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Reign of Fire

Reign of Fire

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $11.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Realistic or not? You be the judge.
Review: This film does seem to be fit for early teens. This film's dragons are pretty real-looking although they were not nearly seen enough. I find it hard to believe that in 2020, the world will be taken over by fire-breathing beasts. This movie also has some plot holes like most movies do. For instance, where do Van Zan and his crew fuel up? The action scenes were exciting and fun. This movie stars Christian Bale (American Psycho) and Matthew McConaughey (The Wedding Planner). Izabella Scorupco(Vertical Limit) stars as a dragon-slaying helicopter pilot. We know so much more about Bale's character, Quinn, than we do about McConaughey's character, Van Zan. We know enough about Quinn to sympathize with him. Van Zan is another story. Christian Bale's performance was good, including getting his butt kicked in the fight scene. Matthew McConaughey did not deliver his best performance when his lines come out so breathy that you crack up right there in the theater. I give this movie's special effects an A. I personally like this movie because I like action movies. Go see this movie for the action scenes but don't expect much else.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Greatest Dragon film since 'Dragonslayer'!!!
Review: Although the computer graphics in this film were disappointing at times, and despite the weak storyline, this was an extremely entertaining film. The landscapes were bleak, the weather cold and depressing, and the dragons were absolute terrors. And even after hours of battling the fiery beasts, Izabella Scorupco's lipgloss was impeccable. Despite these flaws, the film has wonderfully memorable moments. One of my favorite scenes involved Christian Bale and henchman performing a scene from 'The Empire Strikes Back' in an ancient chapel by candlelight. The first real interaction with a dragon was riveting. But, this should be watched with the knowledge that it is a B-grade film, and not a slickly produced Hollywood blockbuster.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Rated PG-13 for "Pretty Good if You're 13"
Review: This film had its strong points and weak points. I think the question on people who have seen this movie's minds is "what is the point of this movie?" The dragons were very real-looking but were not in enough of the scenes. I find it hard to believe that in 18 years from now, our world will be taken over by dragons. What about those plot holes? Where did that Van Zan guy and his crew fuel up? Matthew McConaughey's (The Wedding Planner) character needed some work. It wasn't his best performance. Izabella Scorupco's(Vertical Limit) character comes into the movie as a dragon-slaying helicopter pilot. Christian Bale's(American Psycho)character was sympathetic. He did a good job with the emotional scenes. Matthew McConaughney doesn't need to be so breathy when he speaks. All in all, I give thie movie 3-3.5 stars. Its action scenes are worth going to see the movie for but don't expect much more than that.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A cult classic--and more!
Review: This movie was quite a surprise! The temptation is to have the Computer Generated images dominate everything, and hope that we don't notice that there is no plot. Not true for this movie thank goodness!

This film's set up is simple. It begins in the present, when a tunneling company in London uncovers a lair of hibernating dragons. Young Quinn has the first contact with the bull dragon, and manages to survive. Fast foreword to AD 2020, where the entire planet is devastated do to the fertile and active dragon population. Quinn is the head of a small clan of survivors holding up in an ancient Medieval castle in Northumberland. They have managed to coexist with the dragons, and their intent is to outlast their reign of terror.

Enter Van Zan, the leader of a rag tag group of American Regulars and National Guardsmen who have managed to fly over "The Lake" (remember that the dragons control the airways), and are slowly making their way to London. They have devised a way of capturing and netting the dragons by parachuting from a helicopter, and they have discovered two weaknesses: dragons can't see well in twilight, and they are all female. The bull dragon live in London, and Van Zan is intent on bringing that goliath down.

This is a great film, in that it focuses on characterization, character development, an the clash of ideas. Quinn, the first victim of the dragons, is content to coexist with the dragons, while the wildly aggressive Van Zan is "cocked, locked, and ready to rock" the dragons back to the Stone Age. You see theses two natures collide as Quinn fights the ghosts of his past, and Van Zan wrestles with his almost libidinal drive for action.

I kept thinking of Hamlets soliloquy, about taking up arms against a sea of troubles, or suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. All good stories are metaphors, and the best stories are not about the stories themselves, but rather about us. This film does that, if you can see past the metaphor of the dragons. Hint: Revelations Chapter 12-the devil is a dragon.

As I watched this movie, I thought that it would have made a great miniseries, and can definitely see this movie becoming a TV series a la "Stargate: SG-1." I love the story, and found McConaughey's character riveting. I have never seen him so intense, so wild, and so insane in a performanc

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Amazing Special Effects!
Review: The special effcts in this movie will blow you away! They're so cool and realistic. The story line's very simple and maybe could've been made a bit more coplex but that doesn't really matter since that's not what you're focussing on anyway. The acting is good and the epic backgrounds an landscapes along with the cold look of the movie and the dirt and filthiness help to create an atmosphere of terror and hopelessness. Towards the beginning though there are scenes where they show the dragons destroying buildings and famous monuments and in that scene, there was a building that looked like a sky scraper and when it collapsed, there were crowds of people running through clouds of dust in the streets screaming. This looked too much like 9/11 and therefore, I thought it was a bit inappropriate. But this movie is great and I strongly recommend it if you like action movies or sort of medieval ones. Oh and one more thing, Matthew McConaughey is awesome as Van Zan!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Promises much more than it delivers
Review: Probably the main reason why this ... blockbuster failed to recoup its costs at the box office is that it was poorly promoted as a big effects-driven summer blockbuster that was worthy of being up there with 'Jurassic Park' and the like. Unfortunately this is far from the truth. The story has a pocket of human survivors fighting against the dragons that have overrun England. These include Christian Bale, who was so impressive in 'American Psycho', pulling off a terrible Cockney accent that is fooling no-one and the consistently topless Matthew McConaughey as the American that rallies everyone up. If they can kill the male dragon that's fertilising all the females' eggs, can they wipe out the race of dragons once and for all? You betcha!

You'd have thought that this would have been a cue for lots of dragon action, with fire and brimstone battling it out over the London skyline with helicoptors and army tanks. Whilst there are action sequences intermittently and the special effects did an excellent job creating realistic monsters there simply isn't enough to keep the audience on the edge of their seat, something that is expected of summer box office extravanganzas. The lack of action is especially frustrating given that the bits in between - the predictible sparring between the male leads and a blandly attractive love interest for Bale - are so dull and uninspired. The dialogue is clichéd and doesn't serve the perfectly serviceable actors well at all, despite the wise decision to play it straight.

At the end of the day this is a movie that has the worst possible flaw - dullness - and whilst it's all very good promising its audience fire-breathing dragons by the score to get them into the cinema, it's another thing when you're actually watching the truth, a badly-mounted effort to steal the crown of this summer's blockbuster. It fails.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Natural Napalm
Review: The storyline has it that the Americans, in the form of the Kentucky Irregulars under Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), have come to England to destroy the male dragon and thereby the species. They hook up with the British at a castle where they are in hiding shades of their Policy of Appeasement during WWII, if we ignore it long enough may be it will go away. The English leader Quin (Christian Bale) soon leans that hiding is not the answer and is forced to throw in with the Americans and fight back.

While the movie may have been filmed in England, that isn't any excuse for arming American troops with British ordinance. The Americans would have brought their own equipment with them across the Atlantic. England looked like a nuclear holocaust had occurred, so no serviceable replacement equipment would have been found, as it was the Americans lost a great deal of their force upon landing.

I thought the acting was good, especially McConaughey. He has an awesome speech he gives the English when he catches them celebrating an early victory, yet the war was far from over. They've been known to brew tea in the middle of battles so the film captured the English in wartime very well!

The dragons are spectacularly real! I love the flying sound effects. You could close your eyes and feel them swooping down on you!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I WISH THE DRAGONS WOULD OF WON
Review: When I was at the theatre waiting for the movie to start I had no idea it was gonna be Reign Of Fire!

The movie I was expecting to see was Stuart Little 2-but I stayed and watched Fire and thought that it was pretty good!

Reign OF Fire is about these soldiers who must stop the dragons from taking over the world!

When I saw the adds for this on tv I didnt think I would of watched it in the theatre!

The dragons looked good-the special F/X were great-especially when the dragons would blow fire!

I love dragons anyways-and they were my favorite!

I would reccomend this movie to anyone who loves dragons!

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY-UNTIL THE REIGN CAME.

FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I am sorry, but this was not the film I was led to expect
Review: Whoever designed the promotion for "Reign of Fire" did an incredibly bad job of it because everybody I know who saw the giant poster and caught the preview were convinced they were going to see a film in which hordes of dragons descend on modern day London. That happens, just not on screen during this film, which ends up leaving a gapping hole between what proves to be the prologue and the rest of the film.

So while we went to "Reign of Fire" expecting a gigantic shootout between modern weaponry and medieval dragons, what we got instead was a sort of "Dragonslayer" set in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" with a dash of "Kelly's Heroes," a pinch of
"Point Break," and more than a bit of "Jaws" to help wrap things up. The story begins with young Quinn drops in at the subway excavation his mum is working on and discovers a fire-breathing dragon. The next thing we know the world has been destroyed by dragons and we are almost a score of years down the road where the adult Quinn (Christian Bale) is trying to keep his particular remnant of humanity alive in the ruins of an English castle. When what to his wandering eye should appear but Van Zan (a buffed and bearded Matthew McConaughey), leading a rag tag team of American soldiers who have gone over to what is left of jolly old England to take the last chance to save the world.

Now, I have admitted on more than one occasion that I never even took biology in high school, but what follows still does not seem right to me. Van Zan's argument is that having slain a couple dozen dragons he has discovered they are all female, which leads to the conclusion that there is one male whose main purpose in life is to fertilize all the thousands and thousands of eggs these prolific dragons produce (just think of those old westerns where the day is saved by shooting the chief/medicine man so that the rest of the tribe gives up and goes home despite a numerical advantage of no small significance). This would be like having your neighborhood invaded by bees, all of which were males and drones so you hypothesize that there must be one queen and if you kill the queen then there will no longer be any bees down the road.

The actual theory espoused in the movie is even more complex than that, with dragons being responsible for taking out the dinosaurs and then laying dormant for countless epochs to give the world a chance to build up so they can have fun tearing it all down again. This is really way too convoluted for people who wanted to see mass destruction of computer-generated beasts on the order of "Starship Troopers." My son is into military weaponry and the like and he gave me a lengthy list of reasons why Van Zan and his crew would never have made it to England. Of course, in the end, "Reign of Fire" comes down to a one on one confrontation (think "Aliens") and you leave the theater trying to remember when was the last time you actually went out to see a movie this bad. The one scene you will tell your friends all about has nothing to do with dragons, but rather with keeping great movie moments alive for the kiddies in the dark days ahead.

The special effects are not what you would expect and I do not think you will find anything as memorable as what we first saw in "Dragonslayer" way back when. The outdoor shots are done in this omnipresent bluish-gray tint, probably supposed to reflect that this is a world covered in ash from all the people, places and things the dragons have incinerated. Star Trek fans will notice that both Alexander Siddig and Alice Krige are wasted in small roles. But my biggest complaint remains that we were simply marketed a different movie from this one and we were not pleased with what we were left with when the bait-and-switch was over.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Grim and Grimmer.
Review: This is one bummer of a movie. Encased in dirt and grime, the characters are engaged in a last ditch effort to rid the world of thousands of fire-breathing dragons. In fact, the entire world is gray, gloomy, and depressing--and filthy. There's only so much of that I can take.

Just in case you thought that the movie would provide some quasi-believable backstory about dragons, forget it. The writers either felt no reason to provide any logical basis for incredible idea that dragons are real, or they thought that the audience would be too dumb to need one. Any movie that takes itself this seriously needs to provide at least some basis for suspending disbelief, and there ain't one here.

I can't give any spoilers in this review, so I'll do the best I can to review the movie without them.

Now lets suppose that you actually get beyond the point of the very silly explanation for how dragons might have survived for thousands of years in a very odd location, what next? Poor acting (for the most part), one-dimensional characters, and a small amount of suspense. The ending is flat. It could have been great if it came after compelling battles against great odds, but it doesn't. It just sits there.

There is one clever scene in which the last remaining humans begin crafting their own mythology based upon some popular culture icons, but that's the one high point in the entire film.

Now for the real question: Are the dragons cool. I suppose, for the little amount of time they are actually on screen (maybe 5 or 6 minutes at most). But you don't go to a dragon movie to see hints of dragons, you go to get a good look at one. That is the crowning let down.


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