PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*
There’s no shortage of film-fans who
prize franchise-sequels—BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, TERMINATOR 2-- equal
to or better than the film that started the franchise. I’m not
aware, though, of many “second sequel” films that have earned
such accolades.
DRAGONHEART 3 isn’t any sort of bold
new re-thinking of the premises of the previous two films, and its
story would’ve been difficult to envision without the previous
stories in the series. It’s just a good formula-film that executes
its premise better than the first two entries. As I noted in my
review of the other films, the first DRAGONHEART suffers from a
clumsy sort of humor, loosely modeled on the 1971 film SKIN GAME,
while the first sequel proves overly juvenile in tone.
Both of those films took place in a
vague period of medieval England. Director Colin Teague and writer
Matthew Feitshans anchor their prequel of the franchise in
ninth-century Britain, some centuries after Roman rule. Though the
Romans are gone, they’ve left behind such markers as Hadrian’s
Wall, a dividing-point between the northerly lands of the savage Pict
tribes and the lands to the immediate south, inhabited by more
outwardly sophisticated Britons. In addition to the southerners
having been schooled in the ways of the Romans and of the knightly
traditions of Arthur’s Camelot, this fantasy-history includes a
race of intelligent dragons from the stars. Rather than being opposed
to humankind as one sees in most archaic knight-tales, these
star-dragons acted as tutelary spirits to Arthurian knights, even
instilling in the early warriors the code of honor.
Main hero Gareth, an orphan of low
estate comparable to Geoff in the second film, has labored for years
in service as a knight’s squire, hoping to attain the status of
valorous knighthood. But the code of knighthood has fallen on hard
times, and the warriors that man the wall against the hostile Picts
consider it their due to extort huge sums from the humble peasants.
Though Gareth dearly wants to become a knight, he protests this
inequity. The garrison’s cruel commander casts Gareth out of the
compound into the northern wilderness, challenging the young squire
to come back with some treasure to prove his worth.
While Gareth forages in the wilderness,
a meteor crashes to Earth. Out of the meteor springs a huge dragon,
and Gareth observes that within the remnants of the meteor are nine
eggs of gold. A troop of Picts show up and attack the dragon, and
Gareth briefly considers harvesting an egg for his own purposes. A
Pict shoots Gareth with an arrow, but the dragon thinks that the
young knight has protected the egg. The dragon, later named Drago,
resuscitates Gareth by transferring a portion of Drago’s heart into
the youth’s chest.
However, the Pict tribe has a sorcerer,
Brude. He casts a spell that nullifies Drago’s power, except when
the moon is high, at which point Brude can force Drago to serve him
in destroying the southern Britons and their wall. Drago’s primary
concern is to protect the eggs of the unborn dragons, and because of
the sympathy between him and the knight, Gareth agrees to help Drago
protect the eggs. The knight receives further aid from two friends he
makes in the northern wilds: Pictish warrior-princess Rhonu, who
bears a grudge against Brude, and aspiring Druid magician Lorne, who
provides some of the comedy-relief (though, to be fair, Gareth is
sometimes the butt of Drago’s humor).
There are some fuzzy parts in the
script. It’s not that clear as to why Drago came to Earth with his
brood, since he and his kind haven’t been there for centuries, nor
why he possesses the ability to teach Gareth a skill called
“shadow-jumping,” which involves teleportation from one shadowed
area to another. Still, the story is admirably consistent to its
theme: that Gareth must find some middle way between the unreasoning
aggression of both northerners and southerners. Naturally, meeting a
comely Pictish warrior-woman does a lot to humanize Gareth’s
beliefs about the Picts, though the script doesn’t overplay the
romance at the expense of the main plot. And though the theme is
mostly about humans getting along, Drago had a much more interesting
personality than either of his predecessors, perhaps because he
mirrors the ideals of knighthood to which Gareth aspires.
The film’s only flaw is that, like a
lot of second sequels, the budget doesn’t allow for heavy FX, so
Drago doesn’t actually do all that much, even in the climactic
battle.
Unfortunately, though DRAGONHEART:
BATTLE FOR THE HEARTFIRE is set in the same prequel-era, creative
lightning did not strike a second time for writer Matthew Feitshans,
nor for the new director or the new cast of characters.
Two generations have ensued since
Gareth and his wife Rhonu united the northern and southern kingdoms
of their corner of Great Britain. With the assistance of Drago—the
dragon to whom Gareth bonded in the previous film, now voiced by
Patrick Stewart—the king and queen have managed to bring about the
rebirth of dragons. Not much is said about the restoration of an
Arthurian knightly code, and one never sees any other dragons but
Drago. However, the bonding of human and dragon is still fraught with
peril. At the film’s statt, Rhonu has perished years ago after her
dragon died, and now Gareth is at death’s door. Drago expects to
perish when Gareth does, and is surprised when the king dies and he
Drago yet survives.
Drago realizes that he still has a bond
with a human; one of Gareth’s grandchildren. Gareth and Rhonu had a
son, Walter, who fled court life and chose to live the life of a
peasant. He married some unknown woman, who bore him twins, male
Edric and female Meghan. Neither twin is aware of their kinship with
Gareth, but both have a smattering of scales on their bodies, as well
as unusual powers—Edric is as strong as four men, and Meghan can
control (but not create) any form of fire. After Walter’s death,
the siblings separated. Drago uses the bond to locate Edric, and
though Edric repudiates the bond, he doesn’t reject the revelation
that he’s now the king of this part of England.
Meghan, living in the lands of the
Vikings, hears about her brother’s good fortune and invades England
with a small army, led by Thorgrim. (Dina de Laurentis, daughter of
the more famous Dino and sister of HEARTFIRE’s producer Raffaela,
has a small part as one of the Vikings.) Meghan asserts that as
Gareth’s granddaughter she has equal claim to the throne, and when
she first meets Drago, she steals from him the Heartfire. In contrast
to the exchange of hearts seen in the other films, this theft robs
Drago of his flame-powers, and imperils his survival as well.
Meghan’s enhanced power allows her to take over and to exile Edric.
She then begins her rule, attempting, among other things, to empower
women legally and martially.
After various complications, Edric
sneaks back into the kingdom, hoping to save Drago’s life by
stealing back the Heartfire. The siblings fight, and the Vikings turn
against Meghan. Drago swoops in and saves the twins from death, but
he, now acting as reluctant parent to the duo, becomes aggravated by
their constant squabbling. He sets them down in the forest and
challenges them to fight it out. It’s not much of a fight despite
their respective super-powers, since despite their enmity neither one
really wants to hurt the other one. Some family secrets are revealed,
and the two youths at last join forces to kick out the Vikings and
rule the kingdom wisely—though during the conflict Drago meets his
maker.
The previous entry in the series took
strength from being based in the history, however fictionalized, of
conflicts between two tribes of Britons. This time, the kingdom is
just a backdrop, and the invading Vikings could be Mongolians for all
their identity matters to the story. DRAGONHEART 3 was about Gareth
and Rhonu bringing their ethnic identities together in order to forge
a stronger England. Edric and Meghan are never more than bickering
siblings, weakly characterized and given a patchwork backstory.
Writer Feitshans might have done
something better. Since he wanted the bonding to skip a generation,
apparently he decided to expend as little effort as possible upon
Gareth’s son Walter. The script gives him no solid reason for
fleeing the lap of luxury to live as a peasant; the viewer is only
told that he didn’t like the kingly life. Feitshans might’ve
crafted a situation in which he rejected the world of kingship and
dragon-magic specifically because the dragon’s death killed Rhonu’s
mother. But this avenue remains closed.
One hears nothing of the mother of
Edric and Meghan; she’s just the vehicle to bring the siblings into
the world. Clearly the scripter got rid of the mother quickly, in
order to focus on Walter, even though he remains a vague character at
best. He’s appalled by the twins’ strange powers and becomes
something of a tyrant to them, which leads to a clumsy “family
secret”—Edric thinks Meghan killed their father with her powers,
but someone else is the guilty party. Even this bit of melodrama is
botched, since the characters of the siblings are so flat and
uninvolving. The best I can say of the two lead actors is that they
fit the bland characters perfectly. Whether the franchise can come
back from this low point is anyone’s guess.
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