Summary: The movie was bad. Don't watch it unless you really are desperate.
Details: This is a steampunk version of Moby Dick where they follow the dragons in a huge wagon across snow covered mountains to chase and lance dragons.
People love to complain about the special effects in SyFy channel movies. I found it adequate, better than older Science Fiction classics like Forbidden Planet. The acting was not great but that wasn't what killed the movie. It was the script. It was horrible, rank even by SyFy channel's low standards.
You don't need a huge budget to make a wonderful Science Fiction movie if you have a good script. The Man From Earth is an outstanding example. A cast of eleven and no special effects, yet it was marvelous. This had a comparatively huge budget with costumes, sets, scenes, special effects explosions, everything except a decent script.
We all know that SyFy loves to inflict bad movies on its audience. Why it only chooses such rank scripts, I have no idea. But this one should have been rejected even by them. You can't take a classic story that has been done so well by so many and just do a plot less, trash version without being laughed at.