So last night we kicked back for a bit to watch a DVD: Reign of Fire.

Now, I'm a bit of a geek (really, I AM!), and I was pretty excited about this movie -- it has dragons and a post-apocalyptic storyline, and humans jumping out of helicopters to kill giant lizards. What more could you ask for? It had a good look, but I could tell when I saw the trailers in theaters a few months ago that it would be a bit... bad.

Now, I don't really mind the occasional stinker of a film, but this one pissed me off, because it COULD have been stupendous. We've all been spoiled by the mastery of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring, I know, and nothing will compare -- he developed his characters, gave us wonderful visuals, a breakneck pace.

"Reign of Fire" had too little of this. What angered me was that they ruined a cool premise -- dragons returning to the worlds after millennia of hibernation -- with lazy writing.

A couple times, early on, the film took my breath away, with the "Arcangels" who jumped out of the helicopter to throw nets onto dragons in flight, or when the Quinn character leapedo onto a horse, of all things, to chase down a dragon. Nifty little anachronisms like that, where it felt like an epic fantasy (they were all holed up in a castle, which was PERFECT), and then you're shocked when you see a friggin' tank come blasting out of the woodwork.

But the movie just died in the last 30 minutes. I'm guessing they just ran out of money, and had to cut it short (it was barely 90 minutes long). The big battle with the male alpha dragon just sort of ends, and we lose a major character to zero fanfare or emotional affect, and the female lead just crumples like a daisy in an almost insulting way, and the credits roll. And the dragon that was once as big as a castle is about the size of that pipsqeuak in that Sean Connery flick, "DragonHeart."

I wish I wouldn't even get my hopes up about SF/F/H movies anymore. It seems the dumb folks in Hollywood can't make them. You gotta go to New Zealand to do that. Later.