The Dragonheart Trilogy

You know being a dragon fan, I'm sure people have asked me what I thought about Dragonheart.  

Okay, I just need to get this out for a moment...





Draco is...James Bond, 007.

I was never a James Bond fan back in the 90s, but I knew what it was, I have seen some of the movies.

So, when Dragonheart was coming out in the summer of 1996, I gathered up all sorts of magazines on the subject and every single one of them joked about Sean Connery voicing Draco...with lots of James Bond puns.



I suppose I never really spoken about it much because well, in 1996, I talked about it more then.  I was very excited to see a dragon movie where the dragon not only spoke, but was one of the heroes.  

This thing was pretty much unheard of in a movie that was dumbed down and geared to children.  And Dragonheart was mostly geared to an older crowd.  Kids could watch it too, but it had themes of sacrifice, baptism, people dying, an entire species going extinct pretty much...and the main hero having to kill his friend so that an evil king won't be immortal anymore.

Assisted suicide basically.

And it had a talking dragon in it voiced by 007.

Dragonheart was also another first.   Draco was created by ILM, owned by Lucas at the time, and famous for their other groundbreaking awesome movie a few years prior...Jurassic Park.  Hell when they were doing some test footage, they pretty much took the head of their T-rex from the movie and animated it to make its jaws and lips moved with Sean Connery speaking the lines.

Draco basically became the very first CGI CHARACTER in a live action film.  He wasn't a special effect, he was a part of the cast, he was a character in the movie that the other characters interacted with.  In a live action movie no less.  And even today, it still held up pretty damned well.

Yeah, we can now see the various mistakes, the lighting at times does seem off, I never liked the way Draco flew in the film....

But damn it, it was the first and it was GOOD.  The animators spent hours watching James Bond films to even give Draco Sean Connery's look, expressions, body language.  

"You will believe." that was the tagline, and damn it, did they do a beautiful job of it.  Yes, I did believe in my secret childhood heart that Sean Connery, one of the sexiest men still alive, was a fucking dragon!

Who got cockblocked by Dennis Quaid when dragon 007 was flirting with Dizzy Flores from Starship Troopers.  Damn it, Draco's fucking James Bond with scales, he's the one who's supposed to get the girl, not you Dennis Quaid.   You suck!

But I will say this.  Dragonheart came out during the time when the Internet was just starting to exist and become availible to a lot of people, not just a select few.  But even then, most of the pictures I got of Draco were from magazines.  I was lucky to even get one photo from maybe a website dedicated to movies coming out for that summer.

And by the time the Internet became what it is now, my thrill for Dragonheart faded because I found other things to be excited about.

Hell, Godzilla was probably one of the things that got me away from Dragonheart, basically.

And then I found out about the sequel, Dragonheart: A New Beginning, so I was curious and wanted to watch it.  Rented it from Hollywood Video, back when video rental stores were still the thing back then.

And I watched it and...



HATE!!!!!!

Oh god, this movie was just...bad.

So Stephen from that 70s Show teams up with a little dragon named Drake voiced by Robby Benson of Beauty and the Beast fame, and there was something about a comet that might bring about doom to Britain because one dragon escaped when Bowen went on his dragon slaying spree...and this dragon named Griffon...started hating humans and he caused trouble in China, so the dragons in China RIPPED HIS HEART OUT, turned him into a human...and Griffin went back to Britain, became a knight in the King's Guard, calls himself Ser Oswald, and totally believes in the moto: "A Lannister always repays his debts." and....

God damn it, Game of Thrones!

Anyways, this movie was stupid.  So, Bowen, as an old man, finds an egg that Draco was caring for and he had Brother Gilbert and his monks take care of it, which grew into that abomination.  I mean the CGI is just utter shit in this movie.  Stargate SG-1 had better CGI than that!

And this was the 2000, and the dragon movie for that year was Dungeons and Dragons, which sparked up my ideas for this guy...



Our favorite dragon god of plucky sidekick hijinks.  

Even if he's sad in that image.

Well, anyways, I COULD MAKE BETTER LOOKING DRAGONS than what they did for Dragonheart 2.

And you know, the idea of a dragon who became bitter towards humans because humans are complete assholes, and having his dragonhood taken away from him...that is actually an interesting premise.  Hell, it could have been all about this dragon, as he travels the world in human form, coming to understand humanity by living as a human, and doing something noble and virtuous which would allow him to regain dragon form again.

That could have been a good story if they had stuck with that.  

Not.



Oh god, he looks like a dragon from Spiro.  And I hate the look of those dragons!  Blech!

I've done better looking dragons than that.  Hell, I've done better looking Eastern Dragons than that!



Case in point!

And I've done better looking Red Dragons too...



So, then I found out there was a third movie that was released only a couple of months ago.  And I sat and watched it.



And I thought it was a step up from the last sequel.  And this thing was a prequel actually.

But I felt that it would have been stronger if it didn't have the Dragonheart tag on it.  Maybe it could have been a bit stronger without it?

And yes, just like the other movies, we had a dragon who was named Dragon....or rather Drago.  Draco was named this because Bowen couldn't pronounce the dragon's real name in his language.  So Bowen named him after the constellation Draco, whom the dragon had a deep fondness for because that was where Heaven for dragons was.  So to be named after Heaven was a deep honor to him.

Drake was named...well I would like to think of him being named after William Drake, the artist who drew a lot of religious images depicting the End of Days.  But that's me.  Drake was named after the word Drake in English meaning small dragon.  You know what "drake" also means in English?  It's another word for DUCK!

As in quack, quack!  Duck.

But the dragon in Dragonheart 3 actually has a name, and he even said his name.  It's Hissyoxyillammochogannatoss.  And I am fucking serious.  But the idiot human wasn't smart enough to say it or couldn't even shorten that.  I mean, I could have shorten his name to Mochogan, or something.  It's fucking better than Drago!  But they had to keep the theme of naming the dragon "Dragon".  In this case, knocking off the 'N' in "dragon" to get Drago.  And each time they kept talking about getting to the Wall, I kept thinking about Game of Thrones.  

What did I think about the dragon in it?  Drago...or Mochogan, as I want to now call him.



I didn't like the design.  He moved pretty good, but the face just looked so busy you couldn't read his expressions very well.

I mean look how overly textured that looks!  He looks like he would meld more in the background, which is okay...for a real life dragon, but isn't okay for a movie!  We need to see the character's facial expressions.  

His voice actor was good.  He did a good job of being a snark to the idiot he was bonded with.  And I loved the exchange when they each were hurting themselves so they could hurt the other guys, slap stick humor basically.  I did get a laugh from it.

But let me just show you something.



That's how you do a detailed dragon who can emote.  And even Draco, the first CGI character in a live action movie was an excellent example as well.  He had a lot of detail, but it didn't distract from his facial expressions.  We could read his face just like we could read Smaug's face from the Hobbit.

Drago's face?  I could barely tell what was going on.  That's how bad it was.

And I did see some of the concept illustrations, which showed a better look of him without all that busy texture.  You know, they should have went with that!

But no, instead we could barely see his face.

But I think the best thing I liked about this movie was the design of Drago when he was in his ghostly Dracolich form.





I was impressed.  That's an excellent design for a dracolich.  I wouldn't have used those brown wispy clouds for him though.  But it's still an interesting design.

However, a dragon who can travel through the shadows...



Oh, hai Vickie!

Been there, done that.  Though it was interesting to see it in film form.

Over all, it's an okay movie.  It would have been better without the Dragonheart name.  Like Godzilla 98 would have been better if it wasn't called Godzilla, but something else.

But meh.  My two cents worth of thoughts, I guess.