Reign of Fire (film)

Reign of Fire is a 2002 post-apocalyptic science fantasy film directed by Rob Bowman and starring Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey, Izabella Scorupco and Gerard Butler with the screenplay written by Matt Greenberg, Gregg Chabot, and Kevin Peterka.

The film is set in England in the year 2020, twenty years after a London Underground tunneling project inadvertently awakened dragons from centuries of slumber and the creatures have subsequently replaced humans as the dominant species on Earth. With the fate of mankind at stake, two surviving parties, led by Quinn Abercromby (Bale) and Denton Van Zan (McConaughey), find that they must work together to hunt down and destroy the beasts in a desperate attempt to take back the world.

The film was released by Touchstone Pictures on 12 July 2002. Upon release, it received generally mixed reviews from critics and underperformed at the box office, grossing far less than expected, only $82 million on a $60 million budget.

Plot
When Quinn Abercromby is visiting a London Underground construction project, workers penetrate a cave and a huge dragon emerges from hibernation, incinerating the workers with its fire breath. The only survivor is Quinn, whose mother Karen, the project engineer, is killed protecting him. The dragon flies out of the Underground and soon more dragons appear. The world's militaries fail to stop the spread of the dragon population and target large populated areas with nuclear weapons, leaving humans nearly extinct.

Twenty years later, the dragons are dying off but have become increasingly aggressive in search of food. Quinn, along with his best friend Creedy, leads a community of survivors at Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland where he plans to outlast dragons until they go back into hibernation; as insurance, he shares his notes and plans with Jared, an orphan he rescued and is mentoring to take over as community leader. The community is short on supplies and in a state of unrest pending the harvest of their meager crops. Eddie and a group of his followers steal a truck to harvest the crops for food, but they are attacked by a dragon. Quinn, Creedy, and Jared repel the dragon, but the dragon burns the majority of the crops, leaving the community without food.

Shortly afterward, a group of heavily armed Americans led by Denton Van Zan arrive in an armored convoy, including a Chieftain tank and an AgustaWestland AW109 utility helicopter. Quinn is initially skeptical and suspects that they are marauders, but Van Zan convinces him to let them stay when he reveals the dragons' main weakness: poor vision during twilight. With Quinn's help, Van Zan and his team hunt and slay the dragon who destroyed the crops.

Van Zan introduces Quinn to Alex Jensen, his team's helicopter pilot and intelligence officer, and brief Quinn on their mission. After killing hundreds of dragons, Alex discovered that they were all female; she postulates that they reproduce quickly because the species relies on a single male to fertilize all the eggs en masse. Having tracked the spread of the dragons, they believe that the male is located in London and that if they kill it, the dragons will no longer be able to reproduce, effectively killing the species. Quinn, suspecting that the male dragon is the same one that killed his mother, refuses to help, knowing that London is infested with dragons and that if they fail, the dragons will track them back to their shelter.

Van Zan drafts the castle defenders, despite Quinn's objections and a physical altercation between the two. Van Zan, Alex, and some of the castle's men then depart for London, but true to Quinn's warnings, their caravan is attacked by the male dragon. Everyone except for Van Zan and Alex are killed. The dragon then finds the castle and attacks, killing many of the inhabitants. Quinn gets the survivors to an underground bunker, but they are trapped by rubble when the dragon returns; during its final attack, Creedy is killed.

Van Zan and Alex return and free everyone trapped in the bunker. Quinn leaves Jared in charge and decides to help Van Zan and Alex hunt down the male dragon. They fly to London and find hundreds of female dragons, one of which is cannibalized by the much larger male out of hunger. This scatters the female dragons and leaves the male alone and undefended. Van Zan coordinates a plan: split up, bait the male into attacking, ground him with explosive crossbow bolts, and then shoot one into his mouth once he is ground level. The plan initially works, but the dragon detonates the first explosive bolt early with its fire breath and Van Zan is swallowed whole. Quinn and Alex gather the last explosives and lure the dragon to ground level, where Quinn fires an explosive down the dragon's throat, killing it.

Three months later, Quinn and Alex erect a radio tower on a hill overlooking the North Sea, having seen no dragons since the battle in London. Jared arrives and reveals they have made contact with a group of French survivors who want to speak to the group's leader. Quinn officially declares Jared the new community leader and dedicates himself to rebuilding civilization with Alex.

Production
Kevin Peterka and Gregg Chabot wrote the original screenplay in 1996, after which they sold it to Spyglass Media Group. In 2000 Matt Greenberg revised the screenplay for production.

Reign of Fire was filmed in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains, at the Glendasan Valley Lead Mines. Permission was given on the condition that the area was not damaged and the crew removed all sets once filming was complete. However, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe stopped many planned scenes from being filmed due to quarantine restrictions.

The dead dragon was designed and built by Artem, with visual effects by Secret Lab. The dragon's digital effects posed a problem for animators: "'In recent years there have been several movies starring creatures with scaled surfaces. Among these are Jurassic Park, Dragonheart, and Lake Placid. The surfaces of these creatures have generally been constructed by layering painted textures atop displacement maps. This gives the model texture, but the scales stretch and shrink under the movement of the creature, giving a rubbery look that is not realistic.'" In order to overcome this limitation, the then-groundbreaking work done by digital effects animator Neil Eskuri on Disney's 2000 release Dinosaur was utilized as a benchmark in order to create a realistic physical simulation of the dragon. According to Carlos Gonzalez-Ochoa, the film called for "100 ft creatures with wing spans of 300 ft that could undergo enormous speeds and accelerations. The artistic direction required each dragon to have wings that transition between a variety of physical behaviors and interact with the environment."

Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 42% based on 173 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2/10. The site's consensus states: "Reign of Fire gains some altitude with its pyrotechnic action and a smolderingly campy Matthew McConaughey, but the feature's wings are clipped by a derivative script and visual effects that fizzle out." On Metacritic, it has a score of 39 out of 100, based on 30 reviews from critics. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B on scale of A to F.

Joe Leydon of Variety said of the film, "An uncommonly exciting and satisfying post-apocalyptic popcorn flick, Director Rob Bowman deftly combines an uncommonly satisfying mix of medieval fantasy, high-tech military action and "Mad Max"-style misadventure." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B grade, saying "the season could do with more grinning, spinning, un-self-important, happy-to-be-B throwback movies like this one." Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times noted that "the movie might have been a minor classic if it had maximized its own possibilities. But until the rush wears off, the picture is as much fun as a great run at a slot machine: even when your luck runs out, you're losing only pocket change."

Roger Ebert gave the film one star out of four, describing it as "a vast enterprise marshaled in the service of such a minute idea", adding that "the movie makes no sense on its own terms, let alone ours. And it is such a grim and dreary enterprise. One prays for a flower or a ray of sunshine as those grotty warriors clamber into their cellars and over their slag heaps."

Reign of Fire was third at the US box-office receipts during its opening weekend (12 July 2002), taking in $15,632,281, behind Road to Perdition and Men in Black II.

Awards
Reign of Fire was nominated for one Saturn Award, but lost to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and two Festival de Cine de Sitges awards, winning one.

Video game
In 2002, Kuju Entertainment released the video game adaptation Reign of Fire for PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube, which received mixed reviews much like the film it was based on.

Cancelled sequel
In a 2002 interview, Christian Bale was asked: "Is there a sequel possibility to Reign of Fire?" to which Bale responded "Possibly. I told Scott Moutter, who plays my stepson in the movie, that he's well positioned to take the sequel from me because of the way the movie ends!". However, due to the film underperforming at the box office, no development on a sequel has been spoken of since.

Legacy
The mechanism of dragon's fire breath in this movie, inspired from biology of real-life creatures such as anti-predator adaptation of bombardier beetle and poison glands of vipers, was used in later works such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Gods of Egypt, and Game of Thrones.