Wolfhound (Russia, 2006)

The Barbarian Boom of the ‘80s was the first normalization of fantasy as a mainstream genre for the movies. As the boom faded in the ‘90s (Xena notwithstanding), it seemed as if fantasy film had been just another passing phase. But then, in the early 2000s, along came The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean series: the Second Normalization of Fantasy Film had arrived, and as we’re still living with it in 2024, it looks to be permanent.

So, now we’re livin’ large and eatin’ good, right? Absolutely — as long as you’re something of a picky eater. Because along with normalization comes mediocrity and commercialization. I kid you not: Behold the KFC promotional toys for eragon!

eragon

Rating: ***
Origin: USA/UK, 2006
Director: Stefen Fangmeier
Source: 20th Century Fox Blu-ray

This isn’t half bad. But it’s only half good.

Sorry, let’s start over: Once upon a time, a young man named Christopher Paolini wrote a not-half-bad generic fantasy novel titled eragon inspired by such authors as J.R.R. Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, Bruce Coville, and Brian Jacques. Initially self-published when Paolini was 19, he promoted it so cannily and relentlessly that it was picked up by mainstream publisher Knopf, who gave Paolini a multi-book deal for (you guessed it) a trilogy. The movie rights were snapped up by Fox, the Hollywood gears ground for a couple of years, and in due course a feature film was delivered.

A short précis of the plot: Once upon a time the realm was protected by good knights riding dragons, but an Evil King betrays them and the dragons are killed, all but one egg that survives and eventually hatches. Its dragon chooses a spunky farm lad to be her rider, but the pair must survive the attacks of the Evil King’s assassin wizard to find the Rebel Base, where they can join the resistance against the Evil King, culminating in a Final Battle.

Yes, it’s a standard Chosen One story, and it should be terrible, but just this once it isn’t. eragon the film is a competent work made by a lot of talented professionals who knew their jobs, and it zips right along from beginning to end without a hitch. Harmless and charmless, it’s a slick piece of corporate mass-market product that has no heart and no soul, if such things as souls really exist.

To give credit where it’s due, the folks at Industrial Light & Magic and the Weta Workshop knocked themselves out on this thing, and the animation, special effects, and fantasy props are all top quality. The CGI dragon looks solid and credible, the flying scenes are imaginative and fun, and the magic spells are well-realized and visually effective.

There are even some acting performances worth mentioning, starting with John Malkovich as the Evil King, whose name is (I’m sorry) Galbatorix. He isn’t really in the film very much, but when he is he’s just what you want. Malkovich came onto a soundstage for maybe half a day so he could record ominous Evil King lines such as, “I suffer without my [magic] stone. Do not prolong my suffering.” Amen, brother.

Even better, there’s Jeremy Irons as Brom, the crusty former dragon rider who lost his ride, and by gum, he’s so good he almost saves the film. He looks great and he sounds great, even when uttering drivel like, “There was a time when our land flourished without cruelty and fear.” He says that stuff with such conviction and commitment that, when Irons is speaking, you almost buy this clichéd story.

Tragically, the rest of the cast are plastic action figures, mere androids, including robotic lead Ed Speleers as young dragon rider Eragon and all the other shmoes playing tissue-thin generic fantasy characters with names like Arya, Durza, Roran, and Horst. The biggest waste of all is Rachel Weisz lending her voice to the dragon Saphira, who though well-animated has no personality or anything interesting to say, and making that work is a trick not even Weisz can pull off.

So, eragon is just plain mediocre, but the good news is that the global movie audience came to the same conclusion, and it didn’t do well enough at the box office to justify filming the rest of the trilogy. And thanks to that, our land did flourish without cruelty and fear.

Beowulf

Rating: ***
Origin: USA, 2007
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Beowulf is a heroic fantasy adventure that uses the same computer-graphics-over-motion-capture technique as director Robert Zemeckis’s previous hit, Polar Express (2004), so the entire tale is set in the Uncanny Valley of near-human weirdness, rather like watching a two-hour video game cutscene. This was still strange in 2007, but we’re all used to it now. What’s less successful is that the film was made to be shown in 3D projection for audiences wearing special glasses, so it contains a fair amount of off-putting imagery like guards’ spearpoints right in your face that look preposterous when viewed in flat 2D.

The story was adapted from the 10th-century Old English epic poem by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, who added a few things to the original that got people’s attention. In the poem, the hero has two separate battles, first against the monster Grendel and his mother, and then, years later, against a dragon; the writers connect the two by making Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie) a hypersexualized scaly demoness who seduces Beowulf (Ray Winstone) with her emasculating magic, avoiding death at his hands and instead conceiving another monstrous child who becomes the dragon.

This is all as melodramatically lurid as can be, and the visuals don’t pull many punches — which is all to the good, because lurid visuals and dynamic video game action are what this movie is selling.

The acting is hit or miss, the standout being Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar, Gren-Mom’s first lover and lord of the mead hall assaulted by the monsters — even buried under layers of CGI, Hopkins’s wry wit shows through. Winstone plays Beowulf as a jock, a blowhard with narcissist NFL quarterback vibes, and when he ages and becomes rueful and reflective it’s hard to buy it. Jolie as Grendel’s mother is a mere cartoon vamp, John Malkovich is strangely forgettable as the wicked advisor Unferth, and Robin Wright makes little impression as Wealtheow, queen to both Hrothgar and Beowulf.

However, one must admit that the copious action Beowulf delivers is mostly very good, with the swooping final dragon fight a particular standout (though it’s still a shade too long). This thing may be shallow but it sure is good-looking, and definitely worth a single viewing. More than that, though? Maybe not.

Wolfhound

Rating: ****
Origin: Russia, 2006
Director: Nikolai Lebedev
Source: Momentum Pictures DVD

Wolfhound is a superior sword-and-sorcery adventure in the vein of Conan, but very dark and Russian. Based on a popular novel by Maria Semyonova, it starts out in an idyllic medieval village where a young boy admiringly watches his father, a blacksmith, forge an exceptional sword. Suddenly mounted raiders in nasty black armor attack, massacring the villagers and torching their houses, all under a prominent wolf’s-head banner. The raiders’ leader kills the boy’s parents and takes the exceptional sword, and when the boy tries to attack him, he tells his aide, “Send him to the mines.”

This isn’t an encouraging start because we’ve seen this exact scene in a hundred other medieval adventure films and TV shows. But then Wolfhound takes off on its own, getting inventive and weird. The initial raid had been shot in colorful summer countryside, but the subsequent dark mountain scene is in gloomy, saturated hues, lit fitfully by torches and distant lightning.

A lone adventurer is scaling the mountainside to infiltrate the lair of the wolf’s-head raiders. Is it our young orphan, now full-grown, scarred, and muscular? It seems so! He’s determined, sneaking past the armed guards, killing them when he has to, and here’s the important part: he has a pet bat.

You heard me. A pet bat.

While sneaking in, our hero, now known as Wolfhound (Aleksandr Bukharov), is passed by two women sneaking out, which is completely unexplained until much later, but we don’t care because suddenly we’re into the action, which will seem like it fills most of the next two hours. Once in the interior of the mountain, Wolfhound makes it across a network of swaying rope bridges to the inner sanctum of the chief raider, where the two have a fine boss battle. It’s a well-staged sword and spear fight, dynamic and exciting, and it starts the whole damn mountain lair on fire.

However, when his opponent is dead, Wolfhound discovers he’s killed the wrong raider boss, because this one doesn’t wear the wolf’s-head tattoo of the man who killed his father. The hero’s face twitches angrily, but he shrugs it off because he’s the Most Stoic Warrior in the World, and proceeds to escape. This means solving an extreme jumping puzzle in a flaming hell of plummeting rope bridges while encumbered with a couple of liberated prisoners picked up along the way — standard Conan stuff.

After that, the actual plot engine kicks to life, because this is more than just a standard lone-hero-seeks-vengeance story. Trailed by his new sidekicks, a former slave-woman and a blind healer, Wolfhound joins a merchant’s caravan making its way toward the trade city of Galirad. The caravan is ambushed by wolf’s-head raiders led by their other boss, the one Wolfhound is after, who wears a skull mask, has super strength, and is known as “The Greed.” (You always want your archenemy to have a cool title, because who wants to battle a nemesis named Bernard or Keith?)

Most of the good guys in this dark world are in the city of Galirad, which is under a mystic eternal-winter curse and is threatened by the Greed’s cultists, so to gain allies, the city’s rulers decide to marry off their princess, Knesinka (Oksana Akinshina), to a prince warlord of the north — only they’ll need to get her to him across a dangerous wilderness. Wolfhound is tapped to accompany the princess as her personal bodyguard, and in no time, they’re making eyes at each other in between fighting off cultists, barbarians, and mist demons.

There are some side quests and minor obvious treachery, but it doesn’t slow things down, as the combats keep getting wilder and more magic-enhanced as they go. In the final battle against the cultists’ evil god, Wolfhound gets to wield his father’s now-glowing sword, divinely transformed to be as tall as a redwood, easily the biggest phallic symbol in all of fantasy film. Epic!

And don’t worry: the pet bat survives and saves the day!

Where can I watch these movies? I’m glad you asked! Many movies and TV shows are available on disk in DVD or Blu-ray formats, but nowadays we live in a new world of streaming services, more every month it seems. However, it can be hard to find what content will stream in your location, since the market is evolving and global services are a patchwork quilt of rights and availability. I recommend JustWatch.com, a search engine that scans streaming services to find the title of your choice. Give it a try. And if you have a better alternative, let us know.

Previous installments in the Cinema of Swords include:

Beware of Greeks
Peak ‘90s Wuxia
Ashes of Time
Consider the Rapier
They Seek Him Here…
The Darkness Before the Dawn
Young Horatio Hornblower
Two-Thirds of a Miracle
Wolves and Scorpions
Zhang Yimou
Swords in the Arthouse
Pirates Rise from a Watery Grave

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LAWRENCE ELLSWORTH is busily promoting the Cinema of Swords compilation from Applause Books, a volume that was born right here at Black Gate! That book, out now, covers swordplay movies up through the ‘80s, but Ellsworth is continuing with new material for a Volume Two and is now working his way up through the 2000s. These later reviews are being published weekly on his new Cinema of Swords Substack blog, at cinemaofswords.substack.com.

Meanwhile, Ellsworth soldiers on at his mega-project of editing and translating new, contemporary English editions of all the works in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle; the seventh volume, Court of Daggers, is available now as an ebook or trade paperback from Amazon, while the eighth, Shadow of the Bastille, is being published in weekly instalments at musketeerscycle.substack.com. The ninth and final volume, The Man in the Iron Mask, will be published early next year by Pegasus Books. Ellsowrth’s website is swashbucklingadventure.net. Check it out!

(Ellsworth’s secret identity is game designer LAWRENCE SCHICK, who’s been designing role-playing games since the 1970s. He now lives in Dublin, Ireland, where he works for Larian Studios and was Principal Narrative Designer for the Dungeons & Dragons videogame Baldur’s Gate 3.)