My Favourite Movies: Reign of Fire

OK, first I need to caveat the stuff that follows: My favourite movies posts are not about great movies, even particularly good movies sometimes or works of art. They represent movies I’ve watched more than once and often more than a few times (for an extreme example I’ve watched Bladerunner over 60 times) – and enjoyed it each and every time. Sometimes I enjoy a movie the second or third time for different reasons, sometimes a movie grows on me the more I see things that I missed during the initial movie. Reign of Fire is definitely not a great film or even, to be honest, a particularly good one but it has something that I like about it no matter just how silly it is.

RoF starts out in a very ordinary way with a young boy, Quinn, going to meet his mother who is an engineer on a London Underground extension project. Whilst digging the new tunnel they find a void which Quinn investigates – I’m saying nothing here about the hundred or so Health & Safety rules broken by just about everyone on the building site here. Anyway, in the void they uncover an actual dragon which quickly escapes and flies off – killing Quinn’s mother in the process. Over the next 20 years the dragon proliferate and overwhelm humanities armed forces coming very near to wiping out all life on Earth. Quinn (played in rather over-the-top fashion by Christian Bale), now an embittered and embattled veteran of surviving the dragon apocalypse holds together a rag0tag bunch of survivors in an old castle – holding on until the dragons die off due to starvation. As the group starts to tear itself apart they are approached by what they first assume are marauders. But the heavily armed group turn out to be the remnants of an American assault unit, led by a borderline insane Denton Van Zan (played in an even more over-the-top fashion by Matthew McConaughey)   sent to England to hunt down and kill the only known male dragon who is responsible for fertilising all of the eggs that resulted in the dragon plague. After the usual bout of testosterone fuelled posturing between the two male leads and an abortive first attempt to take out the beast, it’s left to the two boys and the helicopter pilot Alex (played by the very lovely Izabella Scorupco) to go to London and kick some dragon ass!

OK, interesting premise but the fact that the dragons quickly overwhelmed the combined world’s armed forces was very, very silly – especially considering how the dispatch the big bad dragon at the end. The dragons aren’t supernatural in any way – they’re just powerful, big and, initially at least, lots of them. Granted it might have been a tough fight but once the initially surprise and disbelief passed we would have been feasting on dragon burgers. So what did I like about the film that got it onto my favourite list? First I liked the idea of the whole thing and I’m a sucker for end-of-the-world/survivor stories. Second I liked the over-the-topness of the whole thing, it was all very amusing. Ms Scorupco added a certain something too and I thought the SFX of the dragons was pretty good – although the killing techniques bordered on the truly bizarre! It was a silly film that often didn’t make a whole heap of sense, the acting was often questionable but never truly awful and there was a healthy dose of humour which had me laughing out loud a few times – especially the Star Wars bit! I certainly don’t know that many people who enjoyed this film but I did – enough to buy the DVD anyway. If you haven’t seen it before and can put your critical faculties on hold for 98 minutes I think you might enjoy it – just don’t start thinking about it too much or the whole thing will go up in flames before your very eyes.