Reign of Fire

Year: 2002 Rating: PG-13 Overall Evaluation: 9.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 9.0 / 10 9.0 / 10 8.0 / 10 9.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated PG-13 for intense action violence. No gratuitous cussing, no nudity, no gratuitous gore (although it obviously could have!). The effects are subtle - just enough to make it real without going over the top.

Story

I was not terribly impressed with this story when I first saw the movie. Oddly, though, it grew on me and several times over the past few years I have wanted to watch it again. The idea is that dragons have reappeared on earth and are wreaking havoc on mankind. A small group of people that have joined together to hide and try to ride out the storm are confronted by a ragtag team of Americans who have followed the dragon's back trail to the hide-outs compound in Britain. There they face the final battle for dominance of the planet. It is less action-oriented than one might think, possible the reason I was not as impressed at first as I now am. However, the story is a good one and is dealing with some good issues concerning our reactions to attack.

Suppositions

Obviously the existence of dragons is required for this flick. But the dragons are not "mythical" in any sense - rather they are real animals with known mechanisms for their abilities (such as "breathing fire" - a process seen today in Bombardier Beetles). Surprisingly, there were almost no evolutionary overtones which is amazing in today's assumptive climate (there is one line at the end uttered in a "survival of the fittest" context which is completely reasonable).

Significance

I think the basic message of this movie was that hiding out is not always a good option when the enemy attacks. This was a welcome message during a time when the initial emotional outbursts over 9-11 were cooling off and Bush's war on terrorism was beginning to come under fire. The two factions (hiders and fighters) in this movie are an interesting commentary on the social discussion of the world in this period. The hiders want to wait it out and simply survive, while the fighters are willing to risk it all to end the war. "Only one species is coming out of this alive." The hiders, however, are not painted as cowards - in fact the fighters turn out to be mistaken on several key points. So it is a balanced treatment that, in the end, declares that evil is to be fought and that it is worth risking one's life for the right.