Reign Of Fire Review

From the maker of The X-Files comes a tale of intrigue, suspense, thrills and gripping drama - only, that was The X-Files itself! Reign Of Fire is just another critter tale that uses up the last available pre-historic creature on which a movie still hasn't been made (oh, if you consider Dragons and Dungeons one of 'em, hee hee, we have some Enron stock we'd like to sell you!). The good news is that the movie does a brilliant job of bringing something non-existent to life. The bad news is that we are talking about the script.

Reign Of Fire is set in 2020 AD, and shows the year in a light that would badly hurt the market for 18-year-maturity bonds and T-Bills, the stocks of insurance companies and Mr. Chandrababu Naidu's morale (2020 is special to him, remember?) - basically, civilization is all but extinct. Here's the lowdown.

Quinn Abercomby (Christian Bale) is a kid in 2008 when his mother, a London construction worker digging a tunnel beneath the city, breaks open an underground cavern where some dragons had been resting for a few million centuries, give or take a few years. Having woken up, they decide that they want to stretch and yawn a little, and this takes care of humanity.

For the uninitiated, here's a primer on dragonhood. A typical dragon looks like a dinosaur that's missed its appointment with its dermatologist, eats only ash that it's cooked itself by spitting industrial strength blow-torch fire to burn its quarry to cinder, and breeds in a way that makes bunnies seem sterile.

A male dragon fertilizes a few thousand eggs in one shot - sheesh, can you believe these things come from China? The fire comes from the way that they secrete the ingredients for "natural napalm" in their mouths, and killing a dragon is possible only by firing at the glands in its mouth that create the fire, preferably when it's not using them on you.

Anyway, by 2020 just a small tribe of men is alive in Britain surviving in a castle encampment, and led by the now grownup Quinn. They are content hoping they can someday defeat the dragons, but are now joined by American General Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), a freelance dragon slayer who gives all the fundas above and who believes in this rather crazy theory that if they kill the male, the species goes extinct. Assuming, in the process, that there is only one male, that the females are all going to turn in their arms and commit Sati, and that your IQ hovers in the mid-negatives. We already told you what we think of the script.

Anyway, Van Zan, who has a crack team with him including female-interest cum moral-support-tap cum fighter-for-screen-time Alex (Izabella Scorupco), teams up with Quinn, and they expectedly rub out the male critter and walk into the setting sun. In the process assuring you that man always emerges victor, if you choose to ignore such trivialities as the fact that about 190 nations with all their military and nuclear might had perished at battling the creatures before this trio did it.

The visuals of post-apocalypse earth are well-created, even if earth is interpreted as downtown London. The animation is pretty good, too. The film is a little slow and kinda drags when there are no dragons on screen, but the action when it happens is gripping enough. Script errors abound, and are too many to list here - for example, how do Van Zan and his team locate Quinn in a post-nuclear holocaust world with less than a thousand people alive and no communication systems?

Still, this is good popcorn supplement, especially for the college crowds who are just out for a good time and don't carp like film critics!