After a fitful sleep following the terrible outcome of the World Cup (although isn’t nice to see a non-Global North country as the Power-To-Beat), I woke up in a daze, my back sore, as Leah and I had ‘camped out’ in the living room to watch the match, there not being a tv in the bedroom. I puttered about for a while, then decided to watch the other movie we’d rented, Dungeons & Dragons. Which was, as expected, pretty bad. Although I was expecting bad, I was expecting enjoyably bad. And it may have been so, in the vein of so many other high-fantasy films, were it not purportedly based on the role-playing game. D&D the game provides a lush fantasy background for any film – heavily influenced by Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth saga, there’s a lot of disparate creatures, cultures, personalities, etc with which to populate a film. There are, however, certain standards, and a core ‘world’ for the game. I had expected the film to perhaps take part in this core world (Greyhawk), and follow at the core standards. But no – there were new races, that weren’t featured enough to make interesting, and most annoyingly, Dragons, which in D&D are these incredibly powerful, vastly intelligent, majestic creatures to fear and respect, were suddenly but pawns in a political power play in some empire, the servants (no matter how unwilling) of these humans.
The film itself is barely worth reviewing – not even Jeremy Iron’s scene-chewing is really worth watching, and the cgi is fairly poor. I’m glad the film was free to rent, because I don’t think it was even worth the rental price.
Looking for a place to happen