When I first arrived in Korea last summer I saw a number of advertisements for a big budget scifi thriller called D-War. I asked my students about it and they all said it sucked a big one — that Transformers was much better.
I finally had a chance to watch it and it sucked a big one. Not only was the dialogue absolutely cliche but the editing was incredibly choppy. Scenes were not allowed to finish before the next one began. If you have seen the horrendous Dungeon Siege by Uwe Boll then you know just how bad editing can be. My understanding is that on emergency occasions a studio might bring in an outsider to help fix this kind of problem. For instance, Francis Ford Coppola was brought in to salvage the remains of another bomb, Supernova. Should’ve hired someone for this mess.
Anyways, a couple more nitpicks. The main boss guy reminded me of the cheesy bosses from the live-action Ninja Turtle movies or from any episode of Power Rangers. There was also a good 10 minutes of Korean dialogue that I could hardly follow and seeing as it had a worldwide release it would have been nice to see some kind of subtitles, even en espanol!
Craig Robinson, the black guy, never had a clearly defined role. Not only was he a computer whiz with access to a detailed NSA database of every person in LA region, but he was also was a camera man, amateur detective and also had the authority to order and use a company helicopter. The thing that bugged me most about him: his laptop was never plugged in to a power adapter or wired LAN-line at work.
Oh, and the two main actors definitely didn’t look like they were in college, let alone late teens. It is the same problem that many films and shows staring young adults continues to have. Remember Dawson’s Creek or Smallville? Did any of those actors look like they were remotely the characters age? [Note: the lead male is actually 35 and the girl is 26]
And perhaps the biggest annoyance of all was that the scenery did not match the geography of the region. This is the same problem I mentioned with Transformers… where is that huge city the robots fought in? In D-War apparently dragons and dinosaurs are apparently able to run around without being spotted and the super evil boss dude was able to build a couple of huge statues and monuments in the middle of a field. That kind of stuff never attracts attention, right?
1 out of 5. The only redeeming part of the film were the computer graphics/special effects but even those became tiresome. The same thing can be said for Doom another movie I recently watched and which blew chunks.