Dragonslayer



Dragonslayer was a commercial failure upon its summer release in 1981. One major contributing factor was that it opened a mere two weeks in the wake of team Lucasberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tough break. But there were other reasons as well concerning the plotting, style and tone of the film. The Americanized fantasy adventures of the late ‘70s into the 1980s, namely but not exclusively Star Wars and Indiana Jones, offered fast-paced escapism and easy-to-accommodate archetypical storytelling, which made Dragonslayer something of a sleepy, atonal oddball.

It was Disney distributed but in the place of cheerful conventional fairytale was a slower, dreary narrative, void of binary resolve, where characters meandered about, at a time when audiences desired pitfall heroics at every turn. Add to this the film’s overall near-unquantifiable affect: Dragonslayer is very, how shall we say, British. It plods and rambles and fusses about, with an air of bumbling Oxford geriatrics. But this is what gives the film its unique charm, and there does come moments of excitement and sheer terror when best serving the story.



The seemingly simple enough premise begins with a young apprentice named Galen Bradwarden and his sorcerer mentor named Urlich who are visited by a small expedition of desperate villagers in request to vanquish a tyrant dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative, all of which loosely set in the realm of the post Roman Brython. Early on, Urlich makes a peculiar exit that isn’t explained until the third act.

Young Galen then takes the reigns of the mission and, after reaching the kingdom of Urland, must on one hand try and destroy the dragon while on the other hand contend with lottery politics, enforced by King Casiodorus. There’s also a love story as Galen and expedition leader/tomboy Valerian romance sheepishly. Yet none of this is makes for a clear, cut-in-dry story of Good vs. Evil, of white hats vs. black hats, but a story about the last vestige of a druid and Celtic mysticism before its eradication by an orderly, monotheistic faith, one that has homogenized the bulk of modern textbook history, all but eradicating the secrets of magic.

Vermithrax is monstrous but not necessarily evil incarnate. He’s just a beast. Galen, too, is less a traditional hero who successfully champions any one morally right perspective than he is a mere good-hearted (even slightly embarrassing) witness to the changing of the times. The king is flakey and corrupt but also very human and pragmatic regarding the long term betterment of his people. No one outcome of the film is ultimately happy or sad: Vermithrax dies, but so does Urlich and the rest of magic; the villagers are saved, only to succumb to the blindness of Christianity.

Even as Galen and Valerian ride off together happily they likewise express a ponderous, inconclusive “What-was-the-point?” reflection of the events. Peter MacNicol plays Galen with all the stature of that clarinet kid from your high school band class, which perfectly fits his role in the grand scheme of the story. The rest of the cast is British, including John Hellam, Peter Eyre, Sydney Bromley, Ian McDiarmid, a strangely attractive Catlin Clark as Valerian and, the highlight performance of the film, Ralph Richardson as Urlich – the same classically trained theater actor who, also in 1981, graced my personal favorite Time Bandits as The Supreme Being. 

 

Despite the aforementioned British flavor of the film, it was American director and co-writer Matthew Robins and co-writer Hal Barwood who helmed it from start to finish. Robins and Barwood both stem from a group of USC film students known in their time as The Dirty Dozen, which, to name a few, consisted of George Lucas, John Milius, Walter Murch, Howard Kazanjian, Bob Gale and Willard Huyck. None-the-less, Robins and Barwood totally saturated Dragonslayer with the look and feel of primeval Briton, filming on location in the castle-ridden countryside of Northern Wales and Scotland, while depicting an array of song, customs and superstitions that one could liken to nowhere else and at no other period in history.

However, verisimilitude is etched with matt painted backdrops and elaborate set-designed caves and canyons (not to mention the actual content of magic and dragons), as if the Briton we’re seeing is still tied to the lands of ancient myth and legend. It feels credible but evokes the fanciful. The film has stunning cinematography by Derek Vanlint who also lensed Ridley Scott’s Alien. Never relying on false or forced light, Vanlint allowed for the gleaming white ambiance of overcast skies and the under-glow of burning torches–fire in general–to fill every frame, giving deep greens to the surrounding forest, pouring in through windows and warming dark keeps and cobbled corridors with soft amber. The short lens focusing is sharp and direct, while deep focused shots are nicely composed, complete with full vistas and well staged actors and extras. Dragonslayer is not particularly complex or daring in its visual language, but it does have the reassuring shot-flow of a carefully storyboarded optical effects film, the kind of disciplined editing were every frame must economize the hardships of location shooting and heavy post-production.

Speaking of which, the special effects are a marvel even to this day. What’s important is that Vermithrax isn’t a thing, he’s a genuine fully realized character rendered by ILM wizards Phil Tippet, Denis Muren, Ken Ralston and Brain Johnson using a pioneering animation technique called go-motion. This differed from traditional stop-motion in that a model of the dragon would articulate during each exposure instead of in between. The results speak for themselves. In addition, Disney studios provided full scale animatronic head, limbs and wings that would go unrivaled until Stan Winston’s T-Rex.

The climactic battle between dragon and sorcerer is steeped in lurid imagery with impossible craggy mountains (scale modeled) and an otherworldly solar eclipse. Detail is top notch – when Vermithrax soars through the clouds and swoops down upon Urlich, you can hear the wind blowing through his torn leathery wings; his and Urlich’s shared demise achieves the blast, furry and lyrical movement equal to the self-destructed, trailblazing Enterprise from The Search for Spock.

The musical by Alex North was nominated for an academy award but has since become targeted unfairly as an ugly, ungainly fantasy score. North emphasizes the unconventional aspects of the film. He put aside homophonic writing where musical themes are clearly distinct through a progression of repeating structures, instead relying on polyphonic writing where individual phrases and motifs are conceived separately but racked together in composition – replacing traditional harmony with counterpoint harmony, thus rendering an ambiguous, asymmetrical score that is largely inaccessible for the audience, which was the point. Perhaps most important of all is that the score wonderfully captures the atmosphere of this world without choosing sides. It’s wild, chaotic, subversively comical, intentionally aimless, and extremely tense …without delineating the story or setting to any one end. One reviewer said: [It's what shadowy sorcery and fantastical, fire-breathing creatures should sound like in the language of a "modern" orchestra.]

By all means, sit down with Dragonslayer and let it wash you over with its subtle weirdness and fully immersive folklore. It looks great, has great action and rich ideas. It’s an awesome movie.  



Coolist. Picture. Ever.