The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 15, 2014

As far as low budget sword and sorcery "epics" go, The Crown and the Dragon isn't exactly horrible, but it's not exactly good, either. Saddled with a fairly predictable plot and an emphasis on character rather than amazing visual effects, this lo-fi Game of Thrones wannabe struggles mightily to say or do anything new with the genre, ending up traipsing down pretty familiar magical forest paths without providing much in the way of storytelling finesse. A supposedly spunky heroine named Elenn (Amy De Brhun) sets off to deliver a sacred relic to a would be king, only to run into invading forces. She's forced to team up with a supposedly dastardly criminal named Aedin (David Haydn) to restore peace and stability to her troubled land. Can bodice ripping true love be far behind?

While production values and even CGI are reasonably decent here, the true entertainment value of The Crown and the Dragon may come from simply turning on the subtitles. Yes, that's a rather odd thing to say, but I actually started giggling uncontrollably as the film unspooled and over and over again whoever did the subtitles just left big question marks (as in actual question marks) for large swaths of the dialogue, as if to say "WTF"? There are even a couple of occasions where this intrepid transcriber attempted to guess at what was being said and placed question marks within question marks around words he or she typed in to the best of his or her ability. It's an admittedly odd way to eke entertainment value out of a property, but with something like The Crown and the Dragon, it's best to just take what you can and not ask too many questions.

The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cinedigm with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. For such a recent vintage digitally shot feature, things look surprisingly drab here. Forest scenes are sometimes noticeably softer than the bulk of the presentation. The palette here is rather subdued, with an emphasis on ambers, browns and beiges and with only brief pops of color like Elenn's dress brightening the proceedings. Clarity and image stability are fine.

The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Christian Davis' score is one of the better things about this outing, and it sounds very nice on the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Sounds like the fire erupting from the dragon's mouth or the silver metal sounds of swords hitting each other are also rendered clearly and cleanly. The dialogue includes a lot of made up words (hence part of the confusion by the subtitle typist, I suspect), and can be a hard nut to crack at times (and obviously the subtitles don't help in that regard).

The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:05)

The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

For those who appreciate outré parlor games, watching The Crown and the Dragon: The Paladin Cycle with subtitles on might provide a moment or two of off the wall humor. Otherwise, this is a pretty rote dungeons and dragons type escapade. Production values are reasonably good here, and the high definition presentation is fine if not outstanding.