Divisions and Precisions

Dragons are Just Cool

Ever since I first read The Stand, sometime in high school, I've been fascinated with the end of the world and stories that deal with it. That's one of the reasons I was so into Tribe 8. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I liked "Waterworld". I even liked "The Postman". Amazingly, I've never seen any of the Mad Max movies, although I keep meaning to rectify that. So yeah, the idea of what happens after the end of the world intrigues me. So much so that I'm even working on a novel about it right now.

I have to admit, of all the ways I've seen the world ended, I'd never considered dragons. I rented "Dragonheart" a while after it came out. I never quite understood the notion of the helpful, friendly dragon. So I watched the movie, listening to an irascible Sean Connery and just going 'enh'. Dragons are big, scary, destructive creatures who, if they have their own agenda at all, really have their own agenda, and generally don't need a puny human to protect them.

Simply for recognizing this fact, and for coming up with a really unique way of ending the world, "Reign of Fire" gets high marks. I mean, a post-apocalyptic movie about dragons! How cool is that? Pretty damn cool, all things considered.

Then there's the cast. Christian Bale was appropriately brooding and scary, and as his best friend Gerard Butler was huggable to say the least. And Matthew McConaughey... well, a friend of mine put it best (although at the moment, I can't remember if it was Nic or Julie) when she said, "You have to really work to make Mathew McConaughey not look good." Well, "Reign of Fire" almost succeeds, but something about winding tattoos around great big muscly arms, oy. Besides, he did your stereotypical American military guy pretty well.

All in all, I really liked "Reign of Fire". But I had the same frustration with it that you have when you see someone you really care about wasting all their potential doing something stupid. "Reign of Fire" is an action flick, with all the plot holes and shortcuts that belong to your basic action flick. It's sexist as hell -- there's one main female character and, despite the fact that she's presented as one tough cookie throughout the movie, she spends most of the climax of the movie practically weeping in fear while the men reassure her.

What frustrates me the most is that it could have been so much MORE than just an action flick. There's hints of it here and there. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie has Bale and Butler giving their own take on what mythology might become after the world ends (I'll give you a hint, one of them ends up saying, "I am your father!" to a collective gasp of astonishment). There's hints of how people regrouped, how they survived, but not enough. I don't know, the pacing was just off somehow. I wanted more information on how people survived, but I wanted more build up to the action too. By the time the big climax came, I sat there thinking "this can't be it" because the tension just hadn't had time to build, and I think that's because the events that should have built the tension were too fast, too glossed over.

"Reign of Fire" could have been a truly amazing movie, but it settled for just being a summer action movie. Still, for a glimpse at the potential alone, I'll probably see it again.

Posted by Lisa at July 14, 2002 12:33 PM