Reign of Fire
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| Reign of Fire | |
|---|---|
 Reign of Fire film poster |
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| Directed by | Rob Bowman |
| Produced by | Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber |
| Written by | Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka |
| Starring | Christian Bale, Alice Krige, Matthew McConaughey, Izabella Scorupco, Gerard Butler |
| Music by | Mad at Gravity, Ed Shearmur, Brad Wagner |
| Cinematography | Adrian Biddle |
| Editing by | Declan McGrath, Thom Noble |
| Distributed by | Touchstone Pictures |
| Release date(s) | July 12, 2002 |
| Running time | 102 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $60 million |
| IMDb profile | |
Reign of Fire is a 2002 action/fantasy movie directed by Rob Bowman.
Tagline: Fight fire with fire.
[edit] Plot
During an underground construction around 2008 in London, a huge, hibernating dragon is discovered and springs to life, instantly frying all construction workers with its fiery breath. The only survivor is the 12-year-old Quinn Abercromby, whose mother was chief of the construction crew. The dragon escapes and soon thousands of them work their way through Europe and eventually the rest of the world, burning everything, feeding on the ashes, and multiplying at an exponential rate.
Years later, grown-up Quinn (played by Christian Bale) runs a stone-made castle in England, a lonely bastion of mankind, afraid of the sky and the dragons that could attack any time. Their only faint hope is to outlast the dragons, wait until they die out again (as they presumably did several times before) and go into hibernation.
Then Denton Van Zan (played by Matthew McConaughey) arrives, leader of a US army unit from Kentucky, bringing a Chieftain tank and a helicopter, piloted by Alex (played by Izabella Scorupco). Mistrusting but needing each other, the two leaders Quinn and Van Zan work together and eventually manage to kill one of the dragons.
After that, Van Zan tells Quinn that all dragons his unit has encountered so far are female. Their theory is that there is only a single male within the whole dragon population world-wide, who fertilizes the eggs the females lay, which explains the extreme growth rate of the population. They suspect that the male dragon lives in London, and they are on a mission to kill it and thus the species.
When Van Zan starts recruiting for his mission among the castle's population, a fight breaks out between him and Quinn, who still prefers to outlast the dragons. Van Zan and his unit go to London and are attacked by the male dragon on their way, leaving Alex and Van Zan as the only survivors of the group although they are seen helping a miscellaneous soldier as they leave. The male dragon backtracks their route to the castle and destroys it. The castle inhabitants are saved by hiding in an underground shelter.
Defeated, Van Zan returns to the castle, accepts Quinn's lead, and the three go to London. Quinn leads them to the male dragon's hiding place at the underground construction site, and they manage to kill it by shooting an explosive into its mouth just as it starts breathing fire. Van Zan is killed in the process.
[edit] Trivia
There is a scene in which two of the adults (Quinn and Creedy) entertain the children by acting out a play based on the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader "I am your father" confrontation scene from The Empire Strikes Back. When one of the children asks whether Quinn made the story up, Quinn replies, "Of course I did."
ABC had scheduled a broadcast of this movie on July 7, 2005, but because of the terrorist attack on London that day, it was replaced with a different movie. Coincidentally, the movie premiered in the Philippines on September 11, 2002.
The movie was made into a game released on several different gaming platforms.
The title of the Japanese version is Salamander.
