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.

Likes : * The CGI dragons are great - very mythical and more appropriate than a more Hollywood/Spielberg style would have been * The location - totally fitting moody Welsh landscapes * Some of the acting was good * The music was a bit overblown but quite professionalDislikes : * The acting direction was non-existent so despite the individual actors doing a reasonable job there was no sense of interaction or timing. * The camera work was atrocious. Most of the film is shot in close up with occasional distant shots where you cant actually see whats going on. Ironically although most shots are static (i.e. no dolly or tracking)the degree of camera shake tells you its hand held. * Editing was poor and uninspired. Some of the conversational sequences were obviously pieced together from shots taken at different times.Even low budget films can be successful if well directed - this one unfortunately wasn't. There are so many bizarre mistakes - hand held cameras that don't actually move; gorgeous open Welsh landscapes that you cant see because the camera work is too tight, good enthusiastic actors that end up sounding like a school play through lack of direction.

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 The "special" effects are outdated.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.

This film is a story about merlin as a youth. This is an interesting premise but the actual film was a disappointment. the script dialog was bad and should have been worked a little bit more to improve the movie. The film's flow between scenes was not smooth and the editing was bad. The part about this film that really annoyed me was the cinematography. The composition of the film's scenes was really bad. The camera shots did not make any sense. For example, some of the battle scenes were not focused on the action but off center. One could consider it an attempt to be "artistic", but it was not. Overall the film was very amateurish and not worth my time.