While Reign of Fire isn't going to be a huge summer blockbuster, it succeeds where the others have failed. While other summer blockbusters hope to survive off the same old formula, Reign of Fire tries something new - a sci-fi/fantasy film with a solid storyline and characters that the audience can connect with. The plot is simple enough - dragons, at rest beneath the city of London are released after their slumber is disturbed by a tunnel being built. Once the dragons are released, they go on a rampage of terror, burning everything with their fire, looking to turn everything to ash, just as they did with the dinosaurs so many years ago. After the world's arsenal (including nukes) fails to wipe out the dragons, only a few enclaves remain where the humans are trying to rebuild amidst constant terror from above.

At the heart of the rebuilding effort, the movie focuses on Quinn Abercromby (Christian Bale) - quite interestingly, the first human to see the dragons awake in 2010). Quinn leads a group of humans in Scotland, looking only to survive against the sporadic dragon raids, rather than trying to kill them. After some early action, the fun begins when Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey) shows up from America looking to root out the source of the dragon infestation and kill the father of them all. With the male dragon killed, the species will die off as there is only one male to fertilize the female's eggs.

You can easily see where the film goes from here, but it's not as straight-forward as you might think. Reign of Fire does a spectacular job of keeping you guessing throughout as the audience is treated to grand spectacles of dragons, landscapes, and special effects. Obviously, Reign of Fire isn't anything more than your fun summer movie - it doesn't try to be anything more and seems to be content being that popcorn movie filled with fun. For this reason, the movie succeeds. It doesn't try and make itself a masterpiece. It doesn't try to exhibit Oscar-like performances. It just tries to entertain - and it does one hell of a job of it.

While Reign of Fire is able to get the audience to easily believe that the dragons are live creatures through some great CGI, there are still a few questions that to unanswered after the film lets out. Firstly, where does all their fuel come from? Making fuel isn't the easiest thing to do and 8-10 years after the dragon invasion, one would think most of the fuel reserves have been blown up by fire-breathing dragons or used up. Secondly, while the dragons do expel a sort of napalm from their glands, it burns out quickly after doing quite a bit of damage. Yet, after 8-10 years of inhabiting London, their base of operations, there's still debris burning on the ground? You would think everything that could burn would have burned. Yeah, I'm overanalyzing the film a bit too much, but these two flaws really seemed to stand out for both myself and my friend whom I saw it with.

Despite these flaws, the film as a whole does a great job of entertaining the audience. Both Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey turn in amazing performances as they forgo their typical roles to star in this down-and-dirty film. Reign of Fire doesn't try to inject comedy into this action/adventure film - it doesn't try and water the main plot down whatsoever with quirky banter or annoying characters. It's on the screen purely for entertainment and it succeeds. A quality summer movie leaps and bounds ahead of the other so-called "blockbusters" from the past couple weeks.

Genres: Action, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Rated: PG-13 - For intense action violence.
Runtime: 100 minutes
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