| Dragons Rule World in Reign of Fire |
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| By Todd Karella August 8, 2002 |
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| Overall, Reign of Fire is a decent movie filled with just enough action to keep the audience entertained. the acting of McConaughey as the cigar-chomping, hard-core almost insane military man is executed superbly as he pushes his character to the outskirts of plausability and plays wonderfully off of Christian Bale's portrayal of the tormented Englishman. If you're a big fan of medieval movies or just want to see the most incredible dragons come to life, then this is a must-see movie. But if you've only got a passin curiosity or are expecting a monster movie, then you should spend your $8 on something else. |
| Sometimes the previews for a movie do more harm than good. Touchstone’s new dragon movie Reign of Fire is a good example of that. Images of guns, and a muscle-bound Matthew McConaughey flying through the air with an ax immediately portray the film as something to avoid at all costs. I’ve always been a big fan of Medieval Fantasy movies, and after the great adaptations of Harry |
| Potter and The Lord of the Rings I was hoping that the genre would finally gain some acceptance in society. But the previews led me to believe that Reign of Fire would be a movie closer to the hideous Dungeons & Dragons movie than the two latest success stories. Although the story has several holes in the plot, it is a rather enjoyable movie with some incredible special effects that make the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park look like an episode of Barney and Friends. The movie starts off quickly as our hero, 12-year-old Quinn, |
| goes to visit his mother who is the engineer building a new tunnel system in London. Almost immediately they burrow into an underground chamber where a massive dragon has been sleeping since the ice age. Twenty years later after the dragons have repopulated the Earth and destroyed everything in their path we find Quinn (Christian Bale) the only survivor of the initial confrontation is now the leader of a small remnant of humanity taking refuge in an ancient fortress. Times are bleak as their food resources have begun to |
| dwindle, and even the dragons are turning on one another after having destroyed so much of the planet. Out of the gloom comes a self-proclaimed dragon slayer named Van Zan (McConaughey) with his small army, tank and helicopter. The English inhabitants are reluctant to trust this newcomer since they have seen many marauders, and as Quinn’s best friend Creedy (Gerard Butler) says, “There’s only one thing worse than a dragon, |
| Americans.” Sensing something in Van Zan, Quinn allows him and his men to enter the fortress. After a power struggle between the men, the gung-ho American sets out to take on the father of all dragons, which ends in the dragon wiping out his men and demolishing the fortress. Quinn then finds himself heading back to London to take on the very dragon that his mother released 20 years earlier. |
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