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| Images courtesy of 4Digital Media Limited |
Bazelevs film studio founder Timur Bekmambetov is a prominent
figure in modern Russian cinema better suited for funding film productions
rather than directing them. Judging from
his efforts in the director’s chair including but not limited to the Russian
vampire hunter series Night Watch to his American actioner Wanted
and the ill-fated second remake of Ben-Hur, Bekmambetov’s best
affiliation with film involved ushering in genre movements such as the webcam
thriller and directors like Ilya Naishuller and the film worker behind today’s
movie Indar Dzhendubaev and his directorial debut film I Am Dragon or He’s
a Dragon depending on the translation.
Something of a 3D medieval Russian folklore answer to the
then-recent popularity of the Twilight series which just wrapped up, the
film is a photorealistic romantic fantasy epic loosely based on Ukrainian novelists
Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko’s 1996 novel The Ritual in which a human
sacrifice offered up to a shape-shifting dragon who can transform into human
form and the initial abductee soon comes to love this hybridized Beauty and
the Beast. Produced and released by
Bazelevs with additional rewrites by the director, Aleksey Arsenev and Roman
Nepomnyashchy, the lavish 3D film picked up by Netflix internationally is among
the better dragon-centric live action films and offers fantasy lore hounds
something akin to Aleksandr Ptushko though not nearly as colorful or visually
striking as that Soviet legend.
Opening on a flashback involving tales of young maidens
offered up to dragons in exchange for not destroying a local Kievan Rus village
before a knight in shining armor takes on and defeats the dragon before
rescuing the girl, earning the moniker of the Dragon Slayer. Years later a young beautiful princess named
Miroslava (Maria Poezzhaeva) is to be wedded to the dragon slayer’s grandson
Igor (Pyotr Romanov) when during the wedding ceremony the villagers sing a
ritualistic song that summons the dragon who flies in and promptly captures the
princess and imprisons her on a remote island where his cave is.
Not long into her abduction a man suffering from amnesia in
the next room begins communicating with her whom she names Arman (Matvey Lykov)
and they start to form a bond when she discovers he’s not a man at all but a
dragon who can transform in and out of human form albeit uncontrollably. Agreeing to shelter the woman long enough for
Igor to come find her, the unlikely pair begins spending a lot more time
together and soon fall in love though still fearful of the dragon that can come
and go at any time. Much like Beauty
and the Beast, the film goes through the machinations of the creature
expelling the innocent girl from his dark kingdom only for their love to be so
strong she can’t help but come right back to his doorstep, giving viewers a
most unusual interspecies romance somehow or another not involving a CG
animated donkey.
An expensive super-production filmed in Bulgaria, the Black
Sea and Moscow with most of the picture consisting of fully CG rendered creations
and environments, I Am Dragon is a Bekmambetov production through and
through with newcomer Dzhendubaev hastily steering the ship which probably
spent more money on the marketing than the production itself. Reportedly the posters for the movie were
shot on film over a sixteen-hour shoot, unusual in this day and age for film
banners. The soundtrack by Echo and the
Bunnymen drummer Simon Finley is a serviceable orchestral score with an
original song sung by Jenia Lubich that included a hit music video.
Acting wise the ensemble cast is fine with Maria Poezzhaeva
as the film’s initially frail sacrificial lamb who finds an unusual devotion to
the creature. Music video and television
actor Matvey Lykov as the dragon/human hybrid exudes a Robert Pattinson quality
to his doomed shape shifter. The film
also boasts the legendary acting talent of Soviet screen legend Stanislav Lyubshin
from I Am Twenty as the princess’ father who like everyone else is
fearful of the situation with the dragon but soon comes to accept his daughter’s
unexpected love and devotion to the creature.
While nothing spectacular, it is always interesting to see actors from
the Soviet era still actively working in the new.
Tragically, despite an expensive and lavish world premiere
at Karo 11 October cinema, the 3D I Am Dragon flopped at the Russian box
office. Against an $18 million budget,
the film only raked in around $1.7 million domestically. However, in other countries such as China the
film grossed huge numbers and effectively became the most successful Russian
film ever released in the territory. A
couple years later the film finally made its United States debut where it was
met with mixed reception, including some dubbing it a Twilight clone.
Still at present, the film is regarded as having the most
technically complicated computer-generated imagery creation in the history of
Russian cinema with the dragon itself. Whatever
your stance is on Eastern European movies or Russian folklore depicted in
either the Soviet or modern era, I Am Dragon comes as something of an
underrated cult item in the west: a medieval teenage girl’s fantasy romance novel
just now being discovered amid the Year of the Dragon.
--Andrew Kotwicki
