La Légende des mondes

You can't help but laugh throughout most of this movie when you sit down to watch it, provided you actually can endure sitting through it. This is another wonderful movie production from The Asylum, and given the title of the movie "Age of the Hobbits", though I can't start to fathom how come the movie's original title "Clash of the Empires" managed to mutate into "Age of the Hobbits", aside from a lame attempt to cash in on the recently released Peter Jackson movie "The Hobbit", because this movie has absolutely nothing to do with hobbits in any sense of the word.

What went through the minds of the people at The Asylum when this movie was dished out of the creative think-box? Let's go to wonderful Indonesia, round out a heap of little people and make a semi-fantasy movie that is set somewhere in between ancient time when men were just beyond Neanderthal stage and a world with dragons and other gargantuan creatures (lizards and spiders). Seriously? But it actually works out, because it is so hilarious to watch that the movie actually grows on you.

Let's start with the people in the movie. There is a lot of little people on the cast list, and there is nothing wrong with that. But their speech is dubbed into English with a thick American accent. I didn't know that they spoke picture-perfect American in Indonesia 12,000 years ago. But I guess I was proved wrong. For some reason, then the 'enemies' of the heroes of the movie all looked like Neanderthals and were less intelligent as well. You just had to love the unibrow that they all had and the wonderfully fake teeth.

Then there were Christopher Judge and Bai Ling. What were they thinking, taking on a production project like this. Are they not familiar with the previous work of The Asylum? Or are the line of work for actors in Hollywood that far pressed? Regardless, I can only guess or wonder, and it is not really my place to question this. I was just at a loss to see these two people in this movie. Normally Bai Ling do manage to perform fairly well in movies, but her performance in this movie was just awful.

The fight scenes were adequate at times, but then there were moments where it was painfully staged and horribly executed by the performers.

But take this movie for what it is, a hilarious production from The Asylum, and as usual, you know what you are getting yourself into with this movie and their usual stuff. It should be said that The Asylum manages to spew out the occasional great movie once in a blue moon, "Clash of the Empires" (or "Age of the Hobbits") was not one such star moment. Far from it.

What really worked for the movie was the spectacular landscapes and wilderness surroundings in which the movie was shot. Plus, the hilarious entirety that is the movie.

donniedark in his review said "some flying crocodiles with men riding them like horses" not even close! More like flying newts!

Fortunately I also downloaded this to see if it was worth buying.

Buying!!!????? Are you kidding??

It wasn't even worth the download time and has now been deleted from my drive.

Definitely a close contender to replace "Plan 9 From Outer Space" in the position as the worst ever SF movie and as for putting a spoiler in the review? Believe you me, this film doesn't NEED any help!

Whatever you do, give this a miss. Maybe in twenty years or so it may reach "cult classic" status and be hailed for it's dire plot but it's definitely not a "pizza and beer" or a family night in movie.

Most of The Asylum movies are terrible, but I keep watching them because there is something compulsively entertaining in how bad they are that you have to keep watching. Lord of the Elves or Age of the Hobbits is not particularly good as a movie, but The Asylum have done far worse than this. The scenery is spectacular, some of the best of any movie to come out from The Asylum, and the camera work is at least orchestrated competently. Christopher Judge's resonant voice and Shakespeare-like delivery of lines makes for a nicely enigmatic performance. Bai Ling, as beguiling as she looks, is too subdued however, and the rest of the cast are significantly hindered by the truly cheesy dubbing. The dubbing also makes the dialogue awkward and not very easy to understand. The special effects are a mixed bag, the giant spiders and lizards look good and are well above average for The Asylum but the flying lizard-dragons and enormous rhino are less good, the rhino actually was rendered very badly. The story is thinly structured and unexciting, never really getting a chance to properly open up. The choreography for the fight sequences is lacking in tightness and the performing of it likewise. The music is on the generic side, the characters are rather cardboard and never really developed enough to make us care for them and the direction shows a director not putting enough of his own style into the movie, coming across as rather flat and characterless instead. To conclude, could have been much worse and has the scenery and Judge's performance to thank for that, but while somewhat entertaining really rises above mediocre in my opinion. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Chistpher judge must be desperate for money......

The hobbits were a mixture of children and dwarfs! They mostly didn't speak English or very poor English so the film makers dubbed their lines over whatever they had said lol.

I just can't believe this film was made. There were some flying crocodiles with men riding them like horses that made me laugh. It was the kind of special effects the geekier amongst us put to amateur film when we were teenagers.

I think the script was written by someone who's first language was not English lol. That together with bad dubbing and a pathetic story make this almost impossible to watch.

I suspect this was made on the cheap as a con to dupe people in DVD rental shops into renting it on the strength by association because The Hobbit an unexpected journey has been released at the same time.

Warning do not pay money for this! I downloaded it but even though it was free i couldn't sit through the whole film. awful.

It is not so bad, folks. Obviously it's not a good movie but not so terrible either. The Cambodian scenery is gorgeous and the CGI effects are fine considering the budget (in my opinion the monkeys in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" are much worse than the giant komodo dragons, spiders and other creatures here, especially because producers of Spielberg's film spent a hundred times more money. Also we have some decent fights and a cool Bai Ling playing the role of a warrior woman (definitely this is not her best performance from far but she is still very sexy and cool).

I watched it with my sons, seven and eleven years old, and we enjoyed it. Despite its moderate violence, I think that is not a bad film for watching with your children, it has enough elements for that: exotic adventures, a touch of fantasy and a subtle message of friendship and loyalty. It is not good, I repeat, but not so bad. Italian filmmakers made a lot of movies like this in seventies and eighties (usually more violent and less familiar), some of them have become cult movies only for nostalgic reasons. "Clash of the Empires" makes me remember those films and, being honest, maybe because I miss them I don't dislike this one.