Don't get the wrong idea...I do love a nice thoughtful, slow picture, sure, but I also enjoy my popcorn movies, which is what I went to this movie hoping to see. All I wanted was some kick-ass dragonslaying. That's all any of us wanted, I'm pretty sure. And while there is about ten solid minutes of said battle in the movie, for the most part it's just a wasted opportunity. Which sucks, because I REALLY wanted to see some action.

Here's the skinny...in modern-day London, a young boy named Quinn accidentally discovers a nest of hibernating dragons deep underneath the city (don't ask what he's doing there...Bowman seems to have a fetish for children in caves...see X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE for more underage subterranean antics). Naturally, the sleeping giants wake up and begin raising hell. And that's where the fun begins.

Rather, that's where it SHOULD begin. Instead, Bowman decides to skip forward twenty years, completely bypassing the near-complete extinction of the human race by the madly propogating Dragons. But...but...that's what I wanted to see! Remember the poster for this movie, featuring a swarm of Dragons buzzing London amidst a fleet of opposing Apache Helicopters? Shitcan that. By the time WE get into the story, the humans have been driven to ground and are cowering in holes (in our heroes' case, a castle in the English countryside), ekeing out a bare existence and hoping to outlive the medieval infestation as best they can. Led by Christian Bale (a grown-up Quinn from the opening scene, and happily one of the more enjoyable performances of the film), the jittery survivors grow crops, prepare shelters, put on little plays to teach the children good values and say really weird prayers that mostly involve the holy principles of running and hiding.

Wow, exciting!! That's WAY better than fighting Dragons! But what's this? The good times are threatened when a rag-tag squadron of American soldiers suddenly arrives at their doorstep, led by a brainless psychopath played by Matthew 'I thought I'd be more famous than this by now' Mconnaughey, who delivers perhaps the least endearing screen performance of the year. If you make it out of the theatre without having wanted, at least once, to grab Matt by the shoulders, knock that stupid cigar butt he's always chewing on out of his mouth and scream at him to lighten the fuck up, you're a more tolerant person than I.

Naturally, the arrival of GI Joe and the Howling Commandoes sets some events in motion, and we do actually start to see some of that Dragon combat we all paid for. But by this time we've all had WAY too much time to ponder the implausibilities of the script, and have realised that picking the movie apart bit by bit is, in fact, much more fun than actually watching the movie.

I'm sure more educated men and women than myself will have a field day dissecting the quasi-science used to explain the Dragon's abilities and reproduction, not to mention feeding habits that defy all logic and nature. And if someone could PLEASE explain to me just how the Dragons actually made it across the oceans to devastate North America, I'd appreciate it. What, did they stow away on a tramp steamer or something, ala Lost World? Cause I'm really not buying that they just flew across and happened to find land, in sufficient numbers to defeat the entire American military machine. Seems to me one heat-seeking missile would finish one of these beasties off, but I suppose that's why they chose to gloss over the whole 'Dragons-beat-humans' portion of the movie. There really is no way they WOULD have won, something that becomes obvious by the end of Reign of Fire.

All of this quibbling would be moot, I admit, if we had just gotten what we came for...lots and lots of really cool scenes of soldiers fighting dragons. We don't. So what's the point? Just go rent ALIENS again.

Review copyright 2002, The Visitor

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