MOVIE: The Reign of Fire – a movie worth watching

I’ve always been a dragon’s fan and this is why I keep on watching present TV series, such as “Game of Thrones”, and re-watching movies of my childhood, such as: “DragonHeart”, “Merlin”, “Beowulf”, “The Ring of the Nibelungs”, “The Lord of the Rings”, “Harry Potter”, “The Hobbit”, “Dragons: Fire and Ice” etc. etc.

I don’t know where this interest came to me from. I’ve never been interested in Barbie dolls and make up, but the old knightly stories have always fascinated me (alongside with ancient history and

mythology). I must have been a historian in a past life or probably have lived in those times.

One thing is for sure: where there are dragons, there must be a good tale behind it. And when you them, the movie cannot be anything else but interesting and absolutely astonishing.

Next to that, you have in the movie a bunch of actors that nowadays rock on Hollywood: Christian Bale, Gerard Butler, Matthew McConaughey and Alexander Siddig.

ATTENTION!!! SPOILERS AHEAD!

The movie begins when the child Quinn (Christian Bale) comes from school to visit the mines where his mother worked. He lets her know that they have to pay 3000 pounds a year for school, money they don’t have. He sticks around, while one of the digging machines finds an empty space in the ground. Being the smallest from there, he is send by two workers to scout the cave they found. He discovers lots of galleries and something more terrifying: a dragon.

The dragon attacks him and he manages to escape. His mother quickly tries to wash his eyes and get him to the surface. Meanwhile, the workers start scouting by themselves the galleries, thinking that the liquid that entered in Quinn’s eyes was nothing but something that came from the ground. They also find the dragon and are not that fortunate as Quinn was and get burned and eaten alive.

As Quinn and his mother try to get to the surface, the dragon makes way to the gallery and riches them. He crushes the elevator they were in and kills the mother.

Then it is presented how the world got destroyed by the dragons. It seemed that the mythology stories about dragons were true and that they were responsible for the dinosaur’s extinction and that their ashes brought the Ice Age. When they didn’t have anything to eat, they started eating each other and then, when they were only a few, they withdraw into the ground, waiting for the nature to regenerate.

Now waken up, they destroyed the cities and military bases, bringing the world to collapse and in the front of extinction.

Quinn survived this and is now in charge with a castle full of people, most of them being children. He taught them to always keep their both eyes on the sky and when they see dragons coming, to get into the tunnels and start digging. He is helped by his friend, Jared (Gerard Butler) who is very nice and brave, like Quinn.

The story changes when Denton Van Zan (McConaughey) appears at their gates with tanks and soldiers, seeking for shelter. They have with them also a helicopter and a crew of archangels (soldiers that jump from the helicopter with nets to trap the dragons). They were dragon slayers and had a lot of experience in that. Quinn offers them shelter, which was a good idea, since they’ve been attacked later by a dragon that destroyed half of their crops and exactly in that day it returned. Denton’s crew and Quinn manage to kill the dragon, with the price of three lives of their comrades.

It seemed that all the dragons killed were females and that there was only one male that fertilized all the eggs. This dragon, after the ocular descriptions had another characteristic than fire breathing and that was spitting poison in the victim’s eyes. If there was only a male dragon, which was the one that attacked Quinn years back in London. He, Denton and Alex (the Archangel’s leader) go to London to kill the beast.

I really liked the characters played by Bale and Butler, but McConaughey killed it. He was the arrogant type, the bossy, the one that figured out how to kill dragons and the one that found dragon’s weakness. In the end, he gave up his bossy character and followed Quinn in the quest. He died while he was jumping off a building with an axe in his hand, while trying to kill the male dragon.

It ended up well. Quinn put an explosive arrow in the dragon’s neck and started the development of the human society. The movie ended when they built a signal antenna and received some waves from French, which meant they were not the only ones left in the world. 

Sorry for my bad English!