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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 12.28%
Worth A Look: 32.46%
Average: 27.19%
Pretty Bad: 17.54%
Total Crap: 10.53%
7 reviews, 72 user ratings
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| Reign of Fire |
by MP Bartley
"Here Be Dragons.Sort of."
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A lot of things get me excited about forthcoming movies. A great trailer, internet buzz or the talent attatched to it. But very rarely a poster. Until I saw the poster for 'Reign Of Fire'. Oh boy this was going to be good! London was up in flames while a horde of dragons battled in the sky against a fleet of machine gun spewing helicopters. Well get me a bucket of popcorn, a large coke and sit me down in the frontrow, because this was going to be awesome. I stress 'going' to be......because the reality of the event is a lot less than the poster promised. Imagine if 'Independence Day' had been cut by an hour and started with Will Smith, Pullman and Goldblum in the desert after the White House had been blown up. Hell, even the Gene Barry version of 'War Of The Worlds' managed to convincingly show us cities that had been razed to the ground.
Now I'm not arguing that special effects make or break the movies. Of course they don't. 'Mars Attacks!' had London, Paris and Vegas all reduced to rubble by Martians but still remained uninvolving eye candy. But for a poster to promise so much and deliver so little constitutes false advertising frankly.
Instead 'Reign Of Fire' kicks off in England 2020. The dragons, awoken 20 years, have pretty much decimated the world, leaving it bleak and covered in ash which they feed upon. The few remaining humans skulk in the shadows under constant fear of fresh attack. One such refuge is in Northumberland led by the gruff Quinn (Christian Bale) whose mother died in the first dragon attack. Together with best friend Creedy (Gerard Butler) he's trying to protect the meagre colony he's set up and offer hope when there seems to be none. Things get complicated however when American commandos arrive led by Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey) and 'copter pilot Alex (Izabella Scorupco). (Yes it's that old chestnut, the British are just too damn scared and gutless to do anything and so need a crazy American to come along, insult them and then gear them up for action. Hey maybe it's a satire on Bush and Blair).
Anyway Van Zan has a plan that will hopefully see the end of the dragons but he needs help from the unwilling Quinn.
So it's set in the aftermath which gives director Rob Bowman plenty of scope to create one of those post-apocalyptic landscapes that disaster/invasion movies love so much. But for all it's unsettling bleakness it quickly becomes familiar and dull. Set in the wilds of Northumberland we're even spared the sights of the decimated cities. Instead we're treated to barren hills, gravel pits, gravel pits...and more gravel pits. C'mon 'Doctor Who' made a series out of these settings for thirty years and that didn't have a budget approaching anything near a million. Something tells me that perhaps more money went on marketing than on the story.
It's therefore left to the cast to try and get over the gravitas of the situation. Bale and McConaughey both vent snarling machismo in spades, arguing over everything including the fate of a young teenage boy which results in a bare chested fight between them. What subtext Bowman was quite trying to suggest here I don't really want to think about...
But ultimately a film about dragons is going to stand or fall on the creatures themselves and they're fantastically done. Not since 'Jurassic Park' have creatures been so convincingly rendered through CGI. It's a shame therefore that we never see more than one at a time. Instead we have singular attacks. And yes, the first dragon v humans battle that requires the use of skydivers and nets is thrilling in a thrilling-because-all-the-next-battles-are-going-to-be-better kind of way. But that never happens. We never see the dragons attack en masse, even down to the climax. The most we see or hear is Quinn's mournful voiceover over a montage of newspaper clippings and nuclear test footage all detailing the end of the world. The last glimpse we see is that of Time Magazine asking 'The End?' over a picture of cities in flames. It's a haunting moment but sadly the feeling never lasts as we skimp on the action.
Yes, there's some nice character moments and shocks but when you've got a terribly illogical climax you know you're in trouble.
<<<Minor Spoiler>>>
Right, so Van Zan's plan is to kill the one male dragon so it can't fertilize the eggs? Presumably we don't have to worry about the hundreds of dragons already flying around the Earth.
<<<Spoiler End>>>'Reign of Fire' is so crushingly dissapointing for the majority of it's running time because it tantalisingly hints at what could have been a marvellous backstory. Instead all you're left with is characters scrabbling around in the dirt while you wish that more money had been spent on the story and less on the poster.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=5985&reviewer=293
originally posted: 09/02/02 23:33:42
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USA
12-Jul-2002 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
03-Oct-2002
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