Anyone seen it? Is it awful?
It’s a great fun movie. The plot’s great, the pacing is great, the references are great, the comedy is great. It’s a fun adventure with a relatable team of misfit heroes.
It takes some liberties with the game mechanics to accomplish this. If you can’t forgive that, you’ll have a rough time, especially if you like wildshaping druids and spellcasting bards.
While it does skirt some game mechanics, probably due to it being a movie and it’s a strange medium to adapt, it also does some really cool subtle things with the mechanics. For example, in the final major fight all of the characters attack in the same order. They’re in initiative!
My wife suspected this about that final fight, but it goes by quickly in the theater, and unfortunately it’s streaming on one of the few services we don’t have or want to pay for, so we haven’t re-watched it in a pause-able format.
This, pretty much. Pretty hard to be 100% game accurate and make a good movie. Appreciated where they took license, and where they stuck to some (often, obscure) lore.
They also show one of the characters, the bad guy if I remember, having to use concentration for a spell!
One of the rare movies that starts shaky and then finds its footing and breaks out into a conditioned run by the end of it. Didn’t go in expecting much, got a good time.
Rest ye Jarnathan, you deserve a break.
Edit, and the dragon! My wife is obsessed with dragons and she was in love with the one in the movie, it’s like her favorite dragon now.
But they do pay attention to a lot of fine detail. Such as the battle sequences where the party always remains in turn order properly.
Such a fun movie that felt just like playing a session or three with friends.
I honestly enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. They is a chonky dragon. I repeat, a chonky dragon!
:3 yes please
The best part of that was learning that the chonky dragon is actual canon content. Not made up just for the movie.
As far as franchised products based films it’s very rewatchable and I imagine will be a comfort movie on the future.
Id put it just a little below the Lego Movie for quality for what’s essentially an advertisement movie. No complaints however.
As a D&D fan it hits the sweet spots of references but not to feel like it’s pandering (see Super Mario Movie). For a die hard D&D fan you can feel the die rolls going on in the movie.
I imagine Hasbro will kill or ruin Studio One somehow which is a shame I would want more of these kind of D&D movies
“Feeling the die rolls” is very accurate. My group of friends plays 5e pretty regularly, and we all enjoyed the movie a lot.
Not just feeling the die rolls, I could also feel the DM going “oh crap, the bridge is gone now, how will they get across? I know, I’ll give them a portal gun.” And then for the rest of the movie the DM going “oh crap, they have a portal gun now, how am I going to stop them from bypassing every challenge with it?”
As a D&D player, that was my favorite part. The times when the party was getting creative and you could see the DM say, “Ok, roll for xyz to see if that works.”
So many times when I thought, “Yeah, I could see us coming up with that.” Followed by, “Oh yeah, our DM would definitely do that.” And yet it managed to have enough heart and be generally entertaining enough that your non-D&D friends will enjoy it too.
Especially the very beginning, where they come up with the crazy plan to escape, somehow manage to actually pass the persuasion check they didn’t think they would pass, then go through with the plan anyway because they worked hard on it.
“We were going to release you!”
First off I mean this in a good way. I thought it felt a lot more like a movie of how real life players would play the campaign, rather than an attempt at a movie adaptation of a book. And having played D&D, I think it made the movie more relatable to the core audience.
So definitely recommend it.
Plans that are doomed to fail, improper use of a magic item, overpowered npcs to nudge the players back in track? Yeah they nailed it.
Is it high art? No. Enjoyable? Very much.
While it might not be high art, and while it was clearly never trying to be, I’d argue that it does have more nuance and clever writing than many other action/fantasy movies recently.
Tldr: It’s not high art, but it’s still art.
I’m talkin godfather here, but yeah, spot on.
It was such a fun movie! It was much better then it had any right being! With that said, the things I appreciated was, the world felt lived in, they didn’t make a big deal out of races other then humans, just continued on like “Yeah, bird people, that’s a thing we all know is real and accept”.
With no spoilers, I heavily appreciated the “dragon scene”, it was an interesting take that made it fresh but was still an incredibly dangerous situation for the characters.
It is very good. Feels like DnD as played by players and a dm that has to adapt to their stupid ideas.
Exactly. Lots of house rules at this table.
To be fair, the DM had to adapt to his own stupid ideas at various points too.
Both myself and my wife really enjoyed it. I have played D&D for a long time and my wife had never had any interest in it.
Super underrated!! I didn’t expect to be laughing the whole time. Loved it!
It’s fun. Don’t expect anything extraordinary and you won’t be disappointed.
Some of the plans they hatch really feel like the wacky stuff players come up with.
Definitely go in with exceptionally low expectations if you want to have a good time. I was fairly optimistic based on the
reviewsrampant shilling on Reddit and was pretty disappointed. If you’d asked me for a score right after I watched it I’d go 4/10. In hindsight it’s more of a 6 if you allow that it’s supposed to be a bit tongue in cheek and the stilted dialog is a feature rather than a bug.With those caveats it’s a perfectly good way to waste two hours if you have nothing better to do. It has no memorable lines or scenes, and is just an average hot-topic-of-the-moment throwaway action movie.
It’s quite good. Far better than I expected it to be.
It’s something we haven’t seen at the the movies for a while. A nice fun action romp. Think what Marvel films used to be at the start when they were self contained stories and not just set up for the next movie. It somehow manages to be exactly like a D&D game while also being completely enjoyable even if you don’t know what D&D is.
I had a great time watching it. It’s definitely worth checking out even if it’s not for you. There’s enough fun to justify it.
Recently watched it. As a DND movie I give it 9/10, a nearly perfect DND movie
As a movie, maybe 7/10. It doesn’t take too many risks, and it won’t make you cry.
It’s like a dumb heist movie, and very enjoyable.
I think “dumb heist movie” is a perfect description. I never found myself invested in it, but it was basically fun to watch.
It’s a cute movie. Some scenes are funny to watch because they reminded me of what my group would come up in a situation.