O Dragão Dourado

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.

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 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.

I rated the Dragon Pearl a 6. For me, liking is >7, and disliking is <5, so this one fell into the Almost Good or Kinda Liked region.

It's a movie to take your preteen kids to and feel good about (if they aren't movie buffs).

The positives are: - the movie speeds along quickly to use up it's 95 minutes - has a reasonable script - nice mix of Aussie and Chinese actors, with the kids being best - dragon FX are good/minimal/oriental looking

The bads are: - Sam Neil was in it and didn't want to be - story line is way too predictable with typical parent/kid relationships - action sequences really should be left out, they are awful

My rating is 6 out of 10: I kinda liked this almost good movie

Very boring movie. Very predictable special effects are subpar and acting boring..

This is the kind of movie Sam Neil would do just to pay the rent.

I cannot believe somebody heard the pitch for this movie and decided to produce this film.

Doing the dishes and thoroughly cleaning the kitchen is way better than watching the hour and a half the movie it took to play.