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.

Timeline (2003)

rating: ****

the story: Modern archaeologists time travel to the 14th century.

what it's all about: This is the kind of movie that ages well.  I remember watching Timeline on home video soon after its release, and not thinking too much of it.  Like a lot of people I mostly thought of it as a Paul Walker movie, which in 2003 didn't mean as much as it does in 2018.  Not so much because Walker went on to have a brilliant career, but because the Fast & Furious franchise exploded, and that alone increased his significance over time.  2003 also saw his turn as the lead in the second Fast & Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, but that was hardly an indication of where Walker, much less the series, was going to go. 

Oh, and by the way, watching Timeline again, Walker isn't really the star of the movie anyway.  That's the biggest irony, right?

Instead, hindsight really helps make obvious that Timeline is a Gerard Butler movie.  What a fascinating career Butler has had.  He made his name in 2006's 300, and his subsequent career has been a tug-of-war with whether or not audiences actually can think of him for anything other than 300.  Which means in a lot of ways, his career hasn't actually changed all that much.  But what always fascinates me about movies is the constant discovery of it.  Movies are a curious medium.  You can follow them any number of ways, and certainly actors are one of them.  To the general public, it's always about the present, or if the past is revisited at all it's mostly to do with movies that are already well-known or random ones that have developed cult followings.  It's rarely about revisiting movies for the sake of revisiting them.  And yet, Butler is as ripe for that as anyone.  Was 300 truly a fluke, or did he have anything that might have helped indicate such a development?

You can guess my answer already.  Timeline would certainly been a strong indication.  The whole point of his character can be summed up by attempting to answer whether or not Butler's type of hypermasculinity can best be acclimated in the past.  Every character in the story struggles with fitting in.  It would've been cheap storytelling to have Butler just slip into it, and maybe because he was still a relatively unknown element, his arc develops the way it does, but precisely because it works out that way, it works extremely well both for the story and to illustrate both where Butler was at this point in his career and where he was headed. 

Bottom line, if I had been paying attention, I would've recognized back then that I had just seen a star be born.

There's a ton of great talent worth relishing around him, beyond Walker.  Billy Connolly, obviously, and also Michael Sheen, another actor years ahead of be "discovered" as a star.  David Thewlis, meanwhile, puts on an American accent, and I assume in 2003 I had no idea who he was, much less that he would become a favorite.  My big draw, back then, was actually Neal McDonough, who never quite found his sweet spot, following the early demise of Boomtown.  Matt Craven is always worth noting.  Anna Friel, meanwhile, plays French and quite convincingly, even though she's clearly British in real life, so when I saw her again (and in 2003 I had no idea I was supposed to care about her, either), I initially wasn't even sure she was someone I knew, just that she looked familiar. 

This is also the penultimate film directed by Richard Donner, which in 2018 sounds ridiculous, especially when his last movie was 2006's 16 Blocks.  Not that 16 Blocks was a bad way to go.  It was an excellent way to go.  It's just sad to see a talent retire, especially when he was still firing on all cylinders.

The story was based on a book by Michael Crichton, whose professional height was in the '90s, when he was riding on the success of the Jurassic Park film and ER, plus his continuing string of blockbuster thrillers.  I've read him off and on for years, and every time I remember all over again how much I appreciate what he brought to the culture.  In a lot of ways, Jurassic Park distorted his appeal to a fairly cartoonish degree.  And in a lot of ways, Timeline is Jurassic Park minus the cartoonish distortion, an attempt to revisit the past in a way that spectacularly backfires.  Crichton more often tried to resolve real world misconceptions than went for sensationalism, which Jurassic Park the movie was at least wildly accepted to be.  I mean, it single-handedly revived popular obsession with dinosaurs.  But it was also about hubris run amok, as Crichton often explored, totally misjudging when a gamble has been miscalculated.  That's Timeline, the role Thewlis plays.  It's a shame Crichton died just at the start of an age when hubris has exploded, when a little perspective is most desperately needed.

But to watch something like Timeline, and to see how effortlessly, finally, it straddles escapist storytelling and the classic cautionary tale, is to see Crichton's genius all over again, and how Donner brought together a rich host of actors to tell it.