Well, I've seen lots of movies with dragons that I've *enjoyed*, but I wouldn't call them sterling examples of the filmmaking art.

Aside from Dragonheart, my favorite dragon movie is "Dragon" from 2006. Very cheesy, more than a bit of bad acting (although some of it is quite good, too). The Dragon's the antagonist in that one (a group of people are out to kill it). The dragon itself is semi-craptastic CGI, but the movie as a whole was fun.

GPFontaine wrote:

Also Dungeon & Dragons had dragons in it. That sucked too.

Jeremy Irons was the only thing that made D&D worth sitting through to the end. Which is too bad, because it really did have potential.

Disgaearulz12 wrote:

Dorkus wrote: One of these days, the Unicorns time will come. Well there is the Last Unicorn, which was an epic movie. I mean why are mythological creatures so hard to make movies with? I know this thread started out as a mainly dragon movie thread but now that I think about it when it comes to myths and legends of other cultures we tend to butcher the hell out them.

Ah, I love The Last Unicorn, and I LOVE the music for it, too. America is one of my favorite bands, and the soundtrack they put out was wonderful.

Interesting point on the mythological creature movies there. I would guess that its one of two things: either a) the filmmakers focus SO much on the creature they're making a movie about that you loose track of the human plot and cease to care, or b) it falls prey to Transformers syndrome, and they focus TOO much on the people, and ignore the major drawing point of the creature itself.

The best mythological creature movies are ones where the creatures are characters themselves, and not just mounts/mindless antagonists. Dragonheart is a prime example of this being done well, which is why it ended up being such a great movie. The dragon wasn't just a dragon, it was a character with ideas, personality and motivation of its own. Take that away, and its just a crappy action movie about people trying to kill things that could be ANY kind of big, dangerous animal. It makes the mythological creature much less special and much more interesting. (Reign of Fire was hugely guilty of that.) The only time a film like that does work is when the story or characters are epic enough to carry the story on their own--Theseus and the Minotaur for example, or Jason and the Argonauts. In the case of those stories, however, you'll notice that the movie is always sold on it being the story of Theseus or of Jason, not on the fact that there's a monster in the movie. (And when they DO try to turn a story like that into a monster movie, you end up with a giant piece of shit like Minotaur, one of the few Sci-Fi original movies that even I, a huge fan of bad sci-fi channel movies, can't watch all the way through.)

An argument could also be made that the creatures almost always look pretty bad, but I don't think that's true--look at how well the skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts, or the Titan and Medusa from Clash of the Titans has held up over the years despite being simple stop-motion animation. If the story is good enough, the effects quality isn't usually an issue.

My two cents anyway.

God, I've seen pictures before, but they still blow me away every time. Those things are so fucking huge.

Disgaearulz12 wrote:

Well thats what happens when you mix a lion and a tiger

Yeah. I never understood quite why though--I mean, neither a lion nor a tiger is nearly that big. Why should their offspring get so much bigger than either parent?

Ah, that makes sense Fernin. Thank you.