The Dungeons and Dragons movie was fun

[got_quiet]

I saw the Dungeons and Dragons movie with my roommates, and I actually had a great time with it! It's a very basic sort of heist adventure but it knew exactly what it wanted and it got there with very few mishaps. Yes, there is a tragic fridged wife. That was the most annoying part of it. There was also one scene that I thought hit the lows of the D&D movie of decades past, which was a moment when a character ends up with a hand full of maggots and lifts it up to the camera in such an exaggerated and played out way I instantly got flashbacks of the Dwarf in the old movie having to make faces at the camera for two minutes straight before saying his stupid one liner or whatever it was.

But! Aside from that I thought the humor was great. There were a lot of in jokes about typical campaigns and tropes but nothing that didn't work without the inside knowledge in my opinion, and there was none of that awful "Reference! Reference! Reference!" stuff that some projects with massive fan history can get caught up in. The adventuring party was entertaining and while they were largely tropish, they had their own little arcs or were engaged enough with the world that they were not entirely one dimensional. The action parts were  also entertaining and not overly drawn out, and some bits were novel and good comedy. My absolute favorite bit was the fat dragon rolling around trying to snatch a meal.

And while the lesson to be learned was again predictable and stock, it was still handled earnestly and with some real emotion. It would have been very hard for the movie to have gotten nearly as bad as its predecessor, but even disregarding the old movie's existence I'd say this one was pretty good. I liked this better than the last Marvel thing I watched, which was Loki, and it was refreshing to watch a story that wasn't tied into dozens of other installments for once. It's a Forgotten Realms story but you literally need to know 0 about the setting for everything to make sense.

 

And the latest thefridayfive 

1. What fandom(s) do you follow on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth? Can you follow fandoms here? I haven't found any communities that are actually active so I guess none, though I'd like to find something for indy games an gay speculative fiction at least.

2. Where else do you follow those fandoms? Mostly I get stuff from reddit, tumblr, and twitter.

3. Have you ever met up with fannish friends? Many years ago I ended up meeting a lot of WoW friends. About 6 of them over the course of a few years.

4. When there's a question on a 'find a fic' community, are you likely to help find the fic or do you hope someone else will know it? I don't belong to any such communities. I did help someone find an old fic recently though!

5. Did you customize/tweak your LJ or DW home page or are you using one of the basic options? I'm using a generic layout. It's nice and clean. I save my weird design stuff for personal sites but I haven't had one of those in a long time.

Comments

[shadowbliss]

I'm going to admit to loving the predecessor because of the Jeremy Irons/Bruce Payne double team. I have TRIED SO HARD to not laugh at those two but its impossible.

[got_quiet]

The villains chewing the scenery was the only thing of value in the first movie, it is true.

[autumndaze]

So jealous of you meeting up with WoW friends! Dad and I (we used to play WoW together) always talked about like the hopeful idea of meeting up with our guildmates in person, and we actually chatted about it at times. A couple of our guildmates (who were also in the US) actually did meet up a couple times to commission some work and hang out. It was really awesome. I remember when The Guild first released it felt even more like it could happen... and then it never did lol

[got_quiet]

It was a lot of fun! Two of them I was very close to for a while, though unfortunately life has taken us down different paths now.