conception of a dragon, though they're a little closer to velociraptors with wings, and E) the obligatory creepy and devoted General, who Does Not Look Like the Lord of the Nazgul, No Really, We Swear, He's Totally Original, It's Coincidence. When the twenty-year mark hits, the army starts ravaging the Korean countryside, blowing shit up and dragging girls out of their houses to check their shoulders for dragon birthmarks. After a while doing this without success, they finally do find their way to the correct girl's house, and after she practically runs right into their arms, they tie her up, shove her into a palanquin, and set off to go deliver her to the Big Bad Snake.
Of course, her intrepid bodyguards show up to liberate her. Apprentice grabs her unconscious body and makes off into the woods with her, leaving his master to fight of about twenty-five angry armored ninjas and their General of Blank Evil, which seems to me like kind of a not so cool thing to do, but hey, he isn't my master. While epic ninja fight scenes are going on, the girl wakes up in the apprentice's lap beside an awww so picturesque lilypond and they engage in some of the worst dialogue you've ever heard (note, however, that I don't say "in the movie").
Girl: Wh-where am I?
Boy: You're safe with me.
Girl: What's happening? My father! *crying*
Trust me, it's worse than it looks in print. It was painful, like watching Barbie and Ken dolls given life. Anyways, he decides that he just loves her too much to be feeding her to snakes, ditches his knife necklace in the lilypond (because when you're on the run from a horde of supernatural baddies, supernatural protection is totally passe!), and they run off into the woods together, hair romantically streaming in the wind. The narrator informs us, in case we are confused by all the scintillating storytelling, that they have defied Heaven and that this is Very Bad. The master limps to the lilypond after killing all the ninjas, finds the knife, and does a "You were the chosen one!" to the sky. (Another aside... this movie is chock full of scenes taken directly from other movies. I would call it parody, except that it's totally un-self-conscious; I really don't think it was on purpose or in tribute. So when the entire movie I am reminded of Obi-Wan frowning and shaking his lightsaber while Anakin calls him an old fuddy-duddy, I sadly don't mean it in the good way.)
Unfortunately for our twit-brained lovers, Buraki himself decides to just come get her so he can get on with dragonifying himself, and chases them to corner them on a cliff. We get to see Buraki for the first time, and he really is just a four hundred foot massive king cobra, which, if snakes bother you like they do my grandfather, is really freaking scary and cool. Like good little star-crossed lovers, they shout, "I love you!" breathlessly before plunging off the cliff into the ocean, killing themselves and leaving Buraki to pout and lurk disconsolately in his lair until the next girl pops up, 500 years from then. No mention is made of the elusive Good Snake who was supposed to get to eat her, but one assumes that he is probably equally bummed about the situation.
Girl leaps off cliff rather than subject self to Giant Snake. Subtext? Anyone?
Back to the first flashback now (ha, yes! We were still in a flashback within a flashback without even being in the movie proper yet! Those wacky Koreans), where the six-year-old Ethan is staring at old Jack as though he were a complete nutcase (much as most of the audience is also doing). Jack reveals that--shock coming up, folks--he is the reincarnation of the Wise Old Master, and Ethan is the reincarnation of his apprentice. He gives Ethan the knife necklace, tells him the girl has been reborn and that her name is Sarah (because, dude, when you want to have some guy help you go get a girl fed to a giant snake, the first thing you want to do is start humanizing her so he can feel bad about it), and essentially tells him not to go and fuck it all up this time. For some reason, daddy does not see a reason to confiscate a jade knife from his six-year-old upon his return, or else Ethan is just REALLY GOOD at hiding large weapons under his six-year-old shirt.
So, back to the present day, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. Ethan finds his token black friend in the newsroom and asks him to look for a nineteen-year-old girl named Sarah in his database, because obviously the wacky-ass legend some old creepy dude told him in a pawnshop fourteen years ago must be The Answer. In the first rational moment of the movie, his friend tells him that unless he wants to parse 19,000 records of girls named Sarah, he's going to have to go into a little more detail. Undaunted, Ethan sends him off with the all-important information of the dragon tattoo and demands he return soon with results, despite the failure of any American institution I can think of to keep track of birthmarks or tattoos that don't involve having been in prison. Much speech-making occurs having to do with I Must Know and The Answer Is Out There, making me wonder when he was going to bust out with some Jekyll & Hyde action.
Cut to elsewhere in Los Angeles, where a perky blonde with enormous tracts of land is working out in a gym. The cameraman intentionally keeps us from getting a shot at her shoulder despite the skimpy tank top she is wearing, which unfortunately tells us she has El Birthmark quite effectively; she sees none other than Ethan on the gym TV, talking about the resort disaster, and immediately is seized by a crazy premonition and runs home in a panic. She proceeds to wallpaper her apartment in Korean symbols and hide on the couch under a blanket, which behavior understandably confuses her roommate (and any rational person in the audience who favors problem-solving in life). She explains to said roommate that the symbols are the only thing that makes her feel safe and that something really bad is going to happen soon, because she knows it's going to, okay, and then gets very huffy when the roommate appears to not believe her immediately. The roommate, using classic college logic, reasons that psychological and emotional help would not be as useful as a good beer, and drags Sarah out to a bar.
Annoying Roommate Whose Name I Can't Remember: Sarah?
Sarah: ...what?
ARWNICR: I thought if I got a few beers in you, you'd feel better.
Sarah: Sorry, I'm just not in the mood.
ARWNICR: At least stay until my boyfriend gets here. He's bringing that friend.
Sarah: I don't wanna.
Again, the dialogue above is bad, but for the true badness experience, you have to hear the actors say it with all the conviction of a teenager welcoming you to McDonald's, can they take your order?
So of course Sarah walks out, to brave the mean streets of LA in a little miniskirt and her blonde locks. Three drunken footballers of course immediately accost and assault her (what's a good useless heroine without an attempt on her Virtue, after all?), but she is saved when some mysterious dude walks in, knocks all three of them unconscious, and then leaves. Not even a cut to the shot. Walks in, bam bam bam, walks out of the frame again. We in the audience were literally incredulous; after a second of waiting, when we realized the scene was over and the guy had been on-screen for a bare five seconds at most, many of us burst into laughter. It was just too odd. After the fact, I can now reason that this was probably Jack, the Wise Old Master, but at the time I had no freaking idea what was going on.
In one of the movie's few attempts at humor (not few successes, however; it's so funny it's unbearable, but not usually when it's trying to be), a guard at the zoo has to drag his donut-stained self out to check on some unusual racket the elephants are making involving a lot of panicked trumpeting, and finds Ye Olde Evil Snakey eating the elephants. Quite literally. He gets the hint to leave after Buraki drops a bloody elephant carcass almost on him and makes a particularly unwelcoming noise. Being the conscientious elephant-lover that he is, he flees to the authorities, who promptly lock him up as a nutjob when he hysterically tells them that there is a massive snake eating the elephants. No one seems to correlate this to the currently missing elephants, incriminating elephant parts, or blood that are all over the zoo. Maybe Buraki's Zoloft Army cleaned up like good little minions.
Sarah, across town in bed, has a bad dream involving being eaten by a snake (subtext? Subteeeeext) and wakes up with her birthmark glowing and causing her pain (what's that, Harry? Your scar hurts? Oh noes!), and like any normal person with a glowing birthmark, she calls 911. They also think she's mildly insane, and lock her up in the same hospital the unfortunate zoo guard now inhabits, ostensibly because her birthmark "could be some kind of infection". The medical research for this film, including the fact that apparently hospitals can totally just lock people up without any kin consent or court order if they happen to think you sound a bit odd, and that birthmarks that one has had, y'know, since birth, could be oh my god rampant infections, was obviously painstakingly carried out to insure an accurate representation. I mean, it would just be irresponsible if we didn't check these things out!
By cosmic coincidence, back at the newsroom, one of Ethan's fellow reporters is covering the story of a girl who beat up three footballers that attempted to assault her; Ethan recognizes her from the grainy police photo despite never having seen her before and immediately sets off in pursuit of her, after further badgering his hapless token black friend for impossible information-gathering. He runs off to her address, only to find the place destroyed and her roommate (well, part of her) floating haplessly in the pool; Buraki stormed the place and started to eat the roommate, but spat her out when she disappointingly tasted not of Heavenly power, but of terror and poor feminine hygiene. A convenient neighbor tells him that Sarah went to the hospital before the mysterious attack, and he hares off to look for her, making his token friend chauffeur him about town in some product placement car whose product placement was not so good that I have not immediately forgotten what make and model it was.
Meanwhile, the FBI--this is serious business, here, folks--is tearing their collective hair out around a conference table as they try to figure out what to do about Buraki's rampages through poor undefended LA. Having scientifically determined both that the scale is obviously from some kind of reptile and also harder than diamond, their labs are at a loss to explain what a giant reptile is doing running around California. The lead theory is that it must be some kind of prehistoric animal that has remained heretofore unknown, though someone also decides to say, "But there are similarities to a certain legend..." Because, obviously, in the FBI, folklore is always explored as a possible explanation for mass pandemonium. Why, take that pesky case last year when the culprits turned out to be vampire water fairies. What a headache.
The FBI agents somehow--this is never clarified, so don't ask me, I have no clue in hell--have noticed Sarah's existence, and immediately know she's involved. No, they just do. The agents immediately decide to dedicate half their force to finding her, while the rest try to deal with Giant Bad Snake, because, get this: the snake is obviously looking for someone. Not food. Not a mate. Not territory. Not rampaging out of confusion and/or fear. It's obviously looking for someone. Because I know that I, were I an FBI agent, would immediately have to assume that a gigantic person and elephant-eating snake was sentient. It's so obvious. To add to the spicy stew of completely insane inaccuracy, the agents decide that The Only Thing They Can Do is bump Sarah off. Obviously. Seems like the first solution I'd arrive at. Obviously.
Back at the hospital, Ethan is having an argument with a cranky, fat black lady who runs the reception desk and won't let anyone in to see Sarah (we saw her earlier when she also refused to let the now-deceased roommate in). I can't even go into addressing how many stereotypes of both black women and hospital workers the character embodies, but trust me, there are many, and we are practically beaten over the head by the director until we weep in submission and promise that, yes, we promise we will dislike the mean lady, oh god stop. Even Ethan's magical press badge can't get him past her, though it does loosen her up enough to tell him that Sarah has a crazy tattoo infection or something, because patient/doctor confidentiality is for losers.
In Trying to Inject Humor in Our Seriously Serious Plot, Part Deux, we also get to revisit our unfortunate zookeeper, who is in a straitjacket and being talked to by the world's worst psychiatrist. The worst. The woman chews gum, does her nails, stares at the walls like she's being put through a physical hardship, and every time he stops talking tells him to, in essence, stop being a fuckwit and quit being crazy so she doesn't have to deal with him, dammit. If she were my psychiatrist, I'd cut a bitch, and I bet you can guess which one. She tells him she'll let him go if he'll just say he never saw a snake already (responsible medical practices are also for losers), and he complies just to get out of the straitjacket; unfortunately for him, Buraki chooses that moment to rear his big snaky head of doom (subtext! Aaaaah, sweet god, the subtext!) outside the psychiatrist's window. Of course, he withdraws it before she looks, and she has the poor zookeeper tied back up and sent to solitary confinement. Awesome.
Buraki is coiling his gigantic snaky self all around the hospital building, which is intriguing, because despite the face that we, the audience, can see masonry crumbling and things collapsing under his weight, no one in the hospital seems to notice that a large, predatory snake god is all up in their building. In a stroke of utter convenient chance, however, Ethan runs across a doctor inside who turns out to be a fan of his news broadcast, and who not only lets Ethan go see Sarah, but actually lets him into her solitary confinement room and has no problem with letting him talk to her alone. I believe John threw a soda bottle at this point, and the audience had long since given up trying to camouflage their titters. Of course, for Ethan and Sarah, it is loooove at first sight even though all they do is engage in the following scintillating exchange:
Ethan: I'm from the press.
Sarah: *blank stare*
Ethan: But I'm not here to do a story on you, Sarah.
Sarah: *blank stare*
Ethan: I'm here to help you.
Sarah: *blank stare*
I swear to god, the pauses are long enough but there just aren't any words in them. It's like someone found her offensive and just dubbed silence over all her speech.
The building shakes a little bit just as they're getting all cozy on the bed (mm, hospital bed kink, sexy!), and the helpful doctor rushes in to tell them that they should totally run away because, like, there's a giant snake breaking the building. Which they do, and the doctor is revealed to be the Wise Old Master again, which at least made all of us a little less suicidally distressed by the improbability of the plot.
Naturally, Ethan calls his poor token black buddy to come get them in his car (Ethan appears to be a carless wonder... a classic hero archetype, naturally), and they flee from the encroaching army barefoot across the beach while the sea wind ruffles their hair, etc. etc. Said friend picks them up and is then forced to drive away like a bat out of hell because, hello, there is a GIANT SNAKE chasing them down the freeway. Ethan doesn't seem to understand his distress over not having been warned about giant snake-age, but then Ethan also doesn't seem like he could be relied upon to reliably understand Saturday morning cartoons with any accuracy. Alas, in their headlong flight, the General of the Zoloft Army appears to have ignored traffic signals, and they hit him head on, knocking him over and stopping the car in its tracks (but luckily, the snake appears to have gotten bored and gone off to eat some more elephants! Score!).
Being hit by a car going upwards of eighty miles per hour is enough to knock the General over, but not incapacitate him. He gets back up and his sword--oh, god, I forgot to mention his sword in the Korea flashback, didn't I? It's just a hilt, which bursts into flame and grows to its full length whenever the chosen lady of snakebait is nearby. It's a SWORD that SETS ITSELF ON FIRE whenever the heroine is near and GROWS RAPIDLY, dear god the subtext--does its hello deadly boner act and he throws the hapless black dude (I'm really sorry that I can't remember his name, but it should tell you something that I can't) quite a long way into presumed death or unconsciousness. Our Heroes are saved, however, when a second car, driven by a confused-looking older lady, fortuitously head-ons him AGAIN. Someone needs to get this guy some lessons in looking both ways. Confused or not, the older lady seems to have no problem with two random people jumping into her car on the freeway in LA after she's just hit a man hard enough to kill him, and drives merrily away. Those courteous LA drivers! So helpful!
Sarah and Ethan proceed to go have a walk on the sunset-lit beach, while the Zoloft army runs amok on the streets of LA and Buraki swoops around being a pain in everyone's collective ass. There's some making out, and some promising to always protect, and some whining about how unfair it is and she never asked for this. Snore. In a particularly golden moment, she asks, "What about [your black friend with the car]?" and he replies, "Oh, [black guy]'s fine." Clearly, Ethan is that rarest of friends, the kind that loves you so much he will let you drag yourself away from serious injury or death that is directly attributable to his actions on your own so he doesn't emasculate you. That is serious man-love, there. We get a last shot of the confused lady in the car, who turns out to be again--you guessed it--the Wise Old Master. He's dedicated to be running around in drag for this production, isn't he?
Ethan decides that the most important thing to do is take Sarah to get her some proper clothes instead of that drafty little hospital gown, and after that he's going to take her to a professor friend of his who is a specialist in dream interpretation and hypnosis. Reporters have the damndest acquaintances. Now attractively attired in white cashmere (*cough* subtext *cough*), she gets hooked up to a Scientific Brain Machine and hypnotized to regress into her memories, and after a little prodding she can miraculously remember all of her previous life as the Korean Snake Sacrifice. In the process of this, she starts to emit an unearthly glow and levitate off the couch, which reminded absolutely no one in the theatre of Ghostbusters, thank you. Discussion of past lives has to wait, however, since Buraki once again sticks his pesky head where it isn't wanted (oh, man, now I'm doing the subtext on my own), in this case through the hypnotist's roof. More fleeing ensues, aided by the fact that Big Bad Snake can never seem to notice they're running away until he's finished thoroughly destroying whatever building they were just in, even though they're right in front of them and she's blindingly white enough to be visible from Mars. He does, however, get the chance to stare at Sarah and do a lot of screaming snaky screams at her, which appears to be what he does whenever he has a chance to snap her up. Apparently he can't just be eating her without any buildup. Maybe she has an unappealing aftertaste and he has to prepare himself for it, like eating a brussel sprout. While he's busy regarding them and screaming, Ethan and Sarah steal a very convenient car belonging to a pizza boy on delivery (that'll teach him to leave the keys in the ignition) and run for it again, and once again the gigantic snake god is unable to keep up with their little Ford or whatever the hell it was.
Here, Ethan shows his truly noble nature once again by calling up token black friend, who is sitting at his desk with a bandaid on his forehead as though he hadn't just had the crap kicked out of him and been presumed dead by most of us. The theatre didn't even try to disguise their laughter at his miraculous recovery, or at the fact that, despite having been abandoned to die on the highway with a crazy dude and his growing penis-sword, he was still perfectly willing to put himself out and do things to help Ethan. That's just how tight the boys are. Token friend pulls some strings to get the news copter up on the roof of the tallest building in LA, so they can get Sarah into it and Buraki will be forced to lurk impotently (ha!) below since he can't fly. They head off for the building, but bad things are a-brewin': the FBI are still patrolling the streets for Sarah as it is clearly the best use of their time, while the Zoloft Army has decided it's had enough skulking and the Time for Action is at hand, by which they mean they're going to run into downtown LA and start blowing shit up.
Vast, vast sequences involving the destruction of LA follow. While they are lovely examples of very good CGI, at a certain point they become exceedingly repetitive and even boring, which is something you don't want in your action movies. Remember the downtown fight scene that took forever in Transformers? Take that and multiply it by four. It's also worth mentioning that huge numbers of random people are killed in this movie; one scene involves Big Bad Snake shooting down a major highway in the middle of rush hour, sending countless cars and trucks flying into buildings and each other in a fiery, blossoming rain of destruction for at least half a mile, while the Zoloft army spends a good deal of energy destroying the crap out of a lot of office buildings that have nothing to do with anything.
A word of advice to future aviators: do not fly helicopters. This movie has taught me that if you operate a helicopter of any kind, you are fucked. Your end is imminent and messy. Bail out now. A number of police and army helicopters are deployed to deal with the flying dragon-like critters (which, amusingly, are called Bulcos--I'm not kidding!), which school the shit out of them. Some helicopters are knocked out of the air by angry Bulcos; some pilots are killed by Bulcos sticking their nasty heads inside and chewing on them; some are simply set on fire by their fireball breath, which seems rather unfair. Of course, it helps that enough machine gun fire seems to kill them, but unfortunately there appear to be about six hundred thousand of them, and they're all bitchy and trying to kill you and stuff all the time. What is up with that? Even the successful pilots, the ones you think might have a shot because they shoot down several Bulcos and navigate around a few others, always seem to end up either getting distracted by dragony doom and flying their asses straight into buildings, or in one memorable case colliding with a Bulco that zoomed around a corner and exploding in a fiery ball of mutual doom. Don't fly helicopters. Evil things will kill your ass if you do.
While the helicopters are getting the crap kicked out of them and the army is desperately deploying tanks (which, by the way, keep shooting at buildings full of civilians... our army's ethics are represented by this movie disturb me a bit) to try to keep up with all the wtf dinosaurs in the streets, Big Bad Snakey climbs up the outside of Ye Tall Building and arrives at the top just at the same time as Ethan and Sarah, the clueless wonders. They make it into the heliocopter, but as they're achieving liftoff, Buraki grabs onto the bottom of it with his mouth and starts shaking it and making scary snaky sounds. Ethan and Sarah bail out onto the roof--the roof which has a giant snake on it, uh, okay--and suffer no injuries despite having fallen about sixty feet onto concrete, and Buraki hurls the helicopter down to smash on the street. Helicopter Rule. QED.
Now, of course, Sarah and Ethan are at the mercy of Big Bad Snake, who proceeds to open his mouth up and scream at them some more, unfathomably. He gets so involved in this that the remaining helicopters are given time to sneak up and start shooting at him; the bullets of course don't hurt him in the slightest (harder than diamond, remember? He's badass!), but they seem to annoy him enough to make him move his focus to just screaming at the helicopters instead of the humans on the rooftop. He snaps and knocks a few out of the air, but then some enterprising person decides to start shooting the Snake of Doom with rockets, and finally, they cheese him off and hurt him enough that starts to get pissy. More helicopters go down, but they shoot Buraki with enough rockets that he finally falls off the building to smash the street below, and then burrows underground to go slither off somewhere and sulk about how mean everyone's being about this.
Joy! The snake is gone. Sarah and Ethan run out, and the FBI immediately spots them when they hit the street, despite the rampaging dinosaurs, pitched battles and mass destruction encompassing everyone. They pull up in their black limo, shout, "We're friends, get in!" which Sarah and Ethan do, and drive off to... um, I'm not sure where. Apparently not anywhere in LA, since the place has daylight filtering in but is deathly silent. It's a classic wet, cold empty warehouse, where the agent in charge explains that he's quite sorry, but he has to shoot Sarah now so Buraki will stop harassing everyone already (apparently, when you want to stop a rampaging snake, you just kill its prey and then it goes meekly back to napping. Good to know). He also delivers one of the most hilarious lines in the movie, when he informs Ethan that they know all about the Korean legend of the Yu Hi Ju: "We have a very comprehensive paranormal department." The entire audience cracked up. The best moments are always the ones that aren't intended to be humorous.
Of course, there's a lot of "No! Don't shoot her!" "But I have to shoot her, get out of the way!" going on between the head agent and Ethan. Sarah contributes to this by saying nothing and staring blankly at the agent, or occasionally at her bodyguard if she feels the character needs a little more emotional depth. The junior agent, however, immediately says, "Wait, that's your solution?" and, through a series of facial contortions and whimpery sounds, manages to convey to the audience that he is caught in a Moral Quandary. This continues for a good unnecessary five minutes, until the agent finally tries to shoot Sarah and Ethan, of course, leaps in front of her and takes the bullet. Sarah breaks her silence to ask the all-important "Are you okay?" to the prone, twitching man on the floor, while the agent grumbles and has to resight on her, of all the nerve; but just as he's about to pull the trigger, another shot goes off! Oh noes! What could it be?
What, you say the other agent shot his partner? NO.
All right, yes. The junior partner, unable to come to grips with The Moral Wrongness, shoots his boss/partner dead and tells the erstwhile heroes to make a run for it. Never mind that he's an FBI agent, who has had to go through extensive, extensive training, profiling, and conditioning. Obviously, his boyish sense of justice can triumph over all that peripheral shit. Sarah and Ethan, who is miraculously completely unharmed by being shot mere moments before (aha, he has a magic knife, remember) flee YET AGAIN, and this time they decide that the best strategy is, obviously, to drive to Mexico, because everyone knows that giant evil snakes HATE Mexico.
Sarah: ...is this my FATE?
Ethan: Fate brought you to me.
Sarah: But what can we do?
Ethan: Run.
Difficult as it is to break up seamlessly blended fine acting and literary writing of this nature, the director grits his teeth and has winged Bulcos jump out of the sky and set everything on fire. Interestingly, despite the fact that Buraki supposedly needs Sarah alive so he can eat her, they hit the car with a massive fireball, flipping it, rolling it at least five times end over end, and ending up with it upside down and mostly crushed on the side of the road, in a condition that no one--I really do mean no one--could have survived. Of course, Ethan, whose head we can see sticking out of the driver's side window with perfectly coiffed hair, is fine (well, no, he has a tiny scrape across his manly brow! No!), apart from passing out from the trauma.
Ethan wakes up tied to a post in front of a crazy-ass giant stone altar, where the Zoloft Army apparently wanted him so he would have a nice vantage point for the goings-on about to occur (apparently they couldn't kill him because of that pesky knife. Damn celestial artifacts, always ruining a good party). The General is striding around looking pleased with himself while members of the Army drag Sarah, who is also amazingly unharmed from the massively fatal car crash she's just been in (in fact, her white, white, symbolically white sweater is also unblemished), up to the front and tie her down on the altar, and then do a little dance of victory. The General, excited about the fact that he has done something right, makes a big speech about Buraki's impending godhood and then summons him up to come hurry up and eat Sarah, already. The entirety of the non-General dialogue for this scene follows:
Ethan: Sarah!
Sarah: Ethan!
Ethan: Sarah!
Sarah: Ethan!
Ethan: SARAH!
Sarah: No! No! Ethan!
Ethan SARAH!
Sarah: AHHHHHHHHHHHHH ETHAN!
Upon closer reflection, this resembles a bad porn script. But, alas, despite an overabundance of phalluses and a virgin being tied down, there is no sexy-sexy going on, just mental pain.
The Big Bad Snake finally stops sulking over those mean, mean mortals and hauls his ass up through a hole in the ground to finally get a chance to eat Sarah and ascend to being a dragon. Of course, no ritual feasting on womanflesh should be begun prematurely, before the allotted quote of stretching, preening, tooth-flashing, and snaky screaming has been met. What is he, a savage? A full three to five minutes of snake screaming, which makes Sarah scream, which makes the snake scream louder, etc. go by, while the audience weeps into their popcorn and begs him to just eat her so the movie can end, please.
Buraki menaces the prone virgin (what? subtext, you say?) with his scary snaky head for a little longer, then finaly--finally--rears back to go in for the kill, when BAM. Out of left field, out of nowhere, Heretofore Only a Background Character in a Flashback Good Snake comes barreling in to lay the smack down. Where has Good Snake been? No one knows. Patching up elephants, maybe. It is a mystery, but he has arrived in time to save the girl even though he's going to eat her later! Yay! And now the part of the movie that everyone came to see has finally arrived: it's time for the Giant Snake Rumble.
This is really the best part of the movie. This movie took almost six years to make because of its massive CGI quotient, and this scene is one of the primary reasons. It is a mad, towering battle of snakes, fairly realistically rendered, and it goes in pretty typical movie fight fashion: Good Snake smacks Bad Snake around a bit, Bad Snake gets in a lucky blow and turns the tide, Good Snake won't go down without a fight, Bad Snake holds his own. But alas, after a titanic struggle, the subtext of which is as epic as the computer array required to render it, Bad Snake gets hold of Good Snake's neck and snaps it, dropping his lifeless body and screaming triumphantly over Sarah's still quivering body (ye gods! It's some subtext!).
Things look bleak, and Buraki almost looks like he might be done with the foreplay (ha ha!) and ready to sink his fangs into some helpless lady. But, before he can finally realize his evil dreams of dragonhood, Ethan starts screaming Sarah's name again, and here--watch carefully, folks--the power of his luuuurve causes his little dagger necklace to burst into flame (no way! Subtext!). People find this understandably distracting, even more so when a gigantic column of white light shoots out of Ethan (insert pithy subtext observation) and opens the skies (I can't take it, there's too much) which begin to rain down the Light of Heaven (oh, dear god) all over everyone.
The Light of Heaven is so powerful that it knocks Big Bad Snaky right out; his army is less lucky, and the entire Zoloft Army is suddenly disintegrated, much to their short-lived dismay. The General somehow not only survives this, but is merely dazed and sort of stumbles around in circles for a minute or so. The Light of Heaven also apparently works on ropes, because the previously securely tied Ethan is able to wriggle about a bit and somehow get loose to go run up and start trying to untie Sarah.
The General, of course, is not going to take this just because Ethan happens to have the power of galactic sky orgasm on his side, and pops out his flaming penis-sword (hahahahaha, oh, man) to threaten Ethan, who is NO LONGER BACKING DOWN BECAUSE HE IS A MAN, DAMMIT, and who picks up a discarded Zoloftian sword and begins to engage in an EPIC DUEL, FOLKS, for which his life as a mild-mannered reporter has evidently prepared him well. There ensues a fight with massive, massive swords that these dudes can somehow lift in only one hand (do I even have to keep doing these asides? Surely you guys have got the idea by now), until finally the General's superior training and badassery disarms Ethan and knocks him down the stairs. He prepares to run Ethan through with the Sword of Bizarre Flaming Growth (dude, whoa... some subtext), but when he tries to drive the point home, he is blocked by Ethan's dagger necklace (it's too thick; I'm practically choking on it; which of course invites its own jokes now) which ALSO bursts into flames again and disintegrates him like the rest of the Zoloft Army (my penis-fu stronger than yours!).
Ethan gets Sarah untied finally, but as they're running away, Buraki wakes up and dammit, there's a giant snake chasing them again. At this point, an awesome exchange takes place:
Ethan: Come on, we have to run.
Sarah: No.
Ethan: ...buh?
Sarah: You knew it had to be this way, Ethan.
Ethan: But... huh?
Sarah: They've been waiting for me for five hundred years.
Ethan: *sputtering sounds translating roughly to "Bitch, I have just busted my ass keeping you alive, what the hell?*
But apparently Ethan doesn't have the balls to do more than stand there impotently while Sarah turns around and heads back toward the giant snake (look, look, there it is again!). Here, again, the movie loses me: Sarah does some kind of weird voodoo-y thing and a ball of blue light floats on out of her, which is of course the Yu Hi Ju. But what the hell? When did she learn to do that? What, exactly, did she do? Is that what the snake screaming is always about, waiting for her to bust that out? But if so, why does the snake also keep trying to just get her in his damn mouth already? Dude. I do not get it. It makes me sad in my brain place.
Anyway, she floats the ball of light up over her head, and Buraki is in stitches to finally see the actual power he's been after for so long. He makes a lunge for it, but at the last minute she twitches her arm, and the ball--which is apparently handily remote control, for her convenience!--flies across the plateau and instead hits dead Good Snake in the face. Buraki instantly gets all over Good Snake to try to extricate it (sigh... there's just too much. I think I'm burnt out) while Sarah drops like a rock in one of the least convincing faints ever caught on film. Ethan scrambles over so he can drape her romantically over his lap and commence saying, "Sarah!" in increasingly heartbroken tones, but his attention (and, mercifully, the audience's) is soon grabbed by the action going on over with the two snakes.
To wit, Good Snake appears to either not be dead anymore, or to have been faking it all along, suckers. Bad Snake gives it the old college try, but he can't get the power out of Good Snake; it's too late, and Good Snake transforms into a dragon even as Bad Snake is desperately screaming and snapping at him. Of course, the Battle Royale Snake Edition: Part II commences, and the dragon kicks Buraki's ass six ways to Sunday, with a nice finale of setting him on fire until he disintegrates like the others (which brings me back to me question way back at the beginning of the movie: why the hell didn't Heaven just send a dragon down to kick Buraki's ass 500 years ago when this first became a problem?).
Kutcher-Lite, suddenly realizing he's totally still holding a dead girl, recommences staring soulfully at her and begging her to wake up, which of course she does not do. However, lucky him, he gets to see her again because she appears as a blue, filmy ghost (not a single similarity to any Star Wars movies in this film, no sirree!) floating around the dragon's head (interestingly, she appears as her white-ass California Valley Girl incarnation, not the original Korean one... apparently this one was her True Soul, dig it). She informs him that he shouldn't be sad because she'll always love him for all eternity, even though he'll never, ever get to be with her again. Then she disappears, the dragon squeezes out a few tears (uh, what?), and then it, too, flies off into the distance. Our closing shot is Ethan getting up, looking forlornly over his shoulder, and attempting to convince the audience that they should be contemplating something besides the utter train wreck masquerading as a plot in this film.
On the positive side, I haven't seen someone really seriously render an Asian (in this case Korean, though I think the design borrowed from a few cultures) dragon in CGI, as opposed to all the Western dragon movies there have been. It was very nicely done, and the effect believable and rather gorgeous, all things considered. Another thing I thought I would mention is that I am not Korean (I know, I know. Quelle suprise), and thus I am aware that anything having to do with the original folklore probably sailed right over my head. It'd be interesting to hear from someone who knew the myths and to discuss what they thought of their treatment (though no amount of folklore accuracy can help the acting or the lack of coherent plot).
A lot of people were grumbling about demanding their money back for how incredibly awful this movie was, but you know what? I don't need my money back. I paid for a ticket to be entertained. It's not like I was expecting a lot of philosophical debate in a movie called Dragon Wars. And this movie was gosh-darn entertaining as hell--not because it was a fun movie, but because it was just so hilariously bad that I couldn't help enjoying watching it discover so many new ways in which to suck. If you have a few extra bucks and a free afternoon, I would say give it a shot. Be like John and me, the cool kids, and MST3K it in the theatre. |
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