Movie Thoughts: Dragonheart (1996)

• Released: May 31st, 1996
• Directed by: Rob Cohen
• Running time: 1h 43min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A seasoned knight, a young woman and a dragon team up to put a stop to a cruel king.

My Thoughts

I'd say that this is a flawed but nonetheless enjoyable movie. I did genuinely like the characters, especially the knight, Bowen. Draco, Gilbert and Kara were also enjoyable. 

However, I do have to say that visually this movie aged abysmally. It's so ugly. The CGI on Draco just looks gross. Unlike something like Jurassic Park, which came out three years earlier but has CGI that aged pretty gracefully, here Draco looks ugly and out-of-place constantly. Draco's model itself is also just kinda uggo. He looks kinda uncanny with his semi-dragon, semi-human face. His cheeks and mouth are really ugly and his wing membranes don't seem to attach to his body in a natural way. This is also just pretty colorless movie. Most of the colors on screen are bland browns. Even Draco himself is brown. So visually this movie has aged very poorly.

But that said, the plot and the characters were enough to keep me engaged. There were a few obvious continuity/consistency errors, though, like Bowen's horse being interchangeably bay or black, or Gilbert at one point nocking an arrow with a striped feather but then firing an arrow with a white feather. 

Not a terrible movie, and if you can get past the shitty CGI and bland color palette maybe you can get into it, but I was pretty disappointed.