Name: Reign of Fire
Production: Touchstone / Spyglass Entertainment
Director: Rob Bowman
Theatrical Release Date: July 12, 2002
DVD Release Date: November 19, 2002
Genre: Action / Fantasy / Sci-Fi / Thriller
Rated: PG-13
Running time: 102 min.
Budget Estimate: $95 Million

Dragon Contents:

This rating only indicates the dragon contents and importance they play in the movie/game/episodes reviewed.

R a t i n g :

This rating indicates how good or how bad was the movie/game/episodes reviewed. A rating of 5 stars on 10 is considered as the average which mean it is not good but not bad either.
This rating is an average of all reviews available.

In 2002, a group of miners unleased a destructive force of nature that managed to nearly wipe the human race... In many ways, Reign of Fire has much in common with the traditional post-apocalyptic movies such as The Road Warrior (1981) and The Postman (1997) where the hero main purpose is more to just stay alive than being guided by thoughts of grandeur. However, from time to time movie writers have a rough idea of what kind of story they want to tell but don't have any idea on how to explain the setting or how it is possible to end the movie in a meaningful way; this is one of those movie. Here you could change the word "dragons" (which are in fact wyverns since they have one pair of wing and one pair of leg) for "giant slugs" or "evil space aliens" and it basically all the same thing, they needed a villain and they though that dragons would do nicely. As discussed below, I usually do not have any trouble with the setting of a movie since whenever it's fantasy or science fiction, it's the author's prerogative to set the context of their movie the way s/he want and I prefer to focus on what happen from this point forward. However, this movie is filled with inconsistencies that are hard to ignore...


Story line:
The story begin with a little boy (Quinn, who at this point must be around 8 years old) who casually walk around some sort of mining excavation, in a school uniform and nobody seems to care. Even if his mother is working there, it is hard to believe that such kid would be sent ahead to explore a mysterious cave that wasn't supposed to be there while the adults stand behind to watch. Apparently, the adults in this movie seem to be oblivious to potential injuries that could occurs in an unexplored and potentially unstable tunnel. As expected, a dragon is sleeping in that cave who soon wake up in a foul mood after being disturbed and kill everyone on his way out. Quinn and his mother manage to make their way to the elevator but while slowly moving toward the surface, the dragon accidentally kill Quinn's mother while using the elevator for leverage. Then, the dragon somehow reproduced and overrun the world with his offspring and turn all of civilization into a charred wasteland. Apparently, the life cycle of the dragon species can be summed up into: 1) dragons wake up, 2) they eat everything and 3) they go to sleep until food walk the Earth once more.

Many years later (in 2020) and a revenge plot waiting to materialize, Quinn and the human survivors are hiding in the safety of underground tunnels below a castle. They are forced to grow their own crop that the dragons especially like to destroy and turn into ashes. At first, the characters theorize that the dragon feed on ashes since they seem more minded on destroying stuff than eating people but we learn near the end that they need food like anyone else, which seems to contradict the behavior of the dragons who ambush and burn down humans, vehicles, tanks, castles, but after going through all that trouble, they do not stay to eat anything.

The life of Quinn (Christian Bale) and his group is about to change when Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey) arrives with a group of heavily armed Americans who self-proclaim themselves as dragon-hunters. This is also where a movie with a difficult beginning get worse with a pointless sky-diving scene where men jump off an helicopter to lure the dragon toward one soldier while two other who jump a bit later, fire net on the dragon to ensnare him. If that fail, a biker on the ground is used as bait to attract the dragon toward Van Zan big gun. They also make several mention that these jumpers have a life expectancy of 17 seconds once in flight, which lead to the question on how many have died to come with such a precise number and cast serious doubt on the efficiency of this wacky dragon slaying technique. Note that while the people in this world have a lot of trouble to find food, they seem to have unlimited supply of fuel for their vehicles as their helicopter seems to be nearly always in flight. In the end, despite all the trouble the actors go through to play their role and try to get us into the story, the solutions they present to the problems they face are completely ridiculous.

SPOILER... Well sort of...
(select the text with your mouse to read it)
We learn about halfway into the movie that all dragons are females, and as such they may follow a kind of "queen bee" structure where there is a single male alive on Earth who got the dirty job to please millions of females. This confront us again with the fact that the dragon they released 20 year ago was alone, and it doesn't make much sense for dragons in Australia or South America to travel all way back to London to have their offspring. It is even harder to believe that a dragon have to travel 10,000 miles to replace the fallen ones when attacking distant human civilizations. Not really explaining the logical contradictions, the writer faced with the problem on how to end this movie, decided to reduce the problem and make the heroes find a single source to destroy to declare victory. But as the viewers will realize, it is hard to believe that a dragon who wiped out a whole army of men effortlessly, could actually be killed by a handful of poorly armed people who seems to be in a much worse condition than they began with. And also, after the male is dead, presumably all of the females are still alive, and they must be mad as hell now. But for some reason, they just disappear as fast as they came to this world... perhaps, they've moved to a better dragon movie.

In summary, no matter how fantastic the setting, the story doesn't make any sense at all.


Images:
It is hard to believe that the dragons in Reign of Fire are not better than what we have seen in Jurassic Park. The dragons are usually viewed from distance, with very little interaction with the actors (contrarily to Dragonheart, that pushed the concept a bit further than JP). The CGI is spotty per moment and some scenes look more like something you could see in a video game than in movie trying to look realistic (ex: the scene where a dragon is burning down the castle). It's a shame that Reign of Fire do not bring anything new or impressive, as the technology and expertise is readily available. Despite all this, the movie still score some points for the greyish picture that commonly used to depict post-apocalyptic setting (think: Virtual Nightmare (2000)).


Sound & Music:
I don't think there is a memorable theme music in this movie and often it is not exactly the subtle background music that truly set the mood but often the lack of it, which is perhaps exactly what is needed to set the atmosphere on the right track when people look at the sky in complete silence waiting for the enemy to show hims... I mean herself...


Acting:
Is the acting is believable? Most of the time yes. Some other times the actors just sound terribly phony. In the beginning when the people try to survive, the acting is quite good. I was even expecting some interesting character development but the arrival of Denton Van Zan turn something that had potential into chest-thumping contest with phrases like "we could do this the easy way or the very easy way" (replying to Quinn after being denied shelter) and "we bury our dead at dawn". Granted his character looks like a bad caricature of an American army sergeant and there wasn't much he could do except perhaps to look slightly demented (I assure you, he will manage to prove that he is) and chew on his cigar.