by Jerry Roberts

May 31 , 2003

I've grown so accustomed to avoiding movies about the post apocalyptic future in which mankind has been wiped out by ferocious *Fill In The Blank* that I find myself turning my nose up almost as a reflex. I know the material, the formula, the characters, the outcome but what I don't know is why, in these movies, the world has been ravaged beyond the human need for fingernail clippers and a bar of soap.

Reign of Fire is no different, other then some interesting special effects to make legions of dragons fill the sky. I knew the movie's originality level right off the bat when the bedtime story told to the kids was Star Wars (Be wary of a movie so bankrupt of ideas that it has to reference a better one).

The movie takes place about twenty years from now after a tunnel beneath London breaks open an underground cave filled with dormant dragons. Mankind fights back but find a snag in their efforts because every time they pump a dragon full of lead, 100 more take its place. That leaves the handful of remaining humans to cower in caves and await the inevitable. Not death, but the arrival of one of those stock characters who chomps cigar butts, packs a big gun, looks good in silhouette and has a stupid name.

His name is Van Zan (see, stupid name) and he's a take-charge kind of guy who takes charge because that's what guys named Van Zan do. He pronounces himself a Dragon Slayer and he has a theory that the people should rise to the surface with six guns blazing and face the dragons head on, never mind that that's how mankind got in this mess in the first place. The leader of the people, Quinn (Christian Bale), is wary because he is positive that the dragons will follow them back home and destroy them. With those two idiotic assumptions the two men spend a good chunk of the movie at each other's throats.

Alex (Izabella Scorupco) the movie's token female is actually the one character whose vocabulary isn't limited to "Lock" and "Load". She's obviously a scientist who tries to get these testosterone junkies to cool down for a moment so they can figure out a plan. It doesn't work. She's presented as a semi-intelligent character but surprisingly all the bright ideas are brought up by Van Zan who doesn't look smart enough to operate drinking fountain.

He hypothesizes that there is only one male dragon left on earth and that dragons reproduce like fish whereas it only take one male to fertizalize the eggs of tens of thousands of females. Where are all the other male dragons. Well, if you expand on Van Zan's idiotic theory then you would have to surmise that the females have added a sense of female empowerment to their natural instincts and killed off all the males.

If that sounds silly then consider the other flaw in his Bachlor Dragon Theory whereas he believes that if you kill the male then the population will shrink. The Problem: There are tens of millions of female dragons still in the skies and all are filled with hundreds of eggs. But the movie figures that out as well in a bizarre scene in which the females cease fire (no pun intended) and stop attacking once Quinn and Van Zan eliminate the mister. Why? I guess when female empowerment is all that the dragons have left, there's nowhere to go but down.

Van Zan may be great at explaining his half-witted theories (which are written for those who take them as face value and don't consider them for another moment) but as a military strategist he needs to go back to boot camp. He hits upon the notion that dragons breath fire because they secrete what he calls "natural napalm" in their mouths (yeah, I know) and figures that throwing gasoline into their mouths will blow them up. How do you toss a can of gas into a dragon's mouth? You'll love this. He gets his men to hurl themselves at the dragons and toss in the gas bombs! Setting aside the questions about the physiology of "natural napalm" I was quite distracted by trying to imagine how one selects volunteers to hurl themselves at a fire-breathing dragon. What's more? How do you practice for something like that?