***Cointains Spoilers***
A Review on D-War
2/10 Movie: D-War (2007)
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/jour ... iew=public
D-War is the latest CGI movie to come from former Korean gag-man turned director, Hyung-rae Shim. It's basically a classic monster movie with a little more legend and fantasy added. The movie has the distinction of being a Korean movie filmed mostly in English with American actors. It was released in South Korea on August 1st and is already breaking box office records. The Host, the Korean monster movie released last year currently holds the honor of highest grossing Korean film in Korea.
I came into the movie expecting to find some of the humor and quirkiness that made The Host and other Korean films unique. Instead the movie would have been beton HBO on a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s.
First off, there are some good parts. The scenes in Choson dynasty Korea are mesmerizing and colorful. It gives Korea a portrayal usually reserved for fantasy films based in China and Japan. The Imoogi legend, where a serpent is granted the privilege to be a celestial dragon once every 500 years, gave the film some scope and depth. The battle scenes in Los Angeles were exciting, with flying fire breathing lizards fighting helicopters and lumbering beasts with rocket launchers marching through the streets with their Lord of the Rings armor-clad knights. Unlike films like Transformers, the camera doesn't cut so much that it disorients the audience during the battle scenes. They're easy to follow. And finally, the Korean dragon at the end looked great. I can't think of any other movie that tries to realistically portray an Asian style dragon, other than maybe a glimpse in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. If the movie had more of that dragon, it would have saved a good bit of it.
The rest of D-War was disappointing and confusing. It missed a lot of opportunities for humor, character development, and bringing sweep and meaning to the story. The plot and dialogue themselves seemed to be ordered piece by piece from G-Market. Every person and scene and plot twist has been seen so many times before--only this time with dragons. Even suspending all disbelief so far that it can only be viewed through the Hubble telescope with an attitude to have mindless fun will not make the movie any more enjoyable. I actually started falling asleep and studying my fingernails during parts. The bad acting was forgivable, from the Keaunu-clone main character to the villain, who looked like he worked as a box salesman when not dressed in Darth Sauron armor. They did the best they could with the clunky lines they had to work with. The casting and character archetypes were drawn from Korean stereotypes of Westerners that are regularly portrayed on TV. The FBI guy has to look and talk like Robert Stack. The token black character is there for mild humor because he talks funny. And I could have sworn that I have seen the exact same actors who played the American soldiers play American soldiers in every Korean movie that has American soldiers.
The plot itself is a little hard to follow. On the surface, it's simple. There's a woman born every 500 years who can turn a giant serpent, good or evil, into a celestial dragon on her twentieth birthday. There's an ancient Korean wizard and a young man he trained there to protect her. There is a great seige against a Korean walled town that looks so ripped off of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, that I expected Jar Jar Binks to run onto the battlefield, clumsily knocking over droids. In the legend, the young man and the chosen woman fall in love and dive to their deaths over a cliff to avoid the "bad" serpent from catching her.
Five hundred years later, the couple are reborn as Americans in Los Angeles. They don't know each other. Yet the girl, Sarah (Amanda Brooks), has a birthmark on her shoulder in the shape of a dragon, just as she had in her previous life. Ethan (Jason Behr), the reincarnation of her protector, discovers a magic box in an antique shop. The proprietor, Jack (Robert Forster), who was really the wizard from Korea, tells him he has been waiting for him for five hundred years.
And that's really it. He doesn't train him to protect the girl, like he did in the previous life. They just meet each other. Jack gives Ethan some amulet to wear around his neck, and they part ways. When Ethan, grown up as a famous news reporter for a CNN type of news network (copied all the way down to the style of the logo) he comes across a police crime investigation over a crater with a dragon scale in it. The scale reminds him of his meeting with Jack as a kid (don't know why), and we are launched into maybe thirty minutes of long-winded exposition from Jack--who isn't that good of a storyteller.
Suddenly Jack and his cameraman Bruce (Craig Robinson, who gives the best performance in the movie) search through databases to find a nineteen-year-old girl named Sarah who has a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder. Bruce gave the "Are you out of your mind" comment that the audience was feeling. I don't remember how Jack knew the girl's name was Sarah. It's one of those many details that was either glossed over or completely ignored.
This evil elephant-eating (the biggest attempt at flat humor in the movie) ancient serpent somehow is combing Los Angeles, undetected, looking for Sarah. Sarah's best friend, Brandy (Aimee Garcia), plays the role of disposable best friend, who dies from mistaken identity faster than Sarah Connor's roommate in the first Terminator.
Sarah's in the hospital because she felt some freaky thing in her heart. For some reason, they lock her in her hospital room and say that she's quarantined, as if she has a deadly virus. This is an obvious cover up. Nonetheless, when the news reporter Ethan shows up, the doctor says, "I like your work," and lets him in.
What?
Sarah and Ethan escape together, and the chase starts. The evil giant serpent finds them wherever they go, smashing its head into buildings. Whenever it gets close enough to bite them, it just stands there and screams, giving them time to find an escape. Eventually the military shows up (in unmarked yellow tanks), and the battle begins.
In the meantime, this evil dark general (Michael Shamus Wiles) revives the evil serpent's followers, an army of knights and creatures, that march into downtown Los Angeles. The battle begins. Things happen predictably. The FBI somehow knew all about Sarah and Korean dragon legends through its paranormal unit--a big plot point that is just casually mentioned by the head FBI investigator before his partner formulaically shoots him to protect Sarah.
That's one of the most frustrating things about the movie. Everyone suddenly goes from knowing nothing about what's going on to knowing everything about Korean legends. Ethan, even though he seems to have no connection to Korean culture, is able to spout off Korean proverbs while driving. The movie would have worked a lot better if there was more connection between the present and the Korean legend in the past--like if they had to go to Korea to defeat the serpent or something.
Instead it just plays like a bad B-movie that could only be made watchable with the MST3K robots making fun of it. Even the humor--coming from a former comedian writer-director--was lame and repeated. The most oft repeated joke was someone being aloof to the fact that a giant serpent was snaking outside their window. Even during the big battle with explosions and the military blocking off the streets there were scenes of people just going about their daily business, looking up, and suddenly noticing that there were flying lizards and a mile-long snake creeping up their office tower. Yet there's none of that unique Korean humor that peppers classic Korean movies such as Please, Teach Me English, Sassy Girl, and even The Host and Old Boy.
The disappointment over this movie turns into frustration when the Korean media portrays this as the big blockbuster film that will get the rest of the world to recognize Korean film as on par with American film. It takes itself way too seriously while blatantly ripping off every movie cliche that is out there. Even Michael Bay had the brains to realize Transformers wasn't Academy material and played with the fact that the premise itself was hokey. D-War does not even have any subtlety or irony on its subject matter. It actually believes it's a serious film. I'm sure that it will win awards in Korea while wondering why it won't win any Oscars in America, even though there are barely any Koreans mentioned in the credits on the IMDB. There's even a scrolling message from Hyung-rae Shim to his Korean audience at the end of the film, talking about the process and love of making D-War, with masturbatory black-and-white photos of himself making the movie and finally standing in front of the Hollywood sign.
At that point, I was embarrassed and even angry that the film is working to pump up South Koreans' pride only to have it dashed when this film gets laughed out of the theaters overseas.
There are actors I can't stand to watch who are considered genius by other people. To each her own, I say. 
I was seriously hoping it was only b/c I went so early, but if you went at Night and still only 5 people there, that is a really bad sign 
