IT SUCKED.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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September 16th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
[...] Original post by The Bad Astronomer [...]
September 16th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Oh. My. Lanta.
Phil, please assure your readers that you didn’t spend any Money on this crap.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Amen, brother. It took me about 1,100 other words to get there, but that’s just about how I felt about it, too.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
The real question what on this earth would make you think that it wouldn’t suck. It sure wasn’t any of the previews, that’s for sure.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
i see you have a problem expressing your feelings…
September 16th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Tell us how you really feel
. Yeah, I can’t see myself wasting time or money on that piece of crap.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard that it is one of those unintentionally funny movies, and it’s best if you go in expecting nothing more than to laugh at whomever had an unfortunate hand in its making.
September 16th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Not as good as Armageddon then?
September 16th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Was Eragon a better movie than Dragon Wars?
September 16th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
So did you like or did not like it.
September 16th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I’d hate to think you went in not knowing that it was from the same director as Yonggary/Reptilian.
You have to love the blatant use of Bronson Canyon, though. You don’t see that in many films these days, unless they’re trying to be funny. (c.f. Army of Darkness, Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.)
September 16th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
A very in-depth review indeed. I’ll be sure to skip that movie.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
The previews for this one spoke to me and they said, “Straight to video.”
September 16th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
My 12-year-old son really wanted to see it. He said “Can I have money to see it, Dad? Please?”
“No!”
“Why not?
“Because you have been doing so well in school, and I would hate to see Teh Stupid take away that which we have worked so hard to achieve.”
September 16th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
I could tell you from the trailers this was just another vehicle for somebody’s CGI.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
I saw a bit of this train wreck in progress back in early 2004 when the Korean investors came by the visual effects studio I worked at to get some advice & shop around for help. The “engrish” of their promotional material gave us all plenty of laughs for weeks afterwards.
“using state of the art reartime rendering technology…”
They must have paid for this several times over as the version I saw back then had people riding dinosaurs and crap like that…very amateurish.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Tell us how you REALLY feel.
September 16th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Best quote from RottenTomatoes’ review:
“America does just fine making cringingly terrible special-effect extravaganzas, so back off, South Korea!”
September 16th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Well, duh!
September 16th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Oh come on, at least give us a BA-style breakdown. Like this:
Bad:
Dragons exist.
Good:
No they don’t.
September 16th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
So, two middle fingers up, then?
J/P=?
[with thunder in the distance]
September 16th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Not even a future cult to be? dayum!
September 17th, 2007 at 12:07 am
This demands a BA review.
September 17th, 2007 at 1:45 am
The previews made me think it would be one of those heavy-on-special-effects/light-on-plot kinds of movie like Star Wars I-III), but I thought the same thing about Transformers, and that was moderately amusing. It’s good to read such a succinct review before spending my money. (Since I’m not a big shot professional author with money to burn. ;o) )
September 17th, 2007 at 2:27 am
I realise (well, I assume) it’s meant to be an Asian-style dragon, but after watching that trailer all I can think is, “I will not turn in to a snake. It never helps.”
September 17th, 2007 at 2:53 am
Hm, i thought it might be fun in a Godzilla sorta way.
September 17th, 2007 at 9:17 am
You know, it lost me in the preview. Simply put… it had the line “every 500 years they make Earth their battleground.” Suspension of disbelief gone…
Seriously, we weren’t that backwards 500 years ago… you’d think there’d be some sort of record.
September 17th, 2007 at 10:36 am
I agree. It lost me with the movie Trailer. Even in the 21st Century, where gigaflops are a dime a dozen, low-budget still looks low-budget. Stupid is still stupid. Crap is still crap.
September 17th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I watch a lot of bad movies, the base level I use for comparison is BloodRayne. This one had loads of CGI, pretty badly done CGI but loads of it, BloodRayne had some sex which this one does not, so that cancels out. Dialog, directing equally bad, so I am still debating about which should be the bottom of my list of bad movies. I guess I have to watch BloodRayne2 which will probably make these two look like Oscar winners in comparison.
September 17th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Well, maybe yes, but was there any ASTRONOMY in it?
September 17th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
BA,
Typically your movie reviews are fun, concise, and at least reasonably accurate. I’m sorry, you missed out here. This review was far, far too wordy. Of course, this means you used too many letters, and we all know there’s a huge impending shortage of the letter ‘T’ looming on the horizon.
Far better to have said simply: “garbage” or “crap”, or “Codswollop”, or even a simple italicized “awful”.. but *NO*, You had to write this huge missive, full of extraneous foo-fraw. So full, in fact that I nearly missed my bus.
that being said..
and me being an ardent fan of MST3k (the best show ever to grace American TV), I find I have to judge all movies against “Manos; The Hands of Fate”. (Anybody who ever saw this movie in its raw form immediately suffered from post-traumatic-stress syndrome.)
I’ve not seen Dragon Wars, and, despite being a fan of dragons everywhere, don’t particularly intend to. Maybe if somebody gives the DVD to me as a gift. But come on, the trailers are supposed to make you want to see the movie. Ergo, they’re supposed to capture your attention. I actually had to go online to find the darn thing because it was so boring – I’d forgotten it, and the commercials on TV.
Come ON, if you are going to jump into the CGI movie arena, at least get on the cutting edge, not halfway to the back of the blade.
Even so, though, it’s obviously better than Manos. And it sure looks to be worse than the awful Broderick (whom I like) version of Godzilla. In fact, I’d venture to say it looks worse than any of the *Japanese* versions o’ Godzilla. From the trailer I just saw, I’d go so far as to suggest this thing is an updated old-style Chop-Suki movie – with scale-covered slinkys.
Maybe if they’d camped it up? Where’s Adam West when you need him?
September 17th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I got a kick out of this quote on Rotten Tomatoes: “Directed by Hyung-rae Shim, which apparently means Uwe Boll in Korean…”
September 17th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Ah, but does it suck worse than Highlander: The Source? Because I watched that travesty on SciFi, and I really want those two hours of my life back. I’m just glad I didn’t pay to see it.
September 17th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Wow. I’m just trying to track the thoughts that must have gone through your head Phil.
Version 1: Wow, that looks like a good/tolerable/interesting movie; I’ll go see it.
Version 2: Little Astronomer is for some odd reason fascinated by the trailer, and I forgot her birthday this year, so I guess I owe her…
Version 3: I wonder if someone can actually die from 2 hours of banal, vapid, mindless dregs of celluloid. Not really ethical to test on someone else; well, here I go…
I hope it wasn’t version 1.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:57 am
CK…don’t you pay for cable??
September 18th, 2007 at 10:02 am
We do pay for cable, but SciFi is included in the “basic” package (which it wasn’t, back when it was really worth watching). We’d be paying for cable anyway, so I don’t count that – we just didn’t have to pay extra for the insanity of the Highlander movie.
Unfortunately, that means I can’t ask for a refund. I think this one killed the franchise, it was that bizarre.