Reign of Fire has really, really good dragons. The effects are fantastic. The sets are full of Road Warrior-y goodness. There are a bunch of interesting ideas. Matthew McConaughey's transformation from "Friends"-oid pretty-boy into cigar-chomping Sgt. Rock clone is impressive.

But there's not really much plot, and the ending is anticlimactic and kind of dull.

I was really hoping this would be more of a scifi movie than just a bug hunt, since there seemed to be a lot of science-oriented dialog in the previews about dragon physiology, etc. But there was very little of that, and pretty much all of it took the form of, "we had a guy who figured this out years ago; he's dead now."

If this movie had been based on a book, I would have guessed that the book was actually pretty good, and that they left those parts out. (Of course I probably would have been prejudiced against ever reading that book, it being about dragons and all.)

There's a scene near the beginning where someone is flipping through a scrapbook of the collapse of civilization, with headlines, and pictures of monuments in flames. That scene was about half a minute long. The movie should have been about that instead.