Death and Renewal in ‘Dragonslayer’
Dragonslayer was one of my childhood favorite movies, but one that I never revisited as an adult. I remembered that it had an absolutely killer dragon design, but that was about it. A year or two ago I decided to revisit it on a whim and it simply blew me the hell away. I cannot believe Disney was making this in the early ’80s, earnestly seeming to think it was a family film, because this movie’s got nudity, explicit gore, and moments of abject horror. There’s a reason, I suppose, that despite being an out-and-out Disney film, it is nowhere to be found on Disney Plus. While I was right in remembering that Dragonslayer does have the greatest looking dragon ever committed to film, it also has so much more. There’s a surprisingly sharp, refreshingly blunt political bent driving the plot, and it is altogether a mean, clever, sometimes darkly funny and genuinely gorgeous movie that I am now pretty comfortable calling my favorite fantasy film.
The movie opens with an aging wizard named Ulrich in a ruined castle receiving a vision of his own death. This causes his young apprentice, Galen, to panic, but the sorcerer himself seems rather ambivalent toward it. He has seen a dragon that he knows will be the cause of his undoing, a dragon which already has a nearby kingdom in the grips of its talons and has for some time. The king has made a temporary, ghastly, bargain with the incredibly named dragon Vermithrax Pejorative for peace. They provide it with two local girls a year, and in turn, it leaves their kingdom alone. When Ulrich receives the vision, a group of people from that kingdom of Urland come to beg him to kill the dragon. But he is, of course, very old, and slaying the dragon is the work of a young man. Naturally, once the plot kicks into motion, it is Galen who is put to the test, not only of his skills at magic, but his wits and bravery to see if he is up to the challenge of slaying Vermithrax when no one else is willing to do it.
There is a line in this conversation between Ulrich and the villagers that is absolutely essential, when the wizard notes that “it is the end of one time and the beginning of another.” This is, effectively, what the entire film is about. Nearly every scene after that line is spoken is in some way reflective of it. It’s made explicitly clear in the same scene, when Ulrich, last of the great wizards, notes that like himself, Vermithrax is the last of its kind. But Ulrich is training a young apprentice, and the dragon is only taking these maidens from the kingdom to feed its young. Both are fighting to keep their legacy alive in a world that is evolving beyond them, where supernatural beings give way to natural order and magic is dying out.
It is especially obvious in the politics of the kingdom of Urland, which is a focal point of the film as a whole. The practice of sacrificing an innocent girl to a dragon in order to keep the peace is horrifically cruel and unjust. It’s a barbaric practice that feels (and is) ancient and one of the most genius things about this movie is how it’s clearly equated to modern political systems in a way that is never heavy handed or obvious in its symbolism. The sacrifice is determined by a lottery. Every girl in Urland has their name placed into the lottery, one is drawn out, and that one shall be the sacrifice to the dragon. Eventually, it is discovered that the king has never placed his own daughter’s name into the lottery, and has been cheating the system the entire time it has been in place.
He’s been asking everyone to do what he is unwilling to do, to kill their own children, all while knowing it is a choice that he himself will never have to make. No one is more surprised by this than the princess Elspeth herself, who is utterly horrified not only by what the king has done but by the fact that he has done it in her name. Here is where the promise of an era ending and a new era beginning feels most hopeful, because Elspeth feels she owes it to the people to let them know that she is not her father and attempt to enact some actual change. As she figures it, the least she can do is put her name in the lottery, and make the same choice and take the same chance for herself that is being asked of every other citizen.
Naturally, when her name is selected, the entire idea of the lottery is thrown out the window. Once she is set to be given up to the dragon, that’s when the king of course becomes open to the idea of Vermithrax actually being slain, with the end goal of course being the rescue of his daughter. There is so much terrific commentary in there on how the members of any ruling class always play at empathy, always insist they are sympathetic to the struggles of the people, that they would never ask them to do something they would not do themselves when in fact they only ask the people to do things they would not do themselves, to take risks that are of no danger to themselves or their family.
The movie only emphasizes this by suggesting that it might be too little of a change, and too late once Galen actually reaches the dragon’s lair. Up until this point in the film, while it has certainly played with the formula of the classic fairy tale and added some healthy perspective and commentary, it has still been at its core the tried-and-true story of a young hero embarking to rescue a damsel from a dragon.
This is the moment when it ceases to be that story. In the goriest scene I can think of in a Disney film technically aimed at children, when Galen arrives at the cave to slay Vermithrax and rescue the princess, he discovers that she is already dead. It’s a reveal and a half. She’s not just dead, she’s half-eaten, chunks torn out of her, one of her feet completely gnawed off and we see all of it in grisly detail. It’s horrifying. But there’s no turning back, even if there’s no possibility of reward. The dragon is destruction, and it needs to be faced head on. This is the crux of the movie. While this is the scene that finally lives up to the title, more or less, it’s also centered on the death of children.
Vermithrax is a monster, but it is better than the king. The dragon is only looking after its own offspring, whereas the king has simply asked every citizen to accept that any given year could and in all probability will be the year that their child dies, and loses his own child to the same stupid lottery that he designed.
Galen goes into that cave finding the princess dead, and leaves having killed the dragon’s offspring. Both the king and the dragon were of a dying breed, both causing outright destruction as they clung to their legacy, to ensuring a future by any means necessary, and both lost that legacy as a result. There’s a lot to be unpacked there, in the very notion of attempting to build a future without change and how that can only ever yield damaging, destructive results.
There’s another character who absolutely represents the death of one way of thinking and the birth of another and the changing ideologies that shape the future in the film’s female lead, Valerian. She is introduced as one of the villagers who goes to the wizard begging for help in the film’s opening and is, crucially, introduced as a male character. She wants to fight, she wants to enact change, she wants to be a knight or a warrior or even someone people will simply listen to and none of those are roles for a woman, so she assumes the identity of a man until shedding that identity to attempt to force the Urlanders to listen to her voice, as herself. That is change, declaring yourself and embracing yourself no matter the circumstances, looking those in power in the eye and saying that if the rules don’t allow a space for you, then it’s time for new rules.
Dragonslayer is a smart and stylish movie, with this overall theme of the ending of a generation, even a world, giving way to another serving as its backbone from beginning to end. But at the same time, it is still a riveting sword and sorcery epic that never loses that all-important sense of adventure. The fact that it is set at, essentially, the twilight of the age of magic, only makes it unique and allows a distinct perspective for the film as a whole. It’s a movie that’s often pretty nasty, much nastier than I remembered or that I’d imagine anyone watching it for the first time now would likely expect. But there’s a sense of fun in that nastiness, in that director Matthew Robbins seemed to delight in going for the throat, and that bluntness ripples through the movie’s more visceral moments to the commentary at its heart. All of the individual elements would, you’d think, make up a story you’ve seen a million times. And yet there’s truly nothing like it. That is magic.
