Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 3/31/23
T-Minus One Day to Wedded Bliss Edition
Wedded Bliss is Nigh!
This is your last public invitation to scoot on over to Facebook and settle upon the Graceland Wedding Chapel’s official page at 4:30 PM CST on April 1st, which is tomorrow. There you will be treated to a spectacle of love and adoration and also, a wedding, performed by Elvis hisownself.
And with that, I will now leave you in the capable hands of the DoMR.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
We know that there have been other reviews of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie, and we would be remiss if we didn’t weigh in, but there just wasn’t a consensus amongst our department, so we opted instead for a thoroughness not often seen in Internet discourse. We beg your indulgence in this respect and promise not to make a habit of it.
Dungeons & Dragons (in theaters)
A mismatched band of thieves gets double-crossed and has to repair the damage they caused while trying to get a little payback in the process.
This review needs to happen in sections, so let’s get to the elemental question that everyone wants to know: is it a good D&D movie? They tried once before, and it was a grim and dismal failure on every count—of course, this was before the Pop Cultural Singularity happened, and suddenly, these kinds of creature-laden fantasy romps were not only viable, but encouraged and welcomed. All that being said, yes. It’s a recognizable Dungeons & Dragons movie. All the stuff from the trailers and a bunch of things not in the trailers are both wonderful and satisfying, the kind of thing you can point to and say, “They got it right!’
I’m not the only Old-School Grognard who thinks that, either. The online old fart gaming community has been pretty effusive with praise about what they have seen, and with good reason: this movie looks like it’s going to do for role-playing gamers what modern super hero movies did for comic book readers: it reinforces the idea that maybe all those hours playing games and reading funny books weren’t a complete waste of time. At the very least, it excuses it.
Probably the single best thing about the movie is the banter and overall tone of the dialogue and character interaction is completely accurate to the kinds of banter and sarcasm you get from a really good game of D&D with friends who know each other and know how to kid, joke, and take the piss out of one another. Also, several of the key beats, particularly the way some magic items are creatively and cleverly used, are right there in the sweet spot of your players coming up with a really inspired idea and as the DM, instead of saying, “You can try,” you say, “That’s bad ass. Yes, that works. I’m still going to need you to make a Dexterity check, though…” More than any other aspect of the film, I appreciated that the most, and so will you, especially if you’ve ever played in one of those epic D&D campaigns where everyone still talks about it years later.
As Pop Culture
The roots of role-playing games are mired in both wargames and fantasy literature. When Dungeons & Dragons was introduced to the world in 1974, it owed much more to Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, et.al, than it did any movies and television because, with only a few exceptions, there wasn’t enough of anything from TV and film that was worth drawing from. All of the “For Further Inspiration” lists in the early rules sets were lists of books, 95% of which were straight up fantasy an/or SciFi fiction.
It was the success and the appeal of D&D that had programmers writing early computer text games to incorporate this new Choose Your Own Adventure game model, and as soon as they could, TSR was happy to license D&D to software companies for this nascent industry.
Now we’re 50 years down the road. Video Games are their own billion dollar industry, and D&D is now in the gestalt, so much so that certain totems of the game, like the d20 die, are recognizable to people who don’t play D&D, thanks to a steady stream of appearances in TV shows and movies over the years. No, we’re not going to talk about the misfire from 2000, especially when you consider that movie came out one year before Peter Jackson’s three-year Lord of the Rings project. Just from movies alone, you can point to a number of films made in the last 20-plus years that were a blend of fantasy concepts, including, but certainly not limited to, the inclusion of a dragon onscreen.
Reign of Fire (2002). The Hobbit trilogy (Smaug showed up in 2013). Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire (2005). The Game of Thrones series. Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). We can, and should, include Dragonheart (1996), and the grand architect of most of the dragons on the above list, Dragonslayer (1981), a movie made with a cool, terrifying dragon and nary a computer in sight.
These are just off the top of my head. There are a lot more, though, with special effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. All of that owes a psychic debt to Dungeons & Dragons. It was really Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that did most of the heavy lifting, but since that’s shared DNA with role-playing games, there’s not a lot of fantasy that’s been originally produced in the last five decades that doesn’t have some sort of precedent or antecedent to Dungeons & Dragons in and of itself.
Or, to put it more simply, this ain’t my first dragon. Not by a damn sight. As such, the movie doesn’t have the pop and the wow that maybe something called Dungeons & Dragons should have. That may be why they made the choice that they made—there are dragons, plural, in the movie. You see both of them in the trailers. I think this might have been so that some Internet wag wouldn’t be able to quip, “Shouldn’t it have been called ‘Dungeons and Dragon?’”
It's just that, well, ever since the first boxed versions of the game, the dragon has been the de facto corporate mascot for the game and a cornerstone of every marketing campaign they ever did. Yes, there is a red dragon in the movie (for those of you who don’t know, the color of the dragon determines its breath weapon, and red dragons breathe fire), but when you see what they did to their beloved corporate psychopomp, you may laugh out loud. Or not. I don’t know. I was confused to the point of distraction—of all the choices you could have made in a tense action sequence, why that?
I’m not surprised to see that they left a lot of character classes out in the making of this movie—but what they left in? A bard? A paladin? A druid? Oh, Crom give me strength. The bard wasn’t at all bardic, save for one pep talk and two lilting songs, so, um...well, you know what? Never mind, that’s pretty accurate. The druid only used her Wild Shape ability to change into cooler, better monsters and fired a very cool, this-will-get-statted-out-in-everyone’s-game-henceforth, wrist-mounted slingshot, but other than that, she was the most boring Tiefling ever; she came off as more fey than infernal.
The sorcerer could have been any magic user. Only the barbarian and the paladin seemed to be appropriately dialed in, with the barbarian being the most accurate in terms of what’s on the character sheet. Chris Pine should have been a rogue. The rogue that was in the movie was a RINO, a Rogue in Name Only. There was an underwhelming amount of spell casting on the part of all the spell casters, but at least when the spells finally got thrown about, they were instantly recognizable as being unique to the game.
It’s weird to think that they name-checked all of these character classes and then didn’t let them do 75% or more of their character sheets. And yet, the menagerie of beasts and wild things were appropriately awesome, in a couple of instances outshining their meager game stats. I think the only two creatures onscreen that aren’t straight out of the Monster Manual are dragonflies and the horses they (literally) rode in on. Everything else is a registered trademark, so expect all of your old favorites and a few surprising additions, and they will be cool, too.
There is a kind of frenzied urgency to the telling of the story, much like what we saw in certain super hero movies like Green Lantern (2011) ; basically, it boils down to “We may only get one shot at this, so instead of planning a trilogy of films, we have to put everything you ever wanted to see that pertains to Green Lantern in this one movie.”
Maybe that’s why the script is a giant word salad, and it’s obvious that they are taking great pains to say these names and places out loud as much as they can. This is less world building and more like a checklist for fans, allowing them the credit for getting that idea onscreen in case this is the only D&D movie they ever make. This will not be the case, but I’ve seen this kind of effort before, nearly always in super hero movies.
In Batman Forever (1995), Bruce Wayne mentions that Dick Grayson’s circus must be “halfway to Metropolis” by now. There were gasps in the audience when he said that. “Ohmygawd! They both exist in the same movie universe!” It seems silly now, but back in the mid-90s, it was huge.
Five years later, we got X-Men (2000), which had a lot of what we now call Easter eggs, everything from other Marvel characters name-checked in a list of suspected mutants to an un-furry Hank McCoy talking on a television about the mutant problem. It was worse in X2: X-Men United (2003) and out of control by X-Men 3: The Last Stand (2006).
Filmmakers knew that there was no way to shove 300 mutants into a movie, which, for most X-men fans, would have been dubbed “a good start,” and there was always someone raging on the Internet, asking out loud when, oh, GOD, WHEN are they gonna give Dazzler her own movie? The short answer to that question is, never. But they could and did drop as many names and characters into the background in the form of quick cuts, Easter eggs and window dressing, a practice that continued right up to Iron Man (2008) with Captain America’s shield, and, well, we know how well that worked out.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, then, is to the Dungeon & Dragons roleplaying game what the X-Men movie franchise was to the X-Men comics. Everyone get out your scorecard because the names of people, places, and things are going to come at you very fast, hot and heavy. You will undoubtedly hear someone or some place or something you like mentioned in passing, I guarantee it. They even put the Forgotten Realms map on the table in one scene. If that campaign setting is where you do all of your D&D playing, then you will feel not only seen, but incredibly vindicated.
As a Gen-X Touchstone
We’re very close to having near pop culture transcendence with some of the most ubiquitous artifacts and signifiers of Dungeon & Dragons; the monster known as the beholder, the gelatinous cube, the owlbear, and the like. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, I’m grateful for anything that will get people to stop making Cthulhu plushies. But on the other—and this is contradictory, considering that I have kinda-sorta thrown the movie under the bus—but this movie is essentially the last thing that was a product of the Generation X formative experience.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a commercial from around 1981 or 1982 for what appears to be the Moldvay Basic edition (with the Keep on the Borderlands module and the iconic Erol Otus cover showing on the rule book), featuring Jamie Gertz and Alan Ruck (and what’s more GenX than Muffy Tepperman from Square Pegs and Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off playing D&D?
The game was made by Baby Boomers, sure, but it was us, in the seventies and eighties, that grew up playing it, making it our own, and taking ownership of it in a way that has always put D&D at the front of the fringe, the closest part of the outer edge. They name checked it in Taps (1981). They played it in E.T. (1982). The weaponized it in Mazes & Monsters (1982). It was one of our cultural boogeymen and also a sacred cow. Some of us (not me) had to sneak around in order to play it. By 1983, it was a Saturday Morning cartoon. In the 90s, there were a lot of callouts, like in the movie Airheads (1994):
Thanks to the Freaks & Geeks (1999) finale, it became standard practice to have a “D&D episode” on any TV show set “back in the day” or, going forward, with geek culture on display. And what was interesting about all of that was, by and large, they were all faithful, if not exactly accurate, depictions of kids playing rpgs together.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours. And it was the last thing untouched by the Corporate-Owned Assets and Lucrative Intellectual Property Transmogrification Into Multi-Media Franchise, or COALIPTIMM, for those of you who need an awkward anagram . As big an enterprise as D&D currently is ($100 million yearly give or take), it was still a thing that required intention on your part to engage with it. If you didn’t go looking for it, you weren’t going to see it, not like with a Disney property, like Star Wars or Micky Mouse. That shit is everywhere and it’s nigh-unavoidable.
You could still claim outsider status when you played D&D and if you were my age or thereabouts, you could claim to be a part of the Old School Renaissance, or OSR, and then you could be the outsider among all the other outsiders. The Out-Outsider.
This movie is our last turn in the Pop Culture Barrel. The next piece of nostalgia that is fished out of the Zeitgeist and repackaged into a movie franchise will not be something of ours. It’ll be some Millennial touchstone, and I shudder to think (a) what that would be, and (b) how the powers-that-be might ironically comment on it. Sheesh.
I don’t know how I feel about that; it’s not that I’m “done” as a fan of things; there’s still a ton of stuff, books, comics, etc, that I’m into that have not made the jump into the mainstream, at least, not in the way I would like. Hope springs eternal for a Conan movie that doesn’t suck. Or any Elric film or a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser TV series. But those things are not unique to Generation X and a part of my generation’s universal experience. Hollywood is done with us.
My Own Personal Take
My biggest problem with the movie on this meta-level is that it depicts a version of Dungeons & Dragons that is the most homogenized and least interesting of any version of the game to date. D&D fifth edition is a Frankenstein, made up of pieces and parts from of all its predecessors, all stitched together. It’s a dim sum menu of various editions of D&D, which is actually a good thing. The last two iterations of the game were bloated to the point of incomprehensibility (D&D 3rd edition) and abstracted to the point of nearly becoming a skirmish wargame again (D&D 4th edition).
D&D 5e (as the kids call it) is just right, a balance of simple rules and optional systems, that is very flexible and infinitely customizable. But the powers that be also decided to keep the Forgotten Realms setting and its monsters, and taken together as a whole, that’s only slightly more exciting than watching paint dry, which is why there are so many people doing their own campaign world settings right now. Hasbro has to go home with the date it brought to the party, so it’s not entirely their fault. Just mostly, because the floor is littered with the carcasses of complete world settings, that TSR owns, that have fan followings, but that they aren’t willing to dust off and repurpose for one reason or another. The few pocket world settings that they have introduced have been decidedly mixed in quality and execution, ranging from, “Well, they didn’t screw it up,” to “What the hell were they thinking?” And that former sentiment has popped up more frequently in the last few year, too.
I don’t run games in the Forgotten Realms, and never have, and doubt very seriously I ever will. I guess I’m glad this movie got made, but I wasn’t the one asking for it, either. I’m certainly happy that it’s not an embarrassment or a misfire. It’s going to help the game in the long run.
Tabletop Role-Playing, at its very best and most elemental, is indulging in a form of pastiche. We didn’t play “straight” D&D when we were kids; we played Conan meets Elric of Melnibone. We played Lord of the Rings meets the Beastmaster. We swiped everything we could from all areas of popular culture and jammed them together, nilly-willy into our nearly nonsensical campaigns. I wrote a series of blog posts about the movies that informed our gaming. You can read the series here: The Movies of Dungeons & Dragons.
As a pastiche, the game works best in a liminal space—in your head, a Product of your Imagination, or as a reductive representation on a tabletop. It’s never quite held together on its own, despite the wealth of novels that utilize its concepts. As gamers, too, our tastes have gotten more sophisticated as the mediums for storytelling grew up with us. Jurassic Park dinos. Matrix kung fu. Game of Thrones political intrigue. And, of course, better and better game design.
The thing that role-playing games simulate best (albeit imperfectly as a narrative delivery system) is books, that thing that fewer and fewer people are consuming these days, including most gamers, who grew up with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy on DVD and Blu-Ray and so why would you need to read those books? There’s the Harry Potter books, but there’s also the Harry Potter movies, which sparkle when held up to the light. Most new players of D&D have the video game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a point of reference for what constitutes a role-playing game these days: you play “the dragon born,” who has the power to slay the beasts with your magic. If D&D is to become Hasbro’s second billion-dollar brand, they will need the inertia to overcome everything that they helped shepherd into existence, and I don’t know if the company can pull it off. Not now, anyway, when they recently destroyed twenty years of goodwill by alienating upwards of 75% of their customer base.
In this respect, no, I don’t like the movie very much, but I needed to explain why in order to be able to credibly say, despite what they managed to do—take a middling fantasy setting and elevate it with great special effect and a group of actors that didn’t make the source material look bad—there are much better examples of fantasy at all levels of media. I’d rather that big budget have been spent on a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, starring Sam Heughan as Faf, and Adam Driver as Mouse.
Dungeons & Dragons, as a game, as a thought experiment, as a creative exercise, as a pastime, etc., should be the reaction to popular culture, not the impetus. Pastiche imitates the work of another author, or celebrates a particular genre, and frequently does it with a dash of humor. It follows; it does not lead.
Square pegs! That's a name I haven't heard in a while. The only thing that would've made that ad more GenX would've been if they were wearing Generra shirts. Of course that probably would've triggered singularity