I kept looking in the credits for “John Wyndham’s” name on this movie; it would have been right down his alley. Unfortunately, he’s been dead for some years, so any similarity is purely coincidental. Wyndham, after all, wrote, and wrote well, about the English hanging in there against nasty flowers and nasty things from the bottom of the sea, but not, as I remember, about nasty dragons. ⁽¹⁾

You would think that, after their experience excavating the extension for the Hobb’s End station in 1967, ⁽²⁾ the English would have learned not to fool around in the London underground. But no, those English will never learn. Here they are, four decades later, building an extension to the Docklands tube line when they inadvertently tunnel into a dragon’s burrow. Young Quinn Abercrombie, deep down in the workings to visit his mother (Alice Krige), is the first to see the monster — almost his last sight, as he is the only one to escape as the dragon cleans out the tunnels and makes his way to the surface to awaken others of his kind and lay waste to London, England, and the entire planet.

Skip to a dozen years later when Quinn (Christian Bale) is in charge of what may be the last surviving redoubt in England, an old castle or monastery or quarry or something Northumbria where he has charge of a few scruffy-looking adults and a lot of scruffy-looking children, basically trying to keep alive and waiting for the day when the now three million dragons in the world, having exhausted their food supply, open up the hideout like a tin can and toast the residents. At that point, along comes a column of armor — and a helicopter — from what’s left of the United States. Seems these guys have learned how to kill dragons, and their leader, Van Zandt (Matthew McConaughey), has brought them to England to hunt out the boss dragon, the only male in the whole species (yes, I used the pronoun “his” in the previous paragraph advisedly), without whom the species can’t breed. Quinn knows that this will be difficult, but Van Zandt is full of optimism. Rest of film is about the resulting war with the Papa Dragon, some hints of romance between Quinn and Van Zandt’s helicopter pilot Alex (Izabella Scorupco), and the difficulties of keeping alive when you’ve pissed off the clan leader.

There were inconsistencies and unexplained problems in the film; for instance, where did Alex’s helicopter come from (the refurbished C-5A that flew the Kentucky Irregular Cavalry to England crashed on arrival, killing a good part of its passenger manifest, but the helicopter doesn’t have a scratch on it) and where did it get its gas? More troubling to me was that the closeups of the various dragons, including Daddy, showed a species with no significant size difference between male and female members, but distant shots over London indicated that Daddy was big enough to swallow Mommy in one gulp (in the absence of prey, the dragons are not averse to placing their sisters in the food chain).

Whatever, it was an enjoyable and fast moving film — again in the tradition (which may only date to the Second World War) of the fictional British holding out indomitably against unspeakable odds. The dragons were pleasantly dragon-ish (though technologically not too different from the dragon of Dragonslayer some 21 years ago). See it on the wide screen, if you can.

⁽¹⁾ The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, others.

⁽²⁾ Quatermass and the Pit, released in the USA as Five Million Years to Earth, in which the discovery of a buried Martian spacecraft five million years old leads to the near destruction of London.