The Dragon Pearl

Not in a good way, either. I expected a family fun adventure to take up my Friday night but instead it made me feel like it was Monday morning I was in that much pain. The bad acting and bad special effects really added to the torture and I admit that I cried a bit during the special effects. The dragon looked like a flying dog with badly synced audio that sounded like it had been recorded with a phone. I'm not saying this is the worst movie I have seen, it's just number 1 on my top worst movies I've seen. My friend came over halfway during the movie and I had to turn off the TV so he wouldn't see the "movie" I was watching. All in all, I loved it.

The storyboard of this family-friendly (no graphic violence, gore, sexual scenes etc) Australia-China produced movie is pretty original, with touches of Steven Spielberg's ET and Jurassic Park. In fact, Sam Neill is one of the stars, together with Jordan Chan (if you watch Hong Kong action and comedy flicks, you will know him).

Filmed in Hengdian World Studios (Forbidden Kingdom featuring Jet Li and Jackie Chan, Zhang Yimou's Hero etc), the sets involving the underground emperor's tomb and the golden dragon's cave are very convincing.

Above all, the scenes featuring the golden dragon are simply fantastic! In fact, this film has actually set the minimum benchmark for a CGI celestial dragon (with matching awesome audio effects), in true oriental fashion (watch out for the tongue-in-cheek cross references to conventional dinosaur-like/monster-type dragons during the movie).

In future, any self-respecting film featuring heavenly dragon(s) will need to measure up to the life-like CGI rendition in The Dragon Pearl. For this alone, this movie gets 9 out of 10 from me (the presence of Sam Neill and Jordan Chan helped, of course)......!

I had the opportunity to catch this film as a prerelease promo. Knowing nothing about it except that the story took place in China I thought it would be a good waste of an evening. It was. A waste, that is.

There is a long standing tradition among American film viewers that, with rare exception, any movie with the word "dragon" in its title is going to be disappointing. The Dragon Pearl is not one of those exceptions.

The entire thing feels like it was written, cast, and directed by a high school drama team. The story is bland and predictable, following the typical adventure theme. The characters were cookie cutter clones of every adventure movie character we've seen. The actors might as well be made of cardboard for all the emotion they showed. The poorly choreographed fight scenes rely on bad camera angles and 1 second shots to drive them along. And the film itself... maybe it was just the version I watched, but it had a grainy late-80's style to it. (Think: The Goonies.)

I missed about 1/4 of the dialogue due to lack of subtitles (Chinese and English are both spoken throughout the movie) but that should be fixed in the actual release.

The dragon itself amazed me. It wasn't very good (it looked like a plastic toy) but the amount of fluidity to its movement was excellent. It swam through the air, curling around itself, almost like a slow moving eel. They really should have textured it better.

All in all it's one of those budget flicks you won't mind watching on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Assuming there's nothing else to do.

Nothing. Happens. Even while things are happening, nothing is happening. The kids were pretty good actors, especially for a kids' film, and the sets and effects were likewise not at all grating.

That said, expect about 50 minutes' worth of movie to be crammed into about 94 minutes of your day. Prepare for exposition by narration. A retelling of the exposition...by narration. People standing around. People looking at things. People thinking about things. Repeat shots of leaves...blowing around. Suppose there just wasn't enough script for a whole movie, which was a shame. Thought it could've been great.

I would say if you have a kid who's into dragons or Asian themes, definitely give this one a shot; it's clean as a whistle content-wise. Just that I can't imagine watching this again only for the reason that the whole time I was going...come one, come on, something HAPPEN!

There are some cool shots of kids playing Chinese drums that are AWESOME. They're shown at the beginning and end credits and have nothing to do with the plot; so that's really not a spoiler.

I think some of the other reviews of this movie missed the point. This is a movie for kids. Specifically, kids at an age where they are watching TV shows like "Mako Mermaids','iCarly', 'Dog with a Blog', 'Big Time Rush', etc. My ten year old loved it, and can't wait to watch it again.

We chose this for our weekly 'family movie night', and it was a nice alternative to the animated shows we often have to resort too, since we try to limit our family movies to G or PG rated fare as much as possible.

Sure, the plot was 100% predictable to my wife and I. But it was still fun and entertaining none the less, and our kid really enjoyed it. In that context, it was one of the better movies we have seen in the past few months and I would highly recommend this movie to parents looking for something to watch with their young children. In fact, my wife wants to show the movie to the kids in her after school Chinese program because it's a perfect way for them to start using the Chinese they have learned in a fun context that also exposes them to some Chinese culture.