Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Let's be realistic.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

MERLIN AND THE WAR OF THE DRAGONS is another weak and insipid fantasy film from the team at The Asylum. It was shot in the Welsh countryside with a bunch of stars who should never have been put in front of the camera, plus poor old Jurgen Prochnow, whose DAS BOOT days are long in the past. The plot seems to have been made up on the fly and there are bits and pieces of LORD OF THE RINGS thrown into the mix. A couple of the CGI dragon scenes are done okay and if you squint a bit you could suppose that you're watching GAME OF THRONES. I'm being charitable.

Merlin and the War of the Dragons is an Asylum take on the King Arthur legend and as Asylum films goes this is not bad although it is kind of dull in a lot of places. Merlin is played here by Simon Lloyd-Roberts and he does not do a bad job at it. The action sequences are only barely adequate here and so are the dragons presented here. Merlin and the War of the Dragons was filmed in Wales and this movie certainly makes good use of its filming location. The best part of this movie is Jurgen Prochnow in his very sincere performance as The Mage a performance in which he certainly believes in playing the character to his full effect. The end of this movie indicated a sequel but no such sequel was ever made and I would have been curious to see where this story would have gone on from here.

I hope this films budget was so low they could not even pay their actors. There is absolutely nothing good with this film. The actors cannot act and most of them seriously needs some tweezing. The "special" effects are outdated. The plot is more predictable then an episode of Murder she wrote. This film could have been entertaining if the people making it at least would know they were producing something so bad it dos not even warrant a straight-to-DVD release. But doing slow motion fight scenes to hide the lack of choreography and blurring the screen when the dragons are shown to hide your lack of a special effects budget is just really pathetic. If you want to watch a decent Merlin film, get the mini-series from 1998. Not only has it a better plot and actors, but it seems that special effects were better 10 years ago.If they make this into a trilogy I will resign from mankind and go live with the two horrible, but kind of cute, Lady of the lake actors in their cave.

There are Medieval fairs in New Jersey where the 16-year-old attendants at the fried foods tent have more knowledge of English history and mythology than the makers of this sorry excuse for a movie.The facts of this movie were verified by a guy who once saw 'Amedeus', the fight scenes were choreographed by Lindsey Lohan on New Years Eve, and the magical special effects were edited by giving the film to Edward Scissorhands after heavy application of cocaine.Each sword fight drags on until both stunt men die of boredom or succumb to nausea from the endless scene cuts that occur every time they clank their plastic swords together. Mark Atkins must have figured that the fight scenes wouldn't seem like two drunk z list actors waving Mattel toys around if he only filmed them a quarter of a second at a time.The movie wouldn't have been as bad if scene cuts weren't used for EVERYTHING. When a rock materializes out of thin air, you see people react in amazement to the rock before you see the rock just sitting there. When a character dies dramatically, all you see is the other actors vomiting in terror at the amazing death scene you just missed. Throughout the entire movie, I felt like the actors were watching the best movie ever and they wouldn't show it to me.If you still feel like watching this movie, here's a substitute that will benefit both you and everyone but the Asylum. Rent the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trilogies and invite your most inarticulate friends to watch them with you. While they watch these epics, position yourself at an angle next to your TV so you can see your friends react to these awesome movies but not the movies themselves. Then have them describe what's happening and see how satisfying it is.