Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8640 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-06-09
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Bulgarian, Dutch
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Not quite the large-scale epic it promised to be, Reign of Fire is still an enjoyable entry in the post-catastrophe genre. It opens in present-day London with a boy witnessing the rebirth of the race of dragons, who are supposed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and now devastate the world again. Skipping the collapse of society with a montage of magazine articles about the world in flames, we jump into the future where the remnants of humanity cower in enclaves and fire-breathing raggedy-winged bat-lizards prowl the land. Christian Bale commands a castle in Northumberland, trying to preserve humanity, while Matthew McConaughey is an iron man warrior intent on tracking down and destroying the dragon king, making for a hero-against-hero clash of values which, for a change, finds the British preserver of life, rather than the Yankee animal-killer, getting the girl and the glory.

The film consists mostly of scrabbling about in the ruins, and it rather skimps on the big dragon battles the script seems to demand. There's little here that hasn't been done before in The Day of the Triffids on television or that slew of Italian Mad Max imitations of the early 1980s. But director Rob Bowman (The X-Files) and a good cast handle themselves well, and the few times that the dragons do show up they deliver an acceptable burst of fiery horror. --Kim Newman

On the DVD: Reign of Fire has a fairly perfunctory set of additional features on disc. A brief (under 10 minutes) making-of documentary consists mainly of computer geek animators obsessing about CG effects; back in the real world, "If You Can't Stand the Heat" looks at the on-set pyrotechnics. Director Rob Bowman chats affably about the project in a separate interview. Trailers for the movie and video game form the balance. The subdued (ie. gloomy) colours come up well in the anamorphic widescreen print, and the evocative soundscape is suitably full of sub-woofer-friendly rumblings, thuddings and explosions. --Mark Walker

Video Description
In present-day London, twelve-year-old Quinn watches as his mother, a construction engineer, inadvertently wakes an enormous fire-breathing beast from its centuries-long slumber. Twenty years later, much of the world has been scarred by the beast and its offspring. As a fire chief, Quinn (Christian Bale) is responsible for warding off the beasts and keeping a community alive as they eke out a meagre existence. Into their midst comes a hotshot American, Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), who says he has a way to kill the beasts and save mankind - a way Quinn's never seen done. Directed by Rob Bowman (The X-Files), Reign Of Fire fuses a medieval past with a post-apocalyptic future in this ass-kicking, dragon-slaying tale of adventure and survival.

Special Features
Theatrical trailer(s)
"Breathing Life Into The Terror" Making-of featurette
"If You Can't Stand the Heat" Pyrotechnics featurette
Conversations with director Rob Bowman
Widescreen anamorphic format
DTS Audio
5.1 Audio

Customer Reviews

Mis-Advertised
I love this film. It shows the very human struggle to survive after they've been knocked from the top of the food chain. It blends medievil mythology with a modern era breathlessly. Definately an original take on Man vs Dragon. Now to get this straight, this is a film about Humans, not about Dragons. The dragons merely supply the unique reason for the apocalypse. This is a film about the post-apocalypse, not the apocalypse. It's not about skies full of Dragons turning worldwide armed forces into ash on an epic scale. It's not about Dragons setting the world, quite literally, on fire. It's about after all that's happened.

Which is a shame this was advertised as a film about Dragons burning all life as we know it. Of course, everyone goes in expecting to see 90 minutes of Dragons destroying everything. If this had been advertised as a more human film about after these Dragons have completely wasted eveything, I really think this could've been seen as a good film. It unfortunately set expectations high in the wrong sort of viewers by a mind-blowingly epic trailer.

Christian Bale, Gerard Butler and Matthew McConaughey all deliver their role superbly, and the script isn't as bad as it's made out to be either. The effects were great and the Dragons do look pretty realistic, to the point I almost believed this was a documentary. Okay, so there are some plotholes, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to fill those in yourself. I mean, does everything have to be explained so obviously?
The only reason this film gets 4 stars and not 5 is because, being a film about human struggle, it could've done with a bit more character development. Other than that, it's a deeply entertaining, well-acted, suspenseful film.

Don't knock it before you see it for yourself.

Reign of DIRE
.
You take an exciting legendary beast, that everyone is familiar with, and add a contemporary twist, like pitch these ruthless, fiery death-bringers against 21st century military might, over modern cities and you would have a rivoting, thrilling SFX film that will leave you clamouring for more.
Well you would do if it wasn’t done by Touchstone Pictures.

The film is absolutely dire. With such good components it’s hard to imagine the lengths the film makers went to, to foul it up so badly. Dire plot line, dire acting, dire dialogue – they managed it all.

The DVD should be investigated by the Office Of Fair Trading for mis-representing itself. The cover clearly shows a sky full of dragons fighting a force of 11 helicopter gun ships over a blazing London. This isn’t in the film! As a point of fact, there are hardly any dragons in this films, which is a shame really when you buy a film for it’s dragons.
Imagine Hitchcocks “The Birds” made with a single angry sparrow throughout the entire film and you get some idea as to what Reign of Dire does for dragons.

The story (?!?!) starts with the accidental discovery of a single dragon during the construction of some London Underground tunnels. The said dragon, somewhat displeased at being awoken, leaps out of the tunnel and .... the story goes to a narrative where we are told that millions of these dragons suddenly appear and attack everything and kill everyone and it’s all nasty and ever so grubby. But we don’t see any of it. What we next see is 20 years on. The miserable survivors living in miserable Northumberland (well Ireland, actually, but what the hell!). So we miss out on all the action – the destruction of the whole of civilisation, the defeat of the high tech military, the desperate fate of 5 billion people. All lost.

Our grey looking survivors, lead by drippy Quinn, have retreated to a castle in Northumberland and live a scant, medieval existence in the wake of the total collapse of the worlds infrastructures. There is little or no food and they are threatened by dragon attacks.
These dragons, by the way, are not flesh-eating beasts of yore. No, these dragons eat ASH. Yep, ash. So they don’t persecute humans and animals. People are only killed to make ash. The dragons do not differentiate between a person and, say, a stack of telephone directories. They all burn to lovely dragon food.

OK so why do the survivors live in this castle? Well, it is strong and stone and offers some protection. But, it is exposed and the fields around it are regularly incinerated (so we are told). This is one of the many story details that just don’t sit well. There are many castles built either on the coast or on rocks in the sea. Why not live there? The sea is pretty fire proof! There is fish to eat! Der!
Ok let’s not get picky. After all, these could be just really stupid survivors.

One day along comes a convoy of military vehicles that parks outside the castle and with the aid of its tank guns, asks permission to come in.
Now, you are not going to want to let them in anyway. But, horror of horrors, to make things worse, the militia are Americans! Lead by a character called Van Zan, who looks and sounds like he has just come from a lynchin’ in a Southern State, the yanks reveal that they are Dragon slayers and promptly produce a helicopter. Er………. Hang on. The skies have been ruled by dragons for 20 years and you have a nice shiney helicopter with which you chase the hot breathed ones? Come to think of it, how did you lot actually cross the Atlantic in your righteous crusade? Um, where do you get all the fuel you need to run this massive convoy and chopper? I don’t know and the film forgets to make this clear (perhaps it’s magic, like the way they managed to finance this film).
Laughably, the technique the yanks use to kill dragons is to fly close to a dragon and then three numbskull parachutists jump out of the chopper and lure the dragon into gunfire, by free falling in the general direction of the trap. Umm, might have been better to just put a nice big pile of ash out, say the burned script, and wait for the dragon to come and scoff.
The yanks declare that if they can kill the one and only male dragon they will eventually destroy the dragons, because there will be no more born/hatched. Unfortunately, they don’t know where it is and their search continues. What good luck! Quinn, our wet hero, seems to remember where it lives. So off they trot to get it.
Anyway to cut through the rest of the excruciating crud, the final dragon slaying team is the hapless Quinn, the unlikeable KKK representative, Van Zan and some reasonably totty chopper pilot. Van Zan gets killed,the dragon gets killed, Quinn gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after!

Don’t buy this film. If you are bored and have a choice of watching this film or hammering nails into your legs, go to the shed and get the tools. I wanted to give it no stars, but they wouldn’t let me.

Fire extinguisher
Another Summer movie, another rip-off. This adheres blindly to the Bruckheimer rob-'em-blind formula - come up with a cool concept (check), a great poster (check), a cool cast (not quite, but at least Bale tries), shoot it entirely through an unattractive unnatural lens filter that bleeds out selected colours (triple check), pay yourself a s***load of money and then resolutely refuse to deliver because by the time they find out that there are no dragons in the film, they'll have already handed over their cash. This flick is the Holy Grail of false advertising.

Well, there are dragons - in extreme long shot for a few frames at a time - but put end-to-end, their total footage is barely two minutes. Dragons destroy the world! So what do we see? Newspaper headlines (astonishingly, there are no dragons at all in the end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it montage). Skydivers attack dragon! So what do we see? A lot of cranked-up shots of clouds. Dragon attacks castle! So what do we see? A couple of brief long shots before cutting to people running around in cellars while the hero rides back just in time to see it leaving. Are you detecting a pattern here?

Instead, we get a non-script with a great back story (which would have made a much better film and has some pretty decent ideas in it) shot in a grotty disinterested fashion by a director who really doesn't seem to want to make a dragon movie at all. And as for the action scenes - what action scenes? Where the money went is anybody's guess, because it sure ain't on the screen: rarely has anyone spent so much money making a movie look so cheap. And what's with the sound mix? Between the cast's mumbling and the 'atmospherics,' half the dialogue was almost completely inaudible.

This could have been one of the coolest dragon flicks ever, but Bowman and co have ruined it for anyone else in the business with this dull, lifeless fire extinguisher of a movie. Still, maybe it's my own fault for ignoring the fact that Gerard Butler was in it - his presence in a movie is as much a guarantee of a stinker as Virginia Madsen's was in the 80s.

See 'Dragonslayer' or even 'Dragonheart' instead - dragon movies which actually have dragons in them. If only this one could claim the same.

The DVD offers a so-so package that's still better than the film (despite some excessive edge enhancement that gives characters a constant halo), although only one of the featurettes offers more than promo guff, while the interview with the curiously self-satisfied director makes you wonder if he's talking about another movie. Personally, I'd really, really like my money back.