Dean is tormented by a recurring dream of a mysterious girl in his dream who apparently needs his help. He then meets with Dr. Jang convinces him to save his daughter, Nam-Hong (Rose) who disappeared to another dimension while working on the CS23, a time machine Dr. Jang had created years before. Dean is then sent to his past life via the new CS1004 time machine, where he realizes that Nam-Hong has a striking resemblance to the woman in his dreams. Is it all mere coincidence?
I hate to write negative reviews for movies, I really do. However in the case of Dream of a Warrior, it's just something that I must do. I hated this movie. It is by far one of the worst movies I've ever had to experience. I think it's safe to say that I'll never be able to get those 84 minutes of my life back.
First and foremost, the plot makes absolutely no sense whatsoever! I think this director has the worst directing abilities I've seen in a movie. Everything seems all over the place. Things happen, but we rarely get a reason why... or at least a scene that leads up to that to further explain what's going on. For example, one minute they talking about something... (sorry, I don't remember what.....it's that bad... heheh) and the next scene, they're in some battle that we don't even know why it's occurring. I mean, c'mon, at least tell us why they're fighting! It gets so much worse.
There's actually a romantic side-story here. Well, granted it's not much of a love story. For those of you who actually like a little romance in your movies, this isn't the good kind of romance either. The love story is barely even fleshed out. The director shows them having a somewhat meaningful conversation once! And we're supposed to believe they're seriously in love with each other and all. It is never really mentioned why they're so in love, but we as the audience are left with literally a jar of assumptions as to what happened and why. A good movie shouldn't have to leave the viewer with a list of assumptions for specific occurrences. But to tell you the truth, halfway through the movie, I couldn't care less about what would become of these two "lovebirds."
Adding to the overall dismay of this movie are its use of flashbacks. This movie is riddled up the wazoo with flashbacks! To make matters worse, the director uses these same flashback scenes repeatedly. Even some of the scenes were just other scenes used over again! This may be going out on a limb here, but it seemed like the people who made this movie just gave up on the damn movie and couldn't think of anything else and shoved some of the used scenes in there as flashbacks or what not to fill the time. Completely laughable.
This movie does have some good points in its favor though. I must admit, the outfits were very creative and attractive, and some of the CG is rather decent, nothing stellar in execution but suitable nonetheless, as are the mediocre fights. Other than that, there's nothing worth checking out here.
I'm sorry to say that this movie was bad, very bad. However, I think this movie had so much potential in itself. It had a good concept, great costumes and sets, but in the end, things didn't quite work out right. This may be in part due to the directing skills of the director or just over-ambition. For me, this movie won the gold medal for worst movie ever! I swear I'll never watch another Leon Lai movie as long as I live. He has absolutely no facial expression whatsoever and is by far the most boring actor to grace my television screen!
The movie is presented in a very shoddy 1.85:1 letterbox aspect ratio. For such a recent movie, and Mei Ah's newer quality DVDs, I was very disappointed. It looked like a bootleg of a bootleg! Or rather VHS! Soft as hell, color saturation is nothing to write home about. Sharpness is not that great either.. Video quality suffers from fuzziness sometimes. Definitely not reference quality material. Audio is your basic Dolby Digital 2.0. There's nothing to wow yourself over here. Subtitles are average sized and pretty decent, however at times, the subtitles go by way too fast. Extras include the basic Mei Ah staples: Data Bank, Trailer, Best Buy, 6 Chapter Selections. I thought I'd mention that the trailer for "The Successful Story of A Bright Girl" was way more interesting than "Dream of a Warrior".