- Directed by Rob Bowman
- Written by Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka, and Matt Greenberg
- Starring
- Christian Bale
- Matthew McConaughey
- Izabella Scorupco
- Gerard Butler
It’s become increasingly difficult to find new and interesting ways to bring about The End Of Life As We Know It. Nuclear holocaust has been a favorite for years, as have any number of plagues and alien invasions; we also had that ’90s glut of “big things falling from the sky” movies. There’s also a smaller contingent of movies in which the means to the end (to coin a phrase) are left sort of vague, or attributed in passing to a combination of rapacious consumption, ecological trauma, and general pooping in our own dogdish.
Credit has to be given, then, any time a new apocalyptic scenario is dreamed up, especially one with such rich storytelling possibilities. And this one, “dragons attack and destroy all but a handful of survivors,” came along at just the right time, when CGI technique has progressed to the point that the necessary special effects can be rendered with wholesale believability.
You think your commute is bad?
And yet, and yet… despite a great cast, well-imagined sets, and the best-rendered dragons ever to swoop across your screen, something just ends up missing.
In modern-day London, a young lad with the almost comically British name of Quinn Abercromby (Ben Thornton) visits his mother (Alice Krige) at her worksite, a new subway tunnel being hollowed out under the city. He thus gets to witness the beginning of the end: The opening of a long-sealed underground chamber, from which emerges a huge, firebreathing dragon.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, with some sketched-in exposition to the effect that the dragons propogated like, well, wildfire; that they eat the ash left over from their conflagrations; and that, in a very short time, the entire world is charred to a cinder. (Also, that dragons exterminated the dinosaurs and caused the Ice Age.) Quinn, now played by a shaggy Christian Bale, leads a small community of survivors in Northumberland, where their preparations include extensive water-cooled chambers dug out beneath a medieval castle and a few fertile fields spaced far out from their fortress. Quinn is a leader obsessed with survival, but tempered with a true love for the people he leads (as evidenced when he leads a rescue mission for a family which left the castle for early harvesting, contrary to his orders).
The gesture known as “flipping the dragon.”
Although they’ve lost contact with any other survivor group over the last few years, they cling to a tenuous hope: that the dragons, having rapaciously consumed their food supply, are on the verge of starvation. If they can just hold on another year, maybe two…
The entire dynamic changes when a convoy of tanks rolls in. At first taking them to be rare marauders, Quinn and company find that they’re something different, and very dangerous. As Quinn’s right-hand man Creedy (Gerard Butler) puts it, “Only one thing worse than dragons: Americans.”
These particular Americans are the “Kentucky Irregulars,” led by the hardened Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey). I have acknowledge McConaughey’s willingness not to look like a “movie star” in this role: he’s got a shaved head, a scruffy beard, and a general haunted edginess to him. (I also have to acknowledge the unwillingness of the DVD’s marketing staff to let McConaughey look so un-starrish on the cover; they airbrushed all of the character out his face and prettyboyified him to within an inch of recognizability.) He convinces Quinn to let him and his men in to rest and regroup by showing him a rare and significant item: a dragon tooth on a chain. Van Zan’s a demonstrable dragon slayer.
“You know, it’s been years since I had a decent omelet.”
It isn’t long before Van Zan gets to practice his art on an attacking dragon, a strategy that depends on the dragon being baited by a skydiver dropped from a chopper, then having its wings entangled in nets. The English survivors are amazed that it works – they’ve never seen a dead dragon before – but Van Zan’s there for more than admiration (and in fact, rejects that out of hand). No, he’s not looking for women for his men; he’s got one, Alex (Izabella Scuropco), the chopper pilot. No, He’s got a better cause. His science people (mainly Alex) have determined that the dragons are like some kinds of fish, with many females and only one male. And that male has taken up residence in the original cavern in London.
And all Van Zan needs are some volunteer soldiers — and, failing that, some draftees — from among Quinn’s people.
It’s to the screenwriters’ credit that the erstwhile human heavy, Van Zan, doesn’t stumble into the hole of becoming a militaristic despot or fanatic; he’s trying to rid the world of dragons once and for all, and he’s willing to sacrifice all the lives he needs to, even his own, for that worthy goal. That doesn’t make it any easier for Quinn that Van Zan’s goal is diametrically opposed to his own of keeping his people safe and alive. The most dramatic antagonists are those who are distinctly non-evil, but who nevertheless provide a complete foil to the protagonist.
Hum along with Night on Bald Mountain!
With all of this dramatic and technical backing, then, where does the movie head south? It’s no one thing, but a sum of several parts. Here are a few:
The dragons. I mentioned how well-realized they are; they move and act like real, physical beasts. Too bad that nobody thought to be more creative in their design. They look exactly like we all expect dragons to look: bat wings, knobbly skin, swept-back horns on the head. Certainly someone could have come up with a more interesting and innovative design than simply bringing the cover of a Dragonlance paperback to life.
The landscape. Let’s ignore for a moment the idea that every square inch of dry land has been ravaged by dragonfire. The idea of an entirely ashen environment is a good one, but the sheer neutrality of the production (because, you know, ash gets all over everything) drags down the visual impact of the movie. Between the grey hills, the grey costumes, the grey skies (this is Britain, you know), and the frequent grey fog, the movie ends up being an eyestrain. Reining back some of the oppressiveness of the unsaturated color scheme and leaving it more as a background impression, a la The Matrix, would have helped immensely. (Although at least the monochromatic color scheme isn’t nearly as overbearing and ridiculous as Minority Report.)
That grey stuff all over the city? Hate to tell you, but it ain’t ash.
Alex the chopper pilot. Don’t bring a female into a story dominated by men, show impressions of her softer “feminine” side, and then do nothing with her. Scorupco is utterly wasted as a bit of window dressing, and her inclusion in the final desperate assault on Papa Dragon feels more like a grudging obligatory observance of convention than a necessary part of the story. This is a story about two male humans fighting with each other and with the dominant male dragon; intimations of a possible but unrealized romantic subplot are nothing more than a bait-and-switch.
There are some truly inspired moments in this movie, one of them being Quinn and Creedy acting out the climactic battle of The Empire Strikes Back for an enthralled audience of children born too late to have seen the original. But no scenes of comparable inspiration take place within the main thrust of the story itself. Instead, despite the tremendous achievement of the dragons themselves, the movie as a whole comes across as grey and neutral as the barren landscape.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 86 (and the whole rest of the world), plus 3 dragons
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 7
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Alexander Siddig (Ajay, the radio operator) played Dr. Julian Bashir on DS9
- Alice Krige (Quinn’s mother) played the Borg Queen in First Contact and the two-part Voyager episode “Endgame”
