Just finished watching Warrior's Dawn (DN: WD). It's a huge cut above the crap Hollywood recently put out in the form of The Hobbit trilogy, it's the reason I'm disinterested in anymore big-budget Hollywood fantasy productions. My only real gripe with DN: WD, the 90 min movie felt like a 45 minutes. Felt too short, I could eat like a whole 52-hour movie of the franchise, no pun intended.
The good: It doesn't have the pretenses like a mere human/hobbit can defeat a huge dragon. Took a half human-dragon + back-up magicians/warriors to bring the big bad dragon boss down. Most touching scene was when our Elf female lead started departing from her body, could see her ghostly figure rising, but was saved b/c a kind half-human dragon decided to lend his life force jewel. The other touching scene was his sister, unable to do any magic until that critical moment, where she transformed into a dragon to save her brother (sort of like Supergirl not fully yet learnt to fly).
The super-good: Dragon boss is wildly unique from Smaug. It's tail has these bony fans on the sides to help it maneuver in the air. Best practical AND dragon design I've seen yet in cinema. You guys have to remember, China will soon have hypersonic glide vehicles traveling at Mach 20 (the Chinese team of engineers already cracked the problem), while the American HGV program to date is deemed a failure. If there is a country that knows good designs of flying creatures, that has to be not Japan, but China. (Heck Japan doesn't even have a 5th gen stealth fighter yet, they're only starting to work on one).
The bad: Soundtrack/score is essentially non-existent until the climatic dragon fight. If you've ever watched Japanese movies, they're really bland when it comes to sound/music. Same can be said of DN: WD. (It's mostly an Asian cinema thing.) Version I watched was English dubbed, the dubbing felt out-of-place sometimes.
My rating 9.9/10. Easily my favorite movie of the last 5 years (ould be dethroned by the sequel though)! And, I'll tell y'all about my favorite show of the last 5 years in another post...
Really looking forward to the sequel. Since I don't live in China I will have to wait...