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OK, have just been to see Reign Of Fire and can say that it doesn't suck. I really enjoyed it, actually - both Bale and the Texan are good and the script is actually pretty intelligent in the ways it deals with mythologies from all periods, ancient to modern. It refers to a number of films, Jaws most signifigantly (Bale plays the Scheider character, the Texan plays Robert Shaw even though they've reversed the naming by calling Bale's character 'Quinn') but I never felt like I was watching a blank rehash of any of the films quoted. To me, this was more of the approach to mythology taken in the film - everything is game from St. George to Star Wars to the notion of American military superiority. It's all blended well, none of it too much to the fore, with the exception of the treatment of Jaws. The good bit is that in some ways the film addresses the failings of mythology as teaching devices, emphasizing the need to temper tradition with current knowledge.
The dragons are bloody beautiful, though there aren't enough of them for my taste - only a couple of times do you see a whole bunch of them flying at once. But they're well done, and there's very little of the standard stupid human/stupid monster writing that plagues most monster pics. It's only at the end that the script turns stupid; more of a letdown since it was pretty strong up until then, all things considered. I mean, it ain't Shakespeare, but for the genre it really is more solid than, well, than any other dragon picture I've ever seen. And yes - that means better than Dragonslayer, for all those stuck in the 80's. (Caveat: Dragonslayer is a terrible film with pretty cool dragons, just to set the record straight.)
And I have to say, the Airborne sequence is one of the most exciting pices of film I've seen in a while. I blows every action bit in Minority Report out of the water; I can't come up with a sequence to rival it in any recent big Hollywood picture. That was a bonus. |
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