The Last Dragon (2004) (TV)

User Rating:

6.7/10   

Director:

Justin Hardy

Writers:

Charlie Foley (creator)
Charlie Foley (story)

Release Date:

20 March 2005 (USA)

Genre:

Fantasy

Tagline:

What if dragons actually existed?

Plot Keywords:

Sketch | Skeleton | Knight | Museum | Dragon

Awards:

Nominated for 2 Primetime Emmys. Another 1 nomination

Cast

Paul Hilton	...	Dr. Tanner
Katrine Bach	...	Biologist
Aidan Woodward	...	Data Analyst
Tom Chadbon	...	Museum Curator
Niccolo Cioni	...	Lead Knight One
Hamish MacLeod	...	Lead Knight Two
Bradley Lavelle	...	Narrator (voice) (as Brad Lavelle)
Patrick Stewart	...	Narrator (voice)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ian Holm	...	Narrator (UK version) (voice)

Also Known As:

Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real (USA) (DVD title)
Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real (USA)

MPAA:

Rated PG for some mild violence.

Runtime:

Argentina:99 min

Country:

UK | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Australia:PG | Finland:K-7 | Iceland:LH | South Korea:12 | USA:PG | Argentina:Atp | UK:PG | Singapore:PG

Company:

Darlow Smithson Productions

Movie Connections:

Featured in "Troldspejlet: (#34.4)" (2005)

Not as good as it could have been.

This film was done by the same folks who gave us the 'Walking with Dinosaurs/Prehistoric Beasts' shows, and the sequences involving the dragons are mesmerizing, but the bits with the supposed modern paleontologist's quest to find evidence of a dragon are contrived and very badly acted indeed. This was simply not the right way to present this show - it's just too much of a stretch to make dragons scientifically plausible, and I feel the production company would have been better served by hiring some real scientists to play the roles of scientists - rather than giving second-rate actors a horrible script. Just imagine if real scientists had been interviewed and allowed to imagine the plausibilities of dragons having been real, and then intercutting the CGI stuff, rather than contriving a modern scientific 'discovery' plot and hiring actors to play it out.

Basically, this film would have been better if it had included less of the modern storyline and just allowed us to suspend disbelief as we watched dragons soaring over plains and mountains and doing the things that dragons did in legend. They made an overly-serious effort to convince us that dragons were real, but they did it by using a simplistic Indiana Jones style plot full of holes you could fly a dragon through.

I like the DVD overall - I even own it, but I wish I didn't have to fast-forward through the appalling dialogue, the bad acting, the soap-opera plot and the pseudo-science in order to get to the good stuff.