Reign of Fire

(2002, Dir.: Rob Bowman, with Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey)

On one of the special features on the Reign of Fire DVD, Rob Bowman discusses his thought process in creating a horror movie, including the obligatory references to childhood influences. This would be all well and good, only ... Reign of Fire plainly isn’t a horror movie, it’s an action movie. Certainly, films have overlapped the genres many times before, sometimes with great success (the first two Alien films come to mind). But not only is Reign of Fire not scary, it never seems to be trying all that hard to be scary. Bowman reveals too much too soon, and seems clueless about building tension, so that for all their destructive capabilities, the dragons never seem all that menacing (though there is one fairly thrilling helicopter/dragon battle that is pretty much the highlight).

The plot is, not surprisingly, ludicrous. Dragons that have been evidently hibernating underground (the life cycle of the dragon in this film is sketchy, at best) have been awakened and quickly scorch the Earth in order to feed on the ashes left by their destruction. Now only a few straggling survivors hang on, trying to outlast the dragons, which will presumably run out of material to burn. This wouldn’t be so bad (it is a movie about dragons, after all) except the script is equally leaden, and none of the characters’ relationships seem remotely genuine. Things pick up a bit with the appearance of Matthew McConaughey, who occasionally overacts enough to keep things interesting, but there’s just not much to play with.