Dragon Head (2003) User Reviews

Clichés and pacing hurts a wonderfully bleak film

[dbborroughs · 7/10 · 21 October 2004]

There have been great Japanese disaster films like Submersion of Japan, and dreadful ones like Earthquake 7.9. This film falls between the best and worst in the good range.

A teenage boy wakes up on a train. He remembers traveling with his class somewhere when something happened, something terrible of which he is one of the few survivors. The first 40 minutes are set in a collapsed train tunnel where the survivors try to come to terms with their situation, both in the tunnel and in their heads. Its an odd way to start a film, but it works since it allows things to be set up and expectations to be dismantled.

After the 40 minutes the movie moves outside as the survivors struggle to travel across what is now a truly alien earth. What happened is not clear at least at first, but it was big and powerful and not over.

For the most part this film works in spades. Visually this film has set the bar to new end of the world films, and I can only imagine what a live action version of the manga and anime classic Akira would look like in the hands of these film makers. The acting is mostly fine with several eerie performances by several of the supporting cast. I also love the fact that this film is dealing with more than just destruction. There are ideas being battered about, as with the strange pair of kids who's father has removed that part of their brain that allows them to fear. Its trippy and creepy at the same time.

Unfortunately the film also has two serious, but not fatal problems. The first the film occasionally moves into cliché a couple of times, as in the crazed soldiers who hook up with our heroes. Why do we need this insanity, even if the film attempts to explain it? The other problem is the pacing is uneven. Sometimes sequences seem to go on a bit too long, while others are too speedy. It grated on this viewer and it felt longer than two hours. As I said its not fatal, but it is annoying because the film as a whole deserves better.

I liked this, especially its sense of the new world. 7 out of 10. See it if you get the chance.

Life among the ruins

[Mark-129 · 7/10 · 3 May 2004]

Yes, the two leads are rather dull and the complete breakdown of society in about 48 hours, while explained by a few throwaway lines of dialog is a little hard to swallow. Still, Dragon Head is a success. A story where 2 high school kids emerge from what they think was an underground train wreck to find a natural disaster has decimated the entire countryside. Their immediate goal is to get to their homes in Tokyo. Along the way, the encounter the dregs of what remains of the populace, escaping death several times. The two youngsters also learn, that despite losing everything, in this new world, having each other is their most important possession. The ending is anti-climatic, but thanks to some nice special effects and upbeat music leaves off on a hopeful, if not positive note.

Has positives and negatives.

[zv300 · 7/10 · 8 May 2006]

This movie is hard to score because it excels at one thing while failing miserably at another. It's about the end of Earth, (something like that) and the following chaos that follows. I'm sure that some point was lost in it's translation, but the movie does not seem to have a goal or distinct message, except for survival, which may be the message. The two lead characters are VERY weak and seem to have no chemistry at all. They don't even seem like they could, or would fall in love. And any other characters you meet are not explored to any extent, and I don't know why not because in parts this movie seems to DRAG-ON for decades! It gets really slow, but if it added something to the story I would not mind but it's slow for SLOWNESS sake, as if to fill up the 1 1/2 with mindless banter. Well that's the bad, and now the good, the effects are the best catastrophe-movie effects I have ever seen BAR-NONE! They completely beat any inane American Movie of the genre, and probably for 10% of what Hollywood over-spends for effects. Everything looked pretty real, the Horizon was always ash-covered and the cities really looked bombed out, and the meteors towards the end looked REALLY good, blasting through buildings like they were mere paper. Actually, the effects are the only reason to watch the movie but it does impart a feeling of dispare and survival, but the story needed more work.

Pretty good movie ...

[entregan · 7/10 · 26 September 2006]

I rented this expecting a little out of this movie (the movie's graphics are grade A regardless of the B-movie feel) and got what I wanted and then some. Subtitling was great.

SLIGHT SPOILERAGE BELOW ... nothing that explains the movie though Good premise. Along the lines of 28 days and The Thing with the way the people react to being put in a stressful situation.

If you get the chance, definitely pick it up for rental. As far as buying ... weak buy if you're into apocalypse movies (mainly because they only show what's going on in Japan and you don't know what's going on in the rest of the world ... no 'The Core', 'Day After Tomorrow' 'feel' where stuff is going on around the world). That turns into a moderate buy if you're into Anime and want to show some other anime lovers something different, but they would appreciate (especially because the main girl sounds exactly like one of the whiny characters out of Inuyasha or something). Turns into a high moderate buy if you want something for people to say they've never seen before - and you may not get it back.

This guy really is immortal!

[siderite · 7/10 · 12 July 2005]

This movie is what you come up with if you take Armaggedon and you mix it with Die Hard. You remove Bruce Willis and make the main character die even harder, but not save anyone. You add a little Lord of the Flies and make it Japanese. Voila!

This is a movie that could have been a little shorter. It felt really long at its two hours, however it was surprisingly good. It's a disaster movie where people act disastrously, as the calamity that occurred is affecting the human brain as well.

The effects were nice, the emotions in the movie were rather violent for my taste, and I blamed it on Japanese cinema, but it was the magnetic field's fault (or was it? :) ). The script was well done and I thought the actors played well.

It's worth a watch, it may surprise you. It was very close to an 8, but the accent put too strongly on human insanity and the length dropped it to 7.

If I took a drink every time someone fell down, I'd be dead

[cbalogh · 3/10 · 14 September 2006]

What is really disappointing about this movie is that the art direction is so fantastic, it makes the inane acting so upsetting to watch. Seriously, 3/4 of this movie focuses on the main character stumbling around, falling down, and then waddling around on the ground like an invalid. None of the characters act at all rational, and yet they are all surrounded by amazing sets and brilliantly realized visions of the apocalypse. If only the director could have things move faster, or have people stop falling over. I thought to myself, "if I took a drink every time someone falls down to the ground, I'd be dead." It might make a fun time at a party of with some friends, but if you're looking to enjoy a good movie, I would skip out on this tumbling mess.

An odd mix of boring and annoying

[strausbaugh · 4/10 · 20 October 2005]

Yes, the manga-inspired art direction is very fine. Too bad there's no plot, and it's paced slower than a Bergman film, and there's not a single actor in it who knows how to convey distress without shouting, whining and falling down. Literally, they spend most of the movie doing those three things, over and over and over, until you wonder why they don't all kill one another and drink one another's blood--not to survive, but just to shut everyone up. For a post- apocalyptic sci-fi type film, it's amazing how very little else happens in its very s- l-o-w two hours. And yet for all its ponderous and portentous stylings, it says nothing to us about survival or friendship or civilization or etc.--all the Big Issues this type of movie is supposed to have us ponder--that we don't get from airheaded Hollywood blockbusters like "Armageddon" and "War of the Worlds."

A missed opportunity (a couple of spoilers)

[Denatir · 3/10 · 18 April 2006]

While Japanese theater has reached a new height in the west, there are still some duds to be seen. The premise of "Dragonhead" is a great one, 3 students survive a train wreck in a tunnel on the way home from school. One of them decides to get out of the tunnel and get to the surface any way possible where they find Japan changed drastically. Total destruction as far as the eye can see from an unknown cause. This premise opens the door on LOTS of possibilities, but the film falls short of any real scares. The problem that I had was that the film has a feel of a society in months or years of disintegration, not days. There are kids that have had MAJOR brain surgery and fully recovered, fully degenerated people out to kill themselves and the students that find them, and a somewhat weak explanation of magnetic forces on the brain. Originality aside, this film fails to deliver what so many other Japanese films do well. Skip this one.

A visual masterpiece

[wlee08 · 9/10 · 22 September 2012]

I had some reservations before borrowing this movie from the local library. I wasn't sure whether to expect a low-budget dragon movie or something with really bad set design. I couldn't have been more off. This movie may have some of the most spectacular sets I've ever seen. No details or expense was spared in creating the visually stunning and surreal backdrop. The plot has a nice forward momentum full of action and trepidation. But definitely go for the subtitles instead of the English overdub. Nothing can ruin a movie more than an awful dubbing in that ridiculous English voice with the accent. You have to hand it to the Japanese - they are much better at making these kinds of movies than Hollywood seems to be.

quite possibly the worst film ever made

[LunarPoise · 1/10 · 9 October 2006]

I am a sucker for post-apocalyptic event films, and will cut them a lot more slack than other Hollywood fare. However, Dragon Head has made me very wary of ever returning to the genre. What a waste of celluloid. No story, no character development, poor effects, and a male lead who wanders about clueless from start to finish. Most bad films leave you bored or listless; with Dragon Head, I was shouting at the TV screen, it was so mind-numbingly stupid.

Some kind of apocalyptic event has taken place while the protagonist was riding the train. What is this event? How did it come about? We are never told. How do the surviving male and female high school pupils come to terms with this event? They don't. How do they grow, mature and change through the film? They don't. They just wander from one bizarre scenario to the next (from a town where the youth have turned on their elders, to a bunker where everyone is eating drugged food) without any causal relationship between the stages of their journey or the events they encounter there. I suppose some kind of Lord of the Flies metaphor is implied by the boy-savage who menaces the leads in the first third, but without connecting this to WHY civilisation has ended and WHY people are reacting the way they are, the message goes nowhere.

A script as poor as this should never, ever have been made. Sayaka is a good actress, as she showed with a nuanced performance in the short film Bean Cake, but even she can't salvage this. This film has no saving graces. Not a single one.

It gets one star, because I am not allowed to give it zero.

Who knew the apocalypse could be so boring?

[niz · 1/10 · 29 March 2004]

"Hey, I've just been to Uzbekistan and found lots of places that would make a great post-apocalypse location shoot! Lets do it!" A film that seemingly exists just to show off the geography, and has no story of interest (2 people escape from a train wreck in tunnel, on reaching the surface they discover the world is ended, nobody knows why, there are a few survivors struggling for existence etc etc), and no characters of interest (a couple of dull teenagers, a sprinkling of nut cases, only some twins who have been operated on to have their fear removed spark any interest).

Its hard to believe this is based on a manga: who would read such a dull comic? Nothing happens: at the end, it feels like it was just a feature-length first episode of a mini-series. So what about this geography? Well, yes, its definitely desolate, colorless, cold, post-apocalyptic. But 2 hours of looking at people stumbling through it? No thanks.

Now 2016!! Don't waste your time on these

[tkullachet · 1/10 · 26 April 2016]

Don't waste your time on these if you already pass 2012(another world end story), ID4(1996), Inception, Interstella, Tag(2015), Dawn of the Dead, Warm Zombie, WALKING DEAD(SS6)!!

In comic version which the author reputation raise from the very first person whom wrote about psychological conflict of the human's mind during the world ending environment, despite the awful dull in every characters... The Film go in the same way.

But not only that, the film upgrade boring stuff by let the actors show you how dull they were in first 10 minutes. please save the times you got for others ... these score 5.8 still too overrated. (2016.04.26)

So boring you'll be hard pressed to stay awake...

[paul_haakonsen · 3/10 · 7 July 2021]

Given this 2003 movie's synopsis and its cover, I must say that I was rather interested in watching it, as I stumbled upon the movie by random chance in 2021. I hadn't even heard about the movie prior to now, as I had the chance to sit down to watch it.

And I made it halfway through the ordeal that is known as "Doragon heddo" (aka "Dragon Head") before I just gave up out of sheer and utter boredom. Wow, this movie was horribly pointless, slow paced, uneventful and just downright boring. Sure the destruction and the mayhem in the beginning of the movie was interesting, but then the movie lost its momentum and settled into an abysmal pace from which it never recovered.

And it didn't help much that the character gallery in "Dragon Head" was as flaccid and mundane as they come. Talk about having characters that you don't care one bit about.

Visually, then "Dragon Head" was actually adequate, but having sufficient visuals can only do so much when a movie is totally lacking an interesting or captivating storyline. And "Dragon Head" most certainly didn't have anything even remotely of an interesting storyline.

I have zero interest in returning to watch the remaining hour of the movie, because I simply didn't enjoy the storyline one bit, and I didn't care a single bit about the characters and the laughable dialogue that the actors and actresses were struggling with.

This movie had so much potential, and it was definitely wrapped up and presented well enough to make it seem appealing and interesting. The cold hard facts of the matter was a whole different issue as the movie trotted on as I suffered through one of the longest hours of my life.

I am rating "Dragon Head" a generous three out of ten, given the production value and the visuals. Everything else in the movie was just simply a swing and a miss.

Finally a disaster pic worth watching.

[troika19 · 10/10 · 9 November 2004]

After sitting through predictable bore fests I finally get a disaster movie that is worth two hours of My life.

Dragon Head (based on a manga of the same name) starts off like Your run of the mill train wreck movie with two teenagers teaming up up to escape the carnage as well as a totally flipped out third teen only to discover the World that they knew has all but been wiped out by an horrific disaster leaving only an almost deserted waste land where even the Sun is blocked from view by volcanic ash actually raining down to Earth like thick snow.

Basically the movie centers around the two leads trying to make it back to Tokyo and their adventures along the way with a cast of unique and at times plain creepy characters showing up along the way, there are some flaws here and there but overall this is a great emotional, bleak, depressing yet in the end hopeful movie that I fully enjoyed and I personally thought the two lead actors did a superb job and at times the visuals and landscape were depressing yet stunning.

10/10

I found it better than "The day after tomorrow"

[Hellsinger · 10/10 · 5 August 2004]

Having watched a huge panorama of movies already, i was pleased to see Dragonhead. It is an Easter-Asian movie, and i decided to watch quite a few others after this one.

The special effects are just good, sometimes really good. It is a good approach to such a movie too, because you start to think it's a nuclear disaster at the beginning, and then you find out it's actually something a bit worse than that, when the crust of the earth moves, the Earth's balance shifts. That's true, but especially when the magnetic field gets messed up, our apocalypse will come, or rather will rain down on us without holding back the tears of destruction.

When you have a volcano popping up not far from you, and throwing up huge magma bricks at you, that is not nice, i wasn't surprised the humans, well at least the Japanese lost the will to fight for life. But then again, some people have to believe in the future, because there is always a future, no matter how grim things look like.

I put 10/10 for Dragonhead, because of its realism, Apocalypse is not about happiness, it is boring, and everyone just needs to find the will to fight on, against all odds. If you like something a bit different than big blockbusters, then this movie is so for you, because in Asia they approach everything from an objective point of view, that is what makes their quality.

Lost in translation... ^_^

[osmanme · 8/10 · 18 July 2004]

Well, if you're expecting a Hollywood blockbusting action style flick, you'll be sorely disappointed. It is based on a Japanese manga, but it's not one of the kill everything type of mangas. The vast majority of people are already dead.

The film loses something in its translation to English. It is based on a bleak view of how an apocalypse would affect Japan, or more particularly Tokyo. All I can say is that the characters reactions, psyches and the types of characters involved are typically Japanese in style. The extremities of some characters reactions seems unbelievable, but they are common extreme reactions found in Japanese mangas and other Japanese productions.

A human approach to disaster

[katalili2000 · 9/10 · 11 August 2006]

I really liked this movie. It is a "catastrophe" movie, even though it has nothing to do with the typical western idea of such a happening. It does not indulge in the process of reversing the trauma, it rather centers it's plot on surviving the drama. The characters are not typical western heroes, willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the collective. They are merely humans trying to survive in a world suddenly so different and hostile. It covers the bonds between the survivors, the human will to live, and the human will to just let go. An excellent movie, with some forms of dialogue typical for Japanese movies, and fond of human relations. It has great effects, but it's not a Hoolywood blockbuster movie with stupid plot. The disaster is just described, some ideas are given, but there is not detailed description of what happened. And there is no turning back.

Do not embrace the darkness!

[wolfmano23 · 10/10 · 10 March 2006]

On the way home from a school trip to Kyoto, a tragic accident traps Teru Aoki's express train in a collapsed tunnel. the only other survivors of the catastrophe are his classmates, Ako Seto and Nobuo Takahashi. Teru resolves to escape to the surface, braving death, danger, and madness. But what awaits them outside is a desolate landscape of utter ruin as far as the eye can see. Battling insanity and starvation Teru and Ako search for a way to reach the only home either of them has even known, Tokyo. What could have caused such destruction? A natural disaster? A nuclear holocaust? A meteor? Encountering other survivors quickly changes from a blessing to a curse when it is revealed that a violent volcanic eruption has altered not only the landscape but the fragile electromagnetic field, that surrounds the earth, altering human brain chemistry causing some to slip into insanity to a staggering degree. This story is one of survival, pure and simple can love truly conquer all? That's the real question. In the vain of "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Armageddon" Doragon heddo(Dragon head) doesn't disappoint.

Dragon Head (2003)

[SnakesOnAnAfricanPlain · 9/10 · 13 December 2011]

An absolute corker. Dragon Head is a film I knew nothing about. It starts in a demolished tunnel. A train crash. Three students have survived. 2 boys and a girl. They are unsure as to what has happened. One boy recalls seeing blinding lights outside the windows before the crash. This is the premise of the first 40 minutes, which works as its own film. One boy is hoping to be rescued but then plans his escape, while the other descends into madness. It's like a mini version of Lord of the Flies. I will mention the girl only this once as she is the reason I didn't give this film a perfect 10. She is a whiny character, that screams when someone is attacking her and then screams at the person protecting her. She complains about the scary tunnel, but whines about how dangerous the escape looks. All she does is whine, bitch, moan, and generally irritate. This first 40 minutes serves as all the character development. It's a great idea to build a huge movie in such a confined space.

After the students leave tunnel, they find the world is covered in something white. Destruction is everywhere, and it's hard to separate the sky from the land. The effects here are wonderful. It's a fantastical and daring image. As the students walk on they discover some other survivors. These survivors have lost all hope and are planning to end it for everyone.

Based on a Manga, the film should be episodic. However, due to the emotional connection developed, each scene has a welcome fluidity that allows it to go from creepy birthday party gone wrong, to helicopter action sequence. As the film begins to wind down, it has no reservations with slowing it all down allowing us to appreciate all the messages. It's a film about hope, where those that give up are the real failures. As some of the characters begin to remove fear, they forget that it's the fear that helps us survive. One of the best disaster movies you will ever see.