Reign of Fire is a post-apocalyptic-disaster movie, but this time with wonderful computer generated dragons. There have been dragon movies before; smooth talking in Dragonheart and nasty-turned-good in Shrek (and we'll ignore Dungeons and Dragons). In Reign of Fire, they are pissed off. I mean really pissed off! And the reason is obvious: they don't want to be outclassed by a buff, shaved Matthew McConaughey ((mdash)) and can you hold that against them?

Now for plot ((mdash)) well, in the not-too-distant future, humans uncover, and awake, a hibernating dragon's nest. The dragons are pretty grumpy at being woken too early and proceed to decimate humans and humanity. The film begins in the year 2020, when a group of survivors led by Quinn (Bale) fights the dragons with the help of Van Zant (McConaughey). Now, it's a bit farfetched movie and very macho, with matching dialogue. But some of the effects are very, very cool (the 'archangels' are fantastic). The film isn't bad, but not as good as I had hoped. A lot of smoke, not too much fire.

In a sort of post-apocalyptic near-future, the standards of Australian civilisation have slipped somewhat. Gangs of bikers maraud the highways, barely kept in check by elite cops and their souped-up pursuit cars. Max Rockatansky (Gibson) and Jim Goose (Bisley) are two such cops. When bikies, led by Toecutter (Keays-Byrne), kill Goose, Max decides it's time to resign so he can live a normal family life with his wife (Samuel) and baby. Their beach holiday ends in a tragedy, however, that forces him back into uniform (and his V-8 Interceptor) ((mdash)) and this time it's personal.

As if related to the film's setting, in which the simplest material goods are as dear as human life, Mad Max was produced on a minute budget of $380,000. Despite that, or perhaps as a result of it, Mad Max has a visual style, pace, and vitality that distinguish it from all other action films of that era. It took more at the box office in Australia than Star Wars, and found a place in the Guinness Book of Records for having obtained the highest profit-to-cost ratio of any feature film.