Dragonheart (1996)

A fantasy movie with HEART.

This is an old fashioned knight and dragon fairy tale with a twist. I love this movie because of its original plot and entertaining scenes. As far as the transfer WOW. This is an older movie and yet it looks great. I have a somewhat large collection of Blu and HD's and I have to admit that the transfer was well done. The picture is clear, the colors are vibrant and the Dolby Digital Plus-loud with very low amounts of unwanted noise. If your into a fantasy movie with dragons, that still is light-hearted enough for the family this is the way to go. A+ for the Movie, A for the Transfer. January 19, 2008

Not a lot of heart in this

There was so much potential in the premise for Dragonheart. It could have been taken many steps further if the production team and writers genuinely cared about the film that they were making. Unfortunately, they weren't and could only be bothered in hashing together a quick and easy movie with no substance. I'm not sure what the pitch was to Universal but it seems like a bunch of C-list producers and writers felt like making Braveheart...for kids. Only with a Dragon instead of William Wallace.

The plot is so simplistic that it really could be accurately summed up as 'bad king nasty to villagers, knight and dragon help'. Whoa, slow down, man. I don't think I can comprehend so much in a small space of time. Rob Cohen is hardly an artistic director but the action and framing are below even his meagre standards. There are some nice shots here and there but the rest of the film looks incredibly fake thanks to the truly terrible production design.

When you take away all of that, all you are left with is a film with a CGI dragon. But in the 11 years since this was released the standard of such effects has improved drastically. Draco the Dragon looks just a little bit too dated, though he is still as cute and lovable as he always was.

The problems with the film extend even to the extras. It's bad enough that such talented actors are given such rotten dialogue to work with (why none of them requested to tweak it a little bit is beyond me) but I am assuming that no one bothered to give the villagers in the background any instructions before rolling. You have no idea how distracting it is.

Another potential thrown away is the religious element. I guess that no one involved in making the film wanted to offend any kind of faith and erased as much religion from the film as possible. It doesn't even clarify that it's set in Britain either. There are some flippant remarks to Camelot (conviniently just a few miles down the road from any point on the map) but almost the whole film was shot in Romania and the accents are all over the place, as usual.

The one, major, plus-point of the movie is Randy Edelman's glorious score. It's the only decent score he's ever composed in his entire career but it's simply amazing. Well worth hunting down the CD for, I assure you.

Dragonheart is just too tame and tepid to make any kind of lasting impression. There too many faults to forgive. It's better than Eragon, but nowhere near the beauty of Dragonslayer.

The HD-DVD presents the film in 2.35:1 1080p widescreen with Dolby Digital Plus sound. Extras from the ordinary DVD are ported over. October 11, 2007

HD-DVD version

Okay folks, I am guessing you have seen this movie as it is quite a few years old now so I will not bother going into the details of it. If you wish to know more about the plot then check it out on imdb.

The big question is, how did it fare being transfered to HD-DVD? Well to sum it up I would say brilliantly. The video transfer is crisp and detailed, it does suffer a tad with film artifacts but this is the best we are ever going to see it that is for sure.

The audio transfer is absolutely superb.

You want HD-DVD? Well this is as good as it gets for this title. June 22, 2007

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