The Komodo dragon is the last of a lineage that traces back to the Secondary Era and the largest lizard alive today, and this film tracks it across the Indonesian archipelago, from Komodo itself to Java and Sumatra. It opens with the geology behind the mystery: during the Pleistocene, falling sea levels connected and then isolated these islands, cutting Java off from the Asian mainland and setting its plants and animals on a separate evolutionary path. The film revisits the reports that built the archipelago's reputation among outsiders, from 16th-century European explorers describing carnivorous plants and fish that survive out of water, to a downed pilot in the early 20th century who washed ashore and returned with delirious stories of giant lizards eating people. Footage moves through mangrove forests, the tidal zone between land and sea that shelters much of the region's wildlife, before settling on the Komodo dragon itself, hunting and moving through terrain that isolation shaped into something closer to legend than to an ordinary reptile.