Movie Mania: Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker

Title: Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker
Publisher: Fumihiko Sori

Published:  29/05/2012

Run Time: 90 minutes

Final Verdict: 1/10

In b4 this week's header is a lazy collage, I just couldn't be bothered, and that should be saying enough as it is.

Here's a little bit of a disclaimer. I played a total of maybe 1h28 minutes of Dragon Age. And that was Dragon Age 2. I assure you however, I was in the presence of fans when I watched this, so as my review will be completely heartfelt from an entertainment value standpoint, it will be based on my friend's reactions also (and my Wikipedia knowledge of Dragon Age.)

So let's do this.

This movie is awful. Like, I don't mean somewhat mediocre but entertaining, because trust me, no one else in the world has seen the Super Mario Bros movie as often as me, as I can put aside how bad it is and still watch it for the lulz. I watched Trolls 2 and can enjoy it. But this... This is just awful.

I don't even know where to start.

I was compelled to buy this when I saw it on the shelf at HMV and was intrigued on the possibly adding a video game based movie to my roster of reviewed gaming-inspired stuff. So I said, what the hell, I love animation, I love video games, and I mean, look at that cover. It looks good!

WRONG.

The first thing that hit me when the movie started were the graphics. Not by their amazingly rendered Blu-Ray quality, but how low quality they were. They are background quality graphics at the most, and this is the entire movie. Main characters. Environments. Everything! It's a little shocking to see something so low-poly being released these days with the more sophisticated equipment and software becoming more accessible. This is almost gameplay-level graphics for a whole movie. It's unseen!

While we speak of the visual aspect, let me tell you a little about artistic integrity. There is none. I have never been so underwhelmed by design in my life. It doesn't take museum curator to type "Dragon Age" in Google Images and take a look at the game's concepts and armor sets and appealing medieval atmosphere. Dawn of the Seeker seems to miss out on it's origin's creativity. Unfortunately I could go on about this but I have a ton more points to touch and everyone gets fed up after reading too much, so...

 

Look at those faces.

THE ACTING. I can forgive poor voice acting if it really was it's only flaw. It's typical of dubbed movie to have bad voice-overs or poor translations. Again, I could easily laugh that off, if only the characters didn't reflect the bad acting in the animation too. There's so much wrong with the character's stiff movements, but worse of all I have to say would be the lips. There's unnatural movement of their mouths when the characters talk, and I don't mean (just) poor lip-syncing. Instead of opening and closing, the mouths seem to be pulled from the sides as if the characters had fish hooks in each corner of their mouths that were being pulled by invisible fish line every time they wanted to say something like some sort of tortured puppet. It doesn't stop there. Although the animation does fail on many aspects, the acting is also compromised by poorly developed characters, or characters doing out-of-character things. At some point a group of mages come fight along the side of our heroes, by fighting armored knights by hitting them with their staffs instead of casting magic spells. In this movie though, mages seem to only have context-sensitive fireballs. There are many other grievances I could pull from this but I'll have to stop sometime...

Cinematography anyone? I am actually impressed that they managed to screw this up. There are some things about cinematography that you learn just by watching movies that you should know to apply to your own feature, like, for example, no one wants a perfectly framed horse's ass on screen unless they are into weird stuff that I rather not imagine. On multiple occasions the wrong things are in the frame, or there are some unwanted content in the frame (i.e. horse's backside). There's also multiple (and I mean A LOT) of shots of the heroine's face pulling the Kristen Stewart trademark confused pout. It actually started to get frustrating. You started wishing she'd make another face, have another expression, try to feel something, but then she'd talk and your face (teary eyes and everything) would fall hopelessly into your pillow suppressing a scream about why humanity would publish something like this for the unsuspecting masses. It's a cruel world.

 

I'd be pissed too if I only had one expression.

As for writing, the dialogs are crap. There's nothing really great about anything, and even the story is fairly poor. My Dragon Age-loving friends assured me that it was really hard to place this movie (though, from I read on the Internet, it seems to have been somewhere between the first and second game) as there was very little content really relevant to the games, and even some contradicting it. Dragons, which are supposed to be like god-kings-lords-all-powerful-dudes are reduced to a bunch of idiots crashing into each other because little miss plot-device-on-legs decided she wasn't gonna help the bad guys take over the world anymore. Although, I must admit this scene spawned a come at me bro-esque moment where an old lady calls out a dragon and it's as ridiculous as it sounds. There's nothing surprising, touching, suspenseful or exciting about the plot, and really, even if there was, the characters would not have been able to ever take it to that level with the Justin Timberlake meet C-3PO in the lead with Stewart-faced-angry-bitch.

Looking at my notes I see that I could clearly go on for possibly double what I've already written, but I think any sane person got the point already. Avoid this movie if you ever come across it, and certainly don't pay any money for it. If you do watch it, make sure you're properly intoxicated and that you have good friends with senses of humor with you to survive. It's a bad movie. It is adding to the pile of reasons some real directors are horrified of producing actually good video game based movies (Gore Verbinski, please, PLEASE return to the Bioshock project) and I can't really blame them. This is bad. This is AWFUL. I give this 1 pimp slap for being 20$ I'll never see again. And because I'm saving 0 for that game that'll one day need that special place in hell.