Written by Evan Purcell, October 18, 2016, at 10:00 a.m.
Every week, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from the company that brought you Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, and Atlantic Rim. This week, we shoot magic at our friends with Merlin and the War of the Dragons.
Mockbuster: Merlin and the War of the Dragons
War of the Dragons opens with a woman giving birth to the son of a demon. It’s a noisy birth, as most movie births are, and a group of men stand around deciding what to do with the new half-human infant. It’s probably going to grow up evil, so why not just kill it now? The infant is Merlin, our title character, so they opt to let him live in the forest.
Thus begins the Asylum’s version of a Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell’s checklist of quest tropes that everyone should recognize. Have you ever seen Star Wars? What about Lord of the Rings? Harry Potter? A huge chunk of modern entertainment uses the characters, rhythms, and ideas from the Hero’s Journey. Tell me if this sounds familiar:
A very special young man lives a normal, unfulfilling life until something breaks the peace and he has to go on a quest. He doesn’t really know he’s special, but he soon finds out. In this case, it’s Merlin, who has to track down his half-brother before dragons take over the world.
Merlin is aided in his quest by an older mentor, who tries to teach him as much as possible, before getting killed right when things look their worst. Think Dumbledore or Gandalf or Obi Wan: older, stern teachers who have the tendency to die at the exact worst time. In this case, Merlin’s mentor is a nameless mage played by Jurgen Prochnow, the craggy actor from Das Boot (and a million other things). He doesn’t have much of a backstory, so we never find out why he’s the only person in fifth century England with a German accent.
Everything leads to a final battle between the good guy (a 20-year-old Merlin) and the bad guy (the half-brother who keeps turning people into dragons). It looks like Merlin is going to lose, but he uses information that he learned earlier in the film to narrowly eke out a win. (In this case, it involves some magic hoo-haw about the Excalibur sword.) The world soon returns to normal, and Merlin has finally grown into a man.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a Hero’s Journey for Dummies. This story structure can be extremely satisfying, but it can also feel a little rote if the filmmakers don’t bother shaking things up a little bit. Needless to say, this movie is not shaken up. At all. If anything, it’s a constant mash-up of other, better movies. For example, when things aren’t being aggressively Tolkien-esque, we get shameless riffs on Braveheart (blue face paint, long speeches from generals on horses, armies charging over hills).
The few original touches, therefore, really stand out. Merlin’s journey takes a detour under a lake, where he has to figure out which of the two Ladies of the Lake he should trust. It’s an interesting dilemma, and breathes a little extra life into an otherwise by-the-numbers Act Two.
Other than that, though, things proceed pretty much as you’d expect. The climax, for example, is a mixture of sword fights and dragon attacks. It’s staged well but not memorably. The film also falls into the same trap that a lot of these cheaper fantasy films do: the magic rules are frustratingly ill-defined, especially in regards to a bad guy that can seemingly do anything. In the climax, he shapeshifts into someone else, an extremely useful power that was never alluded to before. If audiences don’t know what people are capable of, then there’s no reason to care about what’s happening. Someone can just pull a brand new rabbit out of his hat and fix everything. (Which is more-or-less what happens.)
The film looks nice, though. It was made entirely in Wales, and there’s an appropriately epic feel to the whole thing. All the actors (except our German mentor) seem to be scooped up from whatever Welsh acting companies exist. Authenticity goes a long way in a movie like this, and it’s nice to watch a Medieval movie where everyone has the same accent.
Our Merlin is played by Simon Lloyd-Roberts, a young actor with four movies on his IMDb page. Three of them are about dragons and the fourth is the Asylum’s version of Sherlock Holmes (which has dinosaurs instead). Clearly he was made for the part.
Mark Atkins directed this one. He’s an Asylum regular, having recently finished a gloriously wonky Ben Hur, a movie which I will be talking about in a few weeks. His magnum opus, though, is Planet of the Sharks, which takes an outlandish premise very seriously and ends up being a thousand times more entertaining than your average Sharknado. He did an admirable job with this paint-by-numbers story, and I look forward to any other mockbuster he can churn out.
Really, my issue isn’t with the directing, or the acting, or the music (which is epic and fun), or the special effects (which are about Dragonheart-level). No, my issue is with a story that feels just a tad barebones. There’s nothing wrong with a movie using the Hero’s Journey as a template. There just has to be something else to flesh everything out. Watching this movie is like reading the Cliff Notes version of Lord of the Rings. It tells a good story, but there’s something missing.
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Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, let’s get our quest on!
