DtheRH | Reign of Fire

Rating:

Amy
Jankowicz

Reign of Fire
USA, 2002
[Rob Bowman]
Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Izabella Scorupco
Action / Sci-Fi

I think the problem with this is they had such a brilliant premise that they forgot to make a good film out of it. It sounds so fabulous, doesn�t it? The human race has been shattered by hundreds of previously dormant dragons that scorch the earth and live off ash; a fantastic combination of post-apocalypse cool and a fantasyland dragonfest.

Quinn (Bale), who has one of those cockney accents that only exist in Eastenders and the fond imaginings of American directors, is the leader of a desperately struggling pocket of humanity living in Northumbria. He�s very hard to take seriously as a leader because he sounds a lot like Grant Mitchell. Living in a once-abandoned castle, the people are being completely disorganised tossers in ways that only the English can, until one day thankfully the Big Americans turn up in tanks. One does wonder where they get their petrol from however.

Van Zan (McCounaughey) rolls up, emblazoned with tattoos, sleeveless in shocking disregard for that chilly northern weather, a-chewin� on his cigar and sitting in more than slightly phallic manner over the gun of his tank. He�s accompanied by a gang of handsome, muscly Americans including a token black man and Alex (Scorupco), whose girl-power role as a helicopter pilot is not in any way compromised by being first and foremost a) totty for the viewers and b) totty, improbably, for Quinn. I bet she curses those dragons daily for making her lower her standards like this.

So Americans show the Brits how to kill dragons with Bond-style technology, and they realise that all the marauding ones are female and are routinely impregnated by one huge male (phallic symbol no.2). If they can get the male, they effectively kill the race. So they trundle off to London where the big one is, which of course in American miles takes half an hour from Northumbria. They seem to have taken the scenic route, via the cliffs of Dover, conveniently enough as London has jumped right over Kent and Sussex to be just on the south coast. It�s a bit like those US tourists you meet in Oxford or Bath who are doing all of Britain in a day, except with tanks.

To be honest I didn�t hire it with huge expectations, only as part of my what-am-I-going-to-do-before-Return of the King-comes-out search for mindless fantasy to boggle at. So the least we could have expected was good scenery. But the dragons, though impressively rendered, just don�t occupy the screen enough, and the broken landscape I was expecting was disappointing. No fantastic scenes of Westminster reduced to rubble or even a broken Big Ben. How could they miss such an obvious opportunity? It�s not as though the derivative and obvious has wanted for attention in this film. Post-apocalypse London could have been a building site for all we cared.

Apart from that, the acting is weak, the characters are stereotypes and the relationships are shallowly explored, meaning that if the world were populated only with people like this, you�d probably be cheering for the dragons