Reign of Fire and stories worth preserving
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Gerard Butler and Christian Bale in Reign of Fire (2002)
Last week film criticism YouTuber Like Stories of Old posted an interesting video on mediocre or bad movies that nevertheless—and often despite themselves—had one moment of insight or genius that changed the way he thinks. It’s an interesting selection. I thought I’d offer one of my own.
Reign of Fire came out the summer I graduated from high school. It wasn’t particularly good but I was sufficiently impressed to buy it on DVD and watch it once or twice more. Between the initial glow of seeing a big screen spectacle like this and the decision to trade the DVD in for credit somewhere a few years later, one scene always stood out. I still think about it twenty-four years later.
Briefly, Reign of Fire takes place in a near-future scenario in which dragons, long thought mythical, turn out to be real and dormant beneath the earth. Construction on the London Underground reawakens one and brings about apocalypse. Decades later, small bands of survivors live in the ash, struggling to grow crops without attracting the dragons’ destructive attention and fearing to go above ground. One such group is led by Christian Bale and Gerard Butler. They eventually fall in with a wild-eyed Matthew McConaughey as a dragon-hunting Kentucky National Guardsman* who has somehow made it to Britain with tanks and helicopters and has a theory about how to wipe out the dragon species. This goes way over the top, as you might imagine, but the scene that stuck with me happens before all of this develops.
In this early scene, Bale and Butler entertain the children of their little colony. Gathered in candlelight within the ruins of the castle where they shelter, the two act out a swordfight. Butler calls himself the White Knight. Bale, breathing heavily, calls himself the Black Knight. He forces Butler to his knees and demands that he join him. Butler refuses; the Black Knight killed his father.
In case you hadn’t guessed it by this point, they’re reenacting The Empire Strikes Back.** The children watch, rapt, and gasp at the Black Knight’s following revelation.
The scene is barely a minute long and more evocative and poignant than anything else in the movie. Here, in the ruins of civilization, an old story has survived to entertain a generation that never knew the world that produced it. It was preserved because it was worth preserving and continues to entertain despite the limitations of its new medium.
That’s the immediate import of the scene, but its broader implications have kept me thinking about it ever since. How much of our culture will survive into the future, and in what form? How will it mutate? Given a longer timeframe than that in the movie, what will Bale and Butler’s White Knight and Black Knight look like, and what new details might be added to the story? And—given that their group of survivors, though isolated, is not the only one out there—how is Star Wars remembered elsewhere, if at all?
I saw Reign of Fire long before discovering the Volsung saga or the Nibelungenlied but it primed me for encountering a tradition that emerged in catastrophe and diverged and changed in different ways over centuries. It got me thinking about the fragility of our stories, who keeps track of old things in a culture that has lost so many of them, how they go about it, and the value of preserving them.***
What Reign of Fire taps into for the space of a minute is the emotional and even theological register—in addition to a candlelit medieval chapel we get intentional insert shots of haloed saints—of A Canticle for Leibowitz. It does so apparently accidentally and then backs off, but that one moment struck a chord with me that has lasted to the present. For that reason alone I still think of Reign of Fire with some fondness.
Watch that scene and appreciate it, then watch this compilation of Rifftrax zingers and have a good laugh.
* That’s how I remember it, and I don’t care to fact check this particular item.
** An uncharacteristically clever YouTube comment on the scene suggests this scene as a question for Trivial Pursuit: “In what movie did Christian Bale play Darth Vader?”
*** Throughout my college years, especially as I started reading things like Gregory of Tours and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I toyed with an idea for a novel called The Chronicle of the King of Atlanta. It would take place in a post-apocalyptic South divided and warred over like 6th-century Western Europe and be written as both an official annal and the memoirs of its author, one of the few literate people left. It never happened, but I still think about that imagined world regularly.
