Reign Of Fire [DVD] [2002]

The film is absolutely dire. With such good components it’s hard to imagine the lengths the film makers went to, to foul it up so badly. Dire plot line, dire acting, dire dialogue – they managed it all.

The DVD should be investigated by the Office Of Fair Trading for mis-representing itself. The cover clearly shows a sky full of dragons fighting a force of 11 helicopter gun ships over a blazing London. This isn’t in the film! As a point of fact, there are hardly any dragons in this films, which is a shame really when you buy a film for it’s dragons.
Imagine Hitchcocks “The Birds” made with a single angry sparrow throughout the entire film and you get some idea as to what Reign of Dire does for dragons.

The story (?!?!) starts with the accidental discovery of a single dragon during the construction of some London Underground tunnels. The said dragon, somewhat displeased at being awoken, leaps out of the tunnel and .... the story goes to a narrative where we are told that millions of these dragons suddenly appear and attack everything and kill everyone and it’s all nasty and ever so grubby. But we don’t see any of it. What we next see is 20 years on. The miserable survivors living in miserable Northumberland (well Ireland, actually, but what the hell!). So we miss out on all the action – the destruction of the whole of civilisation, the defeat of the high tech military, the desperate fate of 5 billion people. All lost.

Our grey looking survivors, lead by drippy Quinn, have retreated to a castle in Northumberland and live a scant, medieval existence in the wake of the total collapse of the worlds infrastructures. There is little or no food and they are threatened by dragon attacks.
These dragons, by the way, are not flesh-eating beasts of yore. No, these dragons eat ASH. Yep, ash. So they don’t persecute humans and animals. People are only killed to make ash. The dragons do not differentiate between a person and, say, a stack of telephone directories. They all burn to lovely dragon food.

OK so why do the survivors live in this castle? Well, it is strong and stone and offers some protection. But, it is exposed and the fields around it are regularly incinerated (so we are told). This is one of the many story details that just don’t sit well. There are many castles built either on the coast or on rocks in the sea. Why not live there? The sea is pretty fire proof! There is fish to eat! Der!
Ok let’s not get picky. After all, these could be just really stupid survivors.

One day along comes a convoy of military vehicles that parks outside the castle and with the aid of its tank guns, asks permission to come in.
Now, you are not going to want to let them in anyway. But, horror of horrors, to make things worse, the militia are Americans! Lead by a character called Van Zan, who looks and sounds like he has just come from a lynchin’ in a Southern State, the yanks reveal that they are Dragon slayers and promptly produce a helicopter. Er………. Hang on. The skies have been ruled by dragons for 20 years and you have a nice shiney helicopter with which you chase the hot breathed ones? Come to think of it, how did you lot actually cross the Atlantic in your righteous crusade? Um, where do you get all the fuel you need to run this massive convoy and chopper? I don’t know and the film forgets to make this clear (perhaps it’s magic, like the way they managed to finance this film).
Laughably, the technique the yanks use to kill dragons is to fly close to a dragon and then three numbskull parachutists jump out of the chopper and lure the dragon into gunfire, by free falling in the general direction of the trap. Umm, might have been better to just put a nice big pile of ash out, say the burned script, and wait for the dragon to come and scoff.
The yanks declare that if they can kill the one and only male dragon they will eventually destroy the dragons, because there will be no more born/hatched. Unfortunately, they don’t know where it is and their search continues. What good luck! Quinn, our wet hero, seems to remember where it lives. So off they trot to get it.
Anyway to cut through the rest of the excruciating crud, the final dragon slaying team is the hapless Quinn, the unlikeable KKK representative, Van Zan and some reasonably totty chopper pilot. Van Zan gets killed,the dragon gets killed, Quinn gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after!

Don’t buy this film. If you are bored and have a choice of watching this film or hammering nails into your legs, go to the shed and get the tools. I wanted to give it no stars, but they wouldn’t let me.

Well, there are dragons - in extreme long shot for a few frames at a time - but put end-to-end, their total footage is barely two minutes. Dragons destroy the world! So what do we see? Newspaper headlines (astonishingly, there are no dragons at all in the end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it montage). Skydivers attack dragon! So what do we see? A lot of cranked-up shots of clouds. Dragon attacks castle! So what do we see? A couple of brief long shots before cutting to people running around in cellars while the hero rides back just in time to see it leaving. Are you detecting a pattern here?

Instead, we get a non-script with a great back story (which would have made a much better film and has some pretty decent ideas in it) shot in a grotty disinterested fashion by a director who really doesn't seem to want to make a dragon movie at all. And as for the action scenes - what action scenes? Where the money went is anybody's guess, because it sure ain't on the screen: rarely has anyone spent so much money making a movie look so cheap. And what's with the sound mix? Between the cast's mumbling and the 'atmospherics,' half the dialogue was almost completely inaudible.

This could have been one of the coolest dragon flicks ever, but Bowman and co have ruined it for anyone else in the business with this dull, lifeless fire extinguisher of a movie. Still, maybe it's my own fault for ignoring the fact that Gerard Butler was in it - his presence in a movie is as much a guarantee of a stinker as Virginia Madsen's was in the 80s.

See 'Dragonslayer' or even 'Dragonheart' instead - dragon movies which actually have dragons in them. If only this one could claim the same.

The DVD offers a so-so package that's still better than the film (despite some excessive edge enhancement that gives characters a constant halo), although only one of the featurettes offers more than promo guff, while the interview with the curiously self-satisfied director makes you wonder if he's talking about another movie. Personally, I'd really, really like my money back.