Dragon’s World: A Fantasy Made Real aka The Last Dragon [2004]

July 14, 2009

This is truly a strange movie if it can be called that. And why we shouldn’t call it that when you have all those creepy and gory movies like Aftermath. This is a British docu-fiction movie released on Channel Four and Animal Planet. There’s a warning at the beginning, explaining that dragons are not real and this is all made up. Not sure why is it there, but there you go. There have been many movies about dragons throughout the decades. From cute DragonHeart over fantasy movies like Eragon and The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug to action blockbusters like Reign of Fire. Dragon’s World is nothing like them.

I liked this movie and there are two reasons for that. The first one is the scientific approach, it’s like watching a standard-issue documentary about animals, only instead of animals, we’re talking about dragons. The second aspect was the CGI that was pretty cool for 2004. Remember, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was released three years earlier, so CGI was really big back then. Although compared to today’s standards it looks outdated. Finally, whenever I hear Patrick Stewart I get this warm feeling that I can’t describe.

Jack Tanner is an American paleontologist working for the Natural History Museum in London and has quite the theory. While examining Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, he found signs that the poor dino was killed by some creature not yet discovered by science. Could this be the proof that Dragons were real? The question that follows this one is even more intriguing: Could one of those dragons be alive today. A remote dig site in Romania may provide answers…

Before you get all jittery, worried that this might be another cheap, scary, documentary-style milker of the masses, I have some good news. This is not one of those “let’s make a documentary about some myth or something just to fill the time slot and who knows maybe people will like it” documentaries. They go into great detail explaining the whole evolution of dragons, just like any other show about dinosaurs, even adding interesting accounts of Knights in Romania being scorched.

All these little pieces of information serve a purpose and they are not randomly strewn across the movie to fill time or maintain tension. With 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth extinct, it is entirely possible that Dragons were real. We’ll just never know. One wonders how this movie would fare if it had better funding. So, if you like dragons and documentaries about nature, be sure to check out The Last Dragon (if you can find it), it will not disappoint you.