Merlin and the War of the Dragons (2008)

Well, this is by the same folks that did Dragonquest, so I wasn't expecting much. But, there in the very first scene is none other than Jurgen Prochnow, whom I prefer to think of as the Duke, Leto Atriedes. That had to be a good sign, I thought, and it was.
Even thought this film was by the same production company as Dragonquest, with the same director, it did not have the same cast of actors as I thought it might for some reason. But, that's not a bad thing. This time out instead of some crap story, there is actually a decent tale telling of the beginnings of Merlin and how Uther Pendrag came to rule as King of Britain. They took liberties with that, of course, but I'm okay with it.
The same special effects company, Tiny Juggernaut, did the special effects for this movie as for Dragonquest, and did just as good a job, with a lot more dragons flying about at once, but not as many 'glowy' and 'showy' effects applied to them, letting them look more like traditional dragons. The rest of the special effects were okay, reminding me a lot of syndicated television shows like Xena or Hercules.
The one complaint I have about this movie, well the one major complaint, is that they tried to have a battle scene representing thousands of warriors with a cast of about 20. They did try all kinds of camera tricks and special effects tricks, including some CGI soldiers at a very far distance which actually looked pretty good. The film suffered for having so few actors in the battle. Actually much in the same way that television shows, like the ones I mentioned above often do. Army A meets Army B, and somehow we're only shown about a dozen or a dozen and a half men at any one time. Even big name shows from the 80s and 90s had this problem. I've always thought if it is important enough to the story to have a large crowd, cut back on your special effects and hire the extras. I cannot even begin to tell you how annoyed I was as a kid to see shows like the A-Team fight a large bunch of goons, yet somehow the same vehicle is getting shown blowing up in different scenes, and they fight bad guys four or five at a time. Or how in Buck Rogers, there would be supposedly epic space battles involving squadrons of space ships on each side, yet we would only see three ships at a time. Okay, I always cut this show a little slack in that department because they were just doing what Battlestar Galactica had done.
Until the credits rolled, I was really excited that this company - The Asylum - had come so far in one movie, but then the production date was shown and this was made the year before Dragonquest. I could have guessed that based on the special effects, but I was hoping it was the other way around. The quality of story and acting went way down in one year's time. I am curious to see what they're doing now, though. maybe Dragonquest was the fluke.

Merlin and the War of the Dragons at IMDb