You know that something's gone horribly, horribly wrong when people talking about your movie say things like, "Well... It's no Dragonheart..." Nate and I saw Dragon Wars this evening, and I'm not sure I really have words. We knew it would be craptastic, but I don't think either of us were prepared for the profoundness of it.

The couple in front of us collapsed into giggling within minutes of the title screen. At the thirty minute mark, they staggered out of the theater, supporting each other, laughing audibly. They turned to us and started to apologize -- then just laughed again. An hour later, as giant lizards from feudal Japan fired missiles at tanks in downtown Los Angeles and a six-hundred-foot snake chased a pizza delivery car to Mexico, we would envy them.

The protagonist is an emo-surfer-boy star reporter from the Buck Cameron school of investigative reporting. He works for CGNN, and never files a story. His token black sidekick is thrown off an overpass by the Evil Warlord Named Jack in the middle of one fight and left for dead without a second thought -- only to show up at work the next day with a band-aid on his forehead. There are, at times, four nested layers of flashback active simultaneously. One of the flashbacks features a flash-forward. I'm really not accustomed to using reference counting to keep track of my place in the flashback stack, and I think it's a sign that something's gone terribly wrong.

Like a terrible high school relationship you just can't end, Dragon Wars is baffling, painful, yet filled with a scary kind of excitement. How intensely bad can it get? Very.

Very.