A Cinephile’s Critiques

Directed by Uli Edel, 2004 (Color, 9:5, Surround, 130′/170′)
Starring Benno Fürmann, Kristanna Loken, Alicia Witt, Julian Sands, Samuel West, and Max von Sydow

The Dragon King goes by several names. Sometimes, this film calls itself The Dark Kingdom, sometimes it goes by the name The Ring of the Nibelungs, and sometimes it thinks you should call it The Sword of Xanten. Sometimes it will show you almost three hours worth of story, but, at other times, it will only show you a little more than two hours worth.

This might make you suspect that The Dragon King has something to hide, but it doesn’t. In fact, the longer version is, by all accounts, the better of the two cuts of the film. Maybe The Dragon King feels a little insecure because it knows it’s tough not to compare it to the much more impressive Lord of the Rings trilogy. After all, they both concern a cursed ring. They both depict the spectral guardians of that ring. They both feature a dwarfish outcast with odd mannerisms and strange attributes. And they both involve a lot of swordplay and a fair amount of magic.

But The Dragon King is a retelling of the ancient Völsung saga and the Nibelungen lay, and it is significantly more earthbound than the Lord of the Rings. It is the story of Siegfried, a blacksmith who cannot remember his childhood, the court of the Burgundians, which his adoptive father works for, and a Scandinavian queen. Yes, the blacksmith battles a dragon, the royalty of Burgund isn’t above dabbling in black magic, the queen possesses supernatural strength, and they are all slowly acting out the elements of a curse cast by a long-dead race, but the story spends more time with its characters than it spends with the spectacular, and it plays off the contrasts between the friendly and honest, but fatalistic and vengeful, Nordic people who cling to their old ways, and their reserved and pious, but hypocritical and deceptive, cousins who have recently converted to Christianity.

The Dragon King is by no means a great movie, though. The characters sometimes mouth cringe-worthy dialog, the photography of some of the action sequences allows characters to bounce in and out of the frame, and several scenes were shot day-for-night. Oddly, however, these flaws seem to help the film as much as hurt it. The clunky dialog tends to come when characters are blustering or confused, the erratic action shots add a little chaos to the choreography, and the day-for-night photography seems to portray the sort of harsh, cold twilight you might expect to see in the mythical north.