'Dragonheart' brings a legend to life
By Parvathi Nayar Narayan
JAKARTA (JP): Here be dragons! But whatever the dangers that threaten the film Dragonheart, the dragon isn't one of them. Draco is a rather wonderful dragon. Created as he may have been in cyberspace, this one is straight out of our best fairy tale fantasy with leathery skin, scales and wings, forked tail and gleaming yellow eyes. A legendary creature with the added advantage of having been brought to life by another sort of legend, Sean Connery.
Draco is one very complex and endearing beastie whose portrayal, that runs the gamut from cynical to heroic, clownish to seductive, imperious to wistful, takes over the film. What the heck, let's be honest: Draco takes over even when going through the motions of routine dragon behavior like emitting fire from his nostrils or flying around in the sky.
As any self respecting movie buff knows, Draco the dragon was created around the personality of Connery. Director Rob Cohen even put together clips from Connery's films that showcased his different expressions and moods. Says Cohen: "If we needed Draco to look angry, I could tell the animators, 'go to the anger bin, and you will see something Sean does in Russia House, suitable for Draco in this moment.'"
The dragon creation process began with recording the actor saying Draco's lines. Harnessed for the animation process that followed were the considerable talents of Scott Squires from Industrial Light & Magic, and Oscar-winning designer Phil Tippet. The latter is a designer who has worked on such special effects groundbreakers as the Star Wars trilogy and Jurassic Park.
Still, Industrial Light & Magic alone cannot a film make (the makers of Twister and Independence Day will disagree), and Dragonheart's story, such as it is, is set in the 10th century. While Bowen (Dennis Quaid), a brave knight in the Arthurian tradition, coaches Prince Einon in the art of swordfighting and honor, the peasants rise in revolt against their tyrannical ruler, the prince's father.
The king is eventually killed and in the fracas the heir apparent, Prince Einon, is mortally wounded. The prince's mother, Queen Aislinn (Julie Christie), accompanied by his mentor Bowen, takes Einon to the cave of a dragon. There, drawing on her own Celtic beliefs she pleads for her son's life. Once Einon has sworn to uphold the ancient and traditional laws as king, the dragon sacrifices half his own life forces to give life to him.
The adult King Einon (David Thewlis), however, turns out to be rotten to the core, and leaves behind even his father in the Nasty Tyrant Sweepstakes. Bowen cannot accept this, and (conveniently) blames it on the dragon, whose soul he decides has corrupted the prince. Unable to get over his sense of betrayal, and needing some sort of 'cause' anyway, Bowen mooches moodily off and takes to the life of a bounty hunter as slayer of dragons.
A profession we're asked to believe he is successful at, because soon he's face to face with the last living dragon. The Connery inspired dragon, our protagonist, who's a cunning creature and no pushover. Incidentally, if he is anything to judge the dragons by, it seems inconceivable that the others were so easily bested in combat with a single man.
Still, this is fiction, and one mustn't quibble. Dragonslayer and dragon enter into a partnership of mutual commercial benefit that along the way deepens into friendship, and the dragon is christened Draco. Along the way they also run into Gilbert (Pete Postlethwaite), a monk with ambitions to compose poetry, and Kara (Dina Meyer), a peasant girl with ambitions to revolt against Einon's tyranny. Needless to add, Kara's ambitions prevail.
The story is the stuff of which legend and myth are made. At the heart of any myth worth its salt is a passionate and compelling hero. Now this is a problem.
While we enjoy the dragon immensely, the hero's journey is not exactly one of heroic proportions. Quaid as a dragonslayer, for instance, evokes little sympathy; one can't shake off the sneaky thought that if the other dragons possessed even a fraction of Draco's charm, what an appalling waste that they were slain! And that too to appease some idealistic knight's bad tempered refusal to accept he'd made a bad judgment call about his protegee. Perhaps it does bring all too vividly to mind parallels of modern man's reckless slaughter that has driven so many animals to extinction.
And so inevitably one returns to the dragon, who alone makes the film worth seeing. A creature spawned of digital technology, defined by control vertices and bytes, that can claim to connect emotionally with an audience much better than his co-stars of flesh and bone? It's not often one can say or see that. Yet.