Reign of Fire

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Year:	2002
Country of origin:	UK / Ireland / USA
Director:	Rob Bowman
Genre:	When Dragon's Attack
Starring:	Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey,
Rating:	3/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253556/
Tagline:	Fight Fire With Fire
Favourite line:	Van Zan: "Ever see a male?" Quinn: "When I'm running for my life I generally don't look back at the plumbing."

Veteran genre TV Director (The X-Files, Star Tek: TNG) Rob Bowman takes to the helm to bring us this rather odd tale of dragons on the rampage.

It's present day, 2008, and a construction operation is underway beneath central London, and a dragon is awoken when a huge cavern is opened. It's not long before the dragons are everywhere, burning everything in their wake, and feeding on the ashes, plunging mankind into a fight for survival.
Skip forward twelve years to 2020, and a young boy who witnessed the awakening of the first dragon, Quinn, played by Christian 'Batman Begins' Bale is now one of the few survivors, in charge of a small band of people who have holed up in a castle in Northumberland. The dragons are on the decline as, now that everything is burnt, there is very little food left, and Quinn believes they must simply play a waiting game until the dragons die out again. Suddenly a group of American 'Marauders' show up, tooled up and armed to the teeth with military equipment. It isn't long before they are at each others throats but, inevitably, ultimately they must team up to fight the menace of the dragons.

It's an intriguing, if slightly bizarre idea for a movie, and I am fairly convinced it only got the green light due to the success of both Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, two other tales involving dragons.
Darker in tone than either, this is a post apocalyptic vision of a decimated world, mixing both the small scale claustrophobia of the castle setting with the world view of the savage attacks by the beasts.
It nearly works, too.
The set up is fascinating, and really well realised but, once the initial set-to's with the Marauders is out of the way, it gets a little lost until the climactic scenes.
Still, I enjoyed it nevertheless.