Ah, the Apocalypse.

How can we have thee? Let me count the ways…

War, scientific experiments gone really, really nasty, awaking sleeping horrors—sometimes even God is tapped for a bit of creation’s extinction, or aliens that have come to “conquer Earth” for various reasons, not the least of which is our produce.

But dragons?

Squeaking a bit of fantasy into his science fiction, director Rob Bowman takes a non-government conspiratorial leap to the big screen, away from the X-Files—though he manages to keep the dreary overcast so famous for boggling those with 20/12 vision and throws in arsenals of grime and grit to leave you desperately wanting a shower afterwards.

But in the beginning, there’s Quinn, a cheery lad with a bit more worries on his shoulders than he should have, who suddenly gets more while visiting his mother at work—in a mine shaft. Satiating his curiosity about a drilling “void,” a worker allows Quinn to hop into the rock for a look around, discovering a toasty bit more than he bargained for.

Thus the Year of the Dragon comes around a bit early.

What follows is a tidy stitch of script work fast-forwarding us to Quinn’s adulthood, the gap filled with unnecessarily fancy camera work around a hand that’s writing and a voice-over explaining dragons have been around forever, they come in cycles and can be blamed for just about every unsolved environmental mystery there’s been: even dinosaur extinction and the Ice Age.
Once the prologue hurdle is cleared with a stumble, the audience can hunker down and prepare themselves for…waiting. The script tries for character development as it puts off (and puts off) the inevitable dragon attack, but only succeeds with Quinn (Christian Bale), and only then marginally, which is in no way Bale’s fault. The Welshman plays the salty dog sea captain with as much grit as Rex Harrison, stuck on a ship everyone but he can see is sinking, his peaceful vision shot with a slew of heavy artillery when Van Zan (a seriously ripped Matthew McConaughey) comes striding onto the scene—a man who could kick the Scorpion King’s tail.

As if a draconic apocalypse weren’t enough conflict, we are forced to watch a power struggle between two leading men and a strange British–American prejudice in the script I still can’t find reason for. If it was meant for a touch of reality, the scenery provided enough with scorched castle walls, overly patched clothing, dirt under the nails, a small jab at static action-movie lines (“If anything happens, you know what to do.” “Actually, no, I don’t.” “Me neither.”) and the dragons.

These CGI masterpieces are battle-worn and fire-blacked, holes pecking leather wings large enough to span Wales and realistically portray how something so terrifyingly huge could fly. Add to that a virtually seamless melding with the background, and you’ve got a beastie that leaves very little to the imagination but tons to science.

With a climax in soupy London (a bit unfair…they got the Black Plague before), the script takes its flimsy dive back into genre-laden cliché, pitting three people against the biggest dragon there is—the only male—and throwing Van Zan’s established character out the window (actually, off a tower, but it has the same effect). Our cigar-stub chewing, scalp-shaven, tattooed war general forgets his basic need for survival in an insane, roaring leap with an axe…why?

Forgiving the script, generously, this ash-soaked movie is worth a viewing for the permeating dankness, Bale’s performance and the display of what CGI can really do. But “Reign of Fire” will never scorch the screen with its fumbled attempt at originality—though it could start a new trend in extreme skydiving.

Originally published by the Tyler Morning Telegraph.