Reign of Fire (2002) Review

rating: ****

the story: Dragons are accidentally awakened in the modern world, and subsequently are the subject of a desperate quest to eliminate as mankind struggles to survive.

review: This is the of film you're maybe not sure what to think of initially, if you're like me, but years later realize what an improbable phenomenon it really is.  Here I'm thinking of it in terms of Matthew McConaughey, whom I've grown to appreciate more and more over the years, and how even now he's never done anything even remotely close (unless you count Free State of Jones) to it since, and he's basically a supporting player to Christian Bale the whole time.  Bale has made a career of the unexpected, and since Reign has certainly covered genre material quite heavily (Batman, Terminator: Salvation), so it's not as difficult to reconcile with the rest of his career, but in hindsight it might be easier to view as a rare original role in one that with Batman and Salvation sought to myth-build so eagerly.

Besides that, it's another movie featuring Gerard Butler before 300, when he was still mostly anonymous.  For me, it was also one of the films from this period to feature Alexander Siddig, a standout from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, although he has few enough lines, and the original reason I sought Reign out in the first place.  The film is directed by another Star Trek veteran, Rob Bowman, whose next and most recent production, Elektra, ended up defining his Hollywood career.

Watching Bale and McConaughey grapple with the dragon problem, and each other, Bale's guilt for having unleashed them (in his mind) to begin with, also rings true with Bale's later career, also filled with such roles, and as such is essential viewing as to how it took shape.  The bald pate McConaughey sports doesn't really hide his essentially heroic nature, though as in his critical breakthrough role in True Detective, he's his rogue self trying to let the hero out when other people (Bale, in this instance) can't see it.

And it's a movies about dragons!  Since most of the action takes place at night, the film doesn't have to worry about the effects holding up, since they were designed to pop effortlessly, and so they certainly hold up to modern expectations.  Critics typically hate genre films that don't blunt their stories with comedy, but then they also hate comedy, which is to say, they don't like genre films, so Reign was always going to have a tough crowd.  Even in 2002, franchises were so important to success, but Reign concludes its epic in the one movie, so there was no hook other than the spectacle on display, and mostly the human drama generated by Bale and McConaughey, which should have been enough, and is, if you let it, and it shouldn't be that hard to manage.

It's a textbook definition of a lost gem.