When this movie was announced, quite a few of us were very excited. I had never seen a good dragon movie before - it seems dragon movies are either maudlin and sentimental, or just silly. Unfortunately after seeing "Reign of Fire", I still haven't seen a good dragon film.
There are numerous problems with the movie, the first of which is the strange decision to skip the destruction of the major cities and instead zoom forward to the future. The curious lack of dragons is probably the biggest problem with the film. We see a poorly-edited and truncated dragon attack in the beginning, then are forced to endure a long stretch with rebels huddling in a dank castle. The dragon attacks throughout the rest of the movie are mostly unsatisfying, as they generally involve one dragon against a few defenseless humans.
Also disturbing is the inability of the dragons to stick to their preordained behavior. We are told repeatedly that they "eat ash", yet several scenes involve them chomping live human beings, or at one point eating each other raw. And at one point the humans flee, saying "They don't care about us ... they just want the ash from the field." So why don't the dragons attack the field?
We are never told how the dragons know when people are out and about. They just magically appear when they need to. For people who have survived as long against the dragons, the humans in the castle are also poorly equipped and show total disregard for safety. After killing one dragon they fire up gigantic spotlights and blast them across the sky; candles blaze in every window. Their early warning system consists of a bird and a spyglass.
Not that they do much better when Van Zan shows up. The entire Van Zan plotline is poorly thought out from the beginning - how this person and his troops managed to survive in the open countryside for so long, how they found ammunition and fuel ... so many questions left unanswered. In the only scene of the group traveling they are attacked, quite sensibly, by a dragon and their ranks utterly destroyed. This never happened before?
Then it is revealed how they attack the dragons - the ludicrous idea of skydiving and attempting to snare them in a net. In the one attempt they lose two men. One burns in (apparently they have no AADs on their chutes, and no altimeter) and the other gets chomped. The skydiving itself is pretty ludicrous - I have 32 freefalls and have never seen 15000 feet of vertical cloud cover - and at one point the dragon shoots a wall of flame from his mouth, while plummeting face first. Impossible.
Okay, so it is a technical misfire. It is a plotting misfire - nothing happens that is particularly compelling. And then there is the resolution, which is absolutely inane. The heroes reveal that there must be one male - one - and if they find him and kill him the race will die out. Yeah, seems sensible ... one male? The finale then becomes a poorly choreographed showdown between three people and the one male dragon. Very unsatisfying.
Most confusing are the characters. McConaughey plays Van Zan as a cigar-chomping, wild-eyed Texas lunatic, spouting nonsense like "Eden isn't burning, it's burnt!" Bale is mostly whiny, and Izabella Scorupco doesn't really register. They fail to work as a unit; the rest are mostly redshirts waiting to get burned in anonymous action sequences.
This was definitely a disappointment. Due to its poor box office returns I doubt they will make another, but it would be much cooler to see the destruction of cities, and actual battle with the dragons, than this low-rent rebel camp nonsense.
There are numerous problems with the movie, the first of which is the strange decision to skip the destruction of the major cities and instead zoom forward to the future. The curious lack of dragons is probably the biggest problem with the film. We see a poorly-edited and truncated dragon attack in the beginning, then are forced to endure a long stretch with rebels huddling in a dank castle. The dragon attacks throughout the rest of the movie are mostly unsatisfying, as they generally involve one dragon against a few defenseless humans.
Also disturbing is the inability of the dragons to stick to their preordained behavior. We are told repeatedly that they "eat ash", yet several scenes involve them chomping live human beings, or at one point eating each other raw. And at one point the humans flee, saying "They don't care about us ... they just want the ash from the field." So why don't the dragons attack the field?
We are never told how the dragons know when people are out and about. They just magically appear when they need to. For people who have survived as long against the dragons, the humans in the castle are also poorly equipped and show total disregard for safety. After killing one dragon they fire up gigantic spotlights and blast them across the sky; candles blaze in every window. Their early warning system consists of a bird and a spyglass.
Not that they do much better when Van Zan shows up. The entire Van Zan plotline is poorly thought out from the beginning - how this person and his troops managed to survive in the open countryside for so long, how they found ammunition and fuel ... so many questions left unanswered. In the only scene of the group traveling they are attacked, quite sensibly, by a dragon and their ranks utterly destroyed. This never happened before?
Then it is revealed how they attack the dragons - the ludicrous idea of skydiving and attempting to snare them in a net. In the one attempt they lose two men. One burns in (apparently they have no AADs on their chutes, and no altimeter) and the other gets chomped. The skydiving itself is pretty ludicrous - I have 32 freefalls and have never seen 15000 feet of vertical cloud cover - and at one point the dragon shoots a wall of flame from his mouth, while plummeting face first. Impossible.
Okay, so it is a technical misfire. It is a plotting misfire - nothing happens that is particularly compelling. And then there is the resolution, which is absolutely inane. The heroes reveal that there must be one male - one - and if they find him and kill him the race will die out. Yeah, seems sensible ... one male? The finale then becomes a poorly choreographed showdown between three people and the one male dragon. Very unsatisfying.
Most confusing are the characters. McConaughey plays Van Zan as a cigar-chomping, wild-eyed Texas lunatic, spouting nonsense like "Eden isn't burning, it's burnt!" Bale is mostly whiny, and Izabella Scorupco doesn't really register. They fail to work as a unit; the rest are mostly redshirts waiting to get burned in anonymous action sequences.
This was definitely a disappointment. Due to its poor box office returns I doubt they will make another, but it would be much cooler to see the destruction of cities, and actual battle with the dragons, than this low-rent rebel camp nonsense.
