Current mood:	anxious
Current music:	Sasha - Open Water (2006) Track 2 - Automatic

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King
Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (aka Ring of the Nibelungs )

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King is a fantasy mini-series appearing on SciFi Channel(USA) on 27 March 2006

Based on the Germanic saga of the Nibelungenlied which tells the story of Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer. The source material for the story helped inspire J.R.R. Tolkien to write "The Lord of the Rings."

Written by the wife-and-husband team of Diane Duane & Peter Morwood, it stars Benno Fürmann, Kristanna Loken, Alicia Witt and Max von Sydow,
was directed by Uli Edel, and is a Tandem Communications production.The German language version, Die Nibelungen, was shown on the German TV channel Sat 1 on Nov. 29 & 30, 2004. It was the highest-rated mini-series of the year on German television.



Dark Kingdom - The Dragon King (2006) DVD (USA) - 28 March 2006 - US$16.99
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007OCG5Q/104-3593155-1540760?v=glance&n=130

( comments about the dvd on amazon:

Compared to the region 2 DVD, where the film has 2 parts (as it was shown on European TV)
and runs about 177 minutes in PAL (which equals 184 minutes in NTSC), this version was
obviously cut by about 50 minutes. The title (UK: Ring of the Nibelungs) was also
inexplicably changed, lest any U.S. viewers be put off by the similarity to the Wagner
opera cycle. The fact is that the operas are based on the same source material, an
ancient (about 800 year old) Germanic saga, similar to the British Beowulf legend and other myths. The "Nibelungenlied" has been filmed several times (there is even a silent movie version),
but this latest TV adaptation has been updated to match the tastes of today's audiences.

There is plenty of swordplay, some good special effects, and a fine story. Some younger
viewers might be surprised that someone had ideas like that 750 years before Tolkien.
Kristanna Loken is great to look at and quite adept at handling a sword. Since the cast
is international (German, Swedish, America-Norwegian), there is a weird mix of accents,
but apart from that, the movie is quite entertaining and deserves some recognition.

The soundtrack is also good, and the DVD offers a decent 5.1 sound. The opening map places
the action (as in the original saga) in Burgundy, a region that straddles today's border
between France and Germany. The movie was shot in South Africa, although the landscapes
are digitally made to resemble Scandinavian ones )