Here there be dragon movies, and not a whole lot of them. For whatever reason, perhaps because they require very expensive visual effects, there aren’t a lot of movies about proper dragons compared to all the other movie monsters. And many of them suck out loud. In this installment of Best Movie Ever you won’t find any votes for Eragon or Dungeons & Dragons, for example. But you will find CraveOnline‘s film critics wracking their brains to come up with their picks for The Best Dragon Movie Ever.
Related Article: How to Train Your Dragon 2 Review: Vermithrax Overwhelmingly Positive
Join William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo as they present their arguments, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to vote for your own favorites. What’s your favorite dragon movie, anyway?
Witney Seibold:
This week is a tough call because, well, movies that feature dragons typically kinda suck. Sure, you have a few I-guess-that-one-was-okay films like Dragonheart and Reign of Fire, but I try to think of legitimately great films to feature a dragon, and I am coming up short (I will mention the few I can think of below). Perhaps if I were to finally hunker down to the much-lauded 1980s cult classic Dragonslayer, I might find the final gem in the genre, but as it stands, I find myself having to shift standards away from the wizarding and fantasy conceits that the creatures are usually associated with. And no, The Desolation of Smaug is not a good film, or even really an entertaining one. The original animated film version of The Hobbit was superior in every regard.
Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is his magnum opus, and features a boy that can turn into a dragon. King Ghidorah is a dragon villain in the Godzilla series. I did like the dragon scenes in Sleeping Beauty. The best film, however, to feature a dragon is Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, a 4 ½ silent epic from 1924. This is epic filmmaking at its finest. More than just varied in tone and possessed of a prodigious length, Die Nibelungen espouses a similar feeling to actually reading an ancient epic. There is a sense of grandeur, of scope, of enormity to a film like Die Nibelungen that most filmmakers seems to have forgotten in the modern era. So when the brave hero Siegfried (Paul Richter) does battle with a giant dragon (achieved with the most impressive on-set practical effects you will ever see), we see a giant metahuman doing away with the poison evil of an ineffably old monster.
And that’s just how the film opens. The giant battles, deep heartbreak, and overwhelming magical size of this production is infectious. And there’s a dragon in it. So there you go.
Fred Topel:
Boy, there really aren’t that many good dragon movies. How to Train Your Dragon is great, Dragonheart is fun but Dragonslayer even leaves me cold. There are some decent movies with dragons in them, and I could have been cute and picked Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story or Red Dragon, but even though I liked them I don’t think I could justify them as the BEST movies with dragon in the title.
Good thing I’ve been watching all the old Godzilla movies, because Godzilla’s greatest enemy is a three headed dragon, King Ghidorah, who has appeared in multiple movies. While I’m enjoying the‘90s Heisei series the best, the 1991 Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah is a convoluted time travel mess that’s slow despite all the plottiness. There’s GMK (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack) which certainly gives you lots of monster fights for your buck, but it wasn’t as memorable to me as the original.
So it falls to a classic Showa era film to be the best dragon movie, and that is Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster. When Ghidorah first appears in Tokyo, it takes Godzilla, Mothra AND Rodan to fight him. Though the ‘60s era effects are still primitive, you really get a sense of the teamwork the monsters use to battle Ghidorah. There’s really one image that embeds Ghidorah in my mind. A larval Mothra riding on Rodan’s back to spray Ghidorah with silk to immobilize him is everything that is right with the world.
William Bibbiani:
When I make my selections for Best Movie Ever I frequently find myself retreating to Plato’s Cave. The coolest movie dragon may be Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer (it certainly has the coolest name), the best dragon character is still Smaug from the Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit, but the best dragon movie ever has to be “about” dragons, doesn’t it? And although How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2 are superior dramatically, and Pitof’s enormously underrated Fire and Ice: The Dragon Chronicles certainly deserves an honorable mention, only one film qualifies: The Flight of Dragons, directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr. (Those guys really knew their dragons.)
A little-seen animated film from 1982, and only barely released on home video to this very day, The Flight of Dragons was based on a speculative non-fiction book by writer Peter Dickinson and illustrator Wayne Anderson. They had no story, and focused instead on taking all the fairy tale notions of dragons – like breathing fire and hoarding gold – and coming up with reasonable-sounding scientific explanations. When the time came to turn The Flight of Dragons into a movie, the filmmakers concocted a story about a fantasy enthusiast accidentally forced into a battle with the evil wizard Ommadon (voiced by James Earl Jones), but here’s the twist: his mind winds up in the body of a dragon.
Although our hero dreams of escaping the real world, once he gets to fantasy land he applies everything he knows about science to the fairy tale tropes found in The Flight of Dragons. He’s fascinated by what has happened to him and wants to learn more, and ultimately is forced to do battle using only his wits against a villain whose powers defy explanation. In fact, they defy explanation too such an incredible degree that our hero basically just talks Ommadon out of using them. That’s very clever. The whole movie is very clever, and approaches what we “know” about dragons – good and bad – from the perspective of those who love them and want to understand them better. You know, like the audience. That probably should have been a cloying conceit, but instead it just makes for the nerdiest dragon movie ever made. And by extension, arguably the best.
Brian Formo:
Welcome to Best Movie Ever where I continue to psychoanalyze my childhood. Dragons really should’ve been up my alley as a kid. Like most boys I loved dinosaurs. But dinosaurs were real dammit and dragons are a boy’s unicorn. Breathing fire, flying, having multiple heads? They were a mutation. Dinosaurs were already perfect.
I suppose I should blame Ron Howard. Willow scared the crap out of me as a six-year old. I had numerous nightmares of the two-headed dragon. I don’t remember if one of their heads actually got cut off and turned into a screaming pile of melting flesh, but it at least happened in my dream. My mother wrote Mr. Howard an angry letter for targeting children with something more suitable for teens on up.
Yes, I was a wimp. But I was done with dragons.
But you know what I’ve always loved? Word play. Double entendres. So my choice for “Best Dragon Movie” will go wimpy, twee: it’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And the dragons lose. The dragons that Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) must defeat appear from a bitching keyboard solo performed by the Katayanagi twins (Keita Saito and Shota Saito) during a band battle. Dragons are closely aligned with music, most notably shitty music, like Sisqo and Imagine Dragons. So of course they’d come from dual keyboard pompousness and be defeated by a Yeti that hero Pilgrim is able to summon from his guitar pedal stomp. Superfuzz bigmuff beats keyboard wizardry every time. Dragon smote. Order restored.
Oh, the double entendre? I nearly forgot thee. The Katanyanagi twins are an allusion to the beat ’em up arcade game Double Dragon. A game I frequently played as a kid. And there are no dragons.
