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.
May the seas be friendly to ye matey
Yar har and fiddle dee dee
Meh. If I actually want it bad enough, I’ll buy it. Someone somewhere has to actually pay for the content you salty sea rascals enjoy.
They also show one of the characters, the bad guy if I remember, having to use concentration for a spell!
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.
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.
Oh goodness, hadn’t noticed that. Will have to watch for it on the inevitable rewatch.
You guys manage this in 3 sessions? My group is playing a space opera, and it takes about 3 sessions to fly from one system to the next.
Our last two hour session was combat round 2, continuing from combat round 1 from the previous week. The week before that was the end of the puzzle before the combat round.
It’s our groups first quest, we’ve been going for almost a year, and have done a dozen or so combats and 3 “one offs” that 2/3 lasted more than one session. The DM loves it because he gets to fill in a lot of flavor/lore for everything, we love it because we move at our own pace.
2 hour sessions can be rough. Even just bumping up to 2.5 hours feels like you get a lot more game per week. I do love how unhurried you guys are though. Sounds like everyone in your group is fully engaged and immersed.
It also helps if everyone simply enjoys being friends. The game becomes a reason to block your agenda and spend time with friends.
This is the most accurate description, IMO. If you’re looking for something that’s going to incorporate all the game mechanics into the story, and do so accurately, this isn’t it.
If you want a great time at the movies with excellent comedy, action, and characters you care about - while still holding true to the fantasy and adventure spirit of D&D?
Buckle up, baby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of the plans they hatch really feel like the wacky stuff players come up with.
Exactly!
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.
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.
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.
Super underrated!! I didn’t expect to be laughing the whole time. Loved it!
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). What they add is at least relevant somehow. 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?”
In my campaign the dwarf decided to nose dive dive into a mosh pit full of thousands of kobolds. The ranger failed to pull him up and went down with him.
The only reason they got out was I had planted hints an eldritch god needed them which was the hail Mary In case them or I did something so stupid and needed a way out 😂
I had a campaign where the climactic key moment to “win” involved the party fighting their way up to a portal to hell and then casting a gate spell from a scroll to permanently close it. Gate is 9th level, though, which was above the level the party wizard was capable of reliably casting. Rather than let the resolution of the campaign hinge on random chance, I provided the party with an NPC who was capable of casting 9th level spells, but who had various reasons for being incapable of simply blowing through enemies for the party. I thought of him as my “Gandalf” character.
In the final battle the party wizard managed to reach the portal, and walled himself in with a resilient sphere so that he’d be able to use the scroll in his next turn without being disturbed. Fortunately my Gandalf still had a teleport spell available to him and teleported into the sphere next to the party wizard, offering to take the scroll and use it to save the world.
On the party wizard’s next turn he used telekinetic shove as a bonus action to shove my Gandalf through the portal to hell, and then once the Gandalf was through he tried casting gate to permanently seal the world off from hell. Turns out he’d never trusted my Gandalf, suspecting him all along of being secretly evil, and so he backstabbed him at that crucial moment before my Gandalf could backstab him. There was literally nothing in my Gandalf’s repertoire of remaining abilities that would have allowed him to overcome this, so off to hell he went.
And then the party wizard flubbed his attempt to cast gate, using up the scroll in the process. :)
Fortunately I’d prepared a backup cinematic for that outcome, the flubbed casting was still able to collapse the portal to hell and ruin the bad guys’ plans. It just left the world in a much more “interesting” situation than the party had been aiming for. I frankly preferred that outcome anyway, so I’m not even mad. Though my Gandalf was rather peeved.
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!”
I felt the GM’s frustration in that one!
That was when I knew we were in for a good time. Fuck your hand holding, we stick to plan A.
It is very good. Feels like DnD as played by players and a dm that has to adapt to their stupid ideas.
To be fair, the DM had to adapt to his own stupid ideas at various points too.
Exactly. Lots of house rules at this table.
Thought I’d hate it. But all in all i came out of the cinema with a positive experience. The plot is kinda basic, but it captures a homebrew dnd campaign pretty well. It’s a lot of fun
As not a player I liked it. Light viewing, funny and they managed to show low rolls pretty well
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.
It’s a good fun time. The stakes aren’t massive so it feels real. The characters are a lot of fun, and have a good variety to their personalities.
I really liked the visualization of magic, it looks great, and really breathes life into the spells we’ve played with for years.
And the practical effects are great. The movie uses costumes, props, and setpieces for a lot of creatures and spells which gives it a very real look.
There would have been so many ways to make this movie suck. IMO they avoided all of them. I loved it.
Many people are saying that it was faithful to DND mechanics, but I personally don’t care about that so much. I loved how it captured the feel of an evening of dnd at the table with my friends. The lightheartedness, the nonsensical stunts, the banter. It even makes fun of insane DM puzzles at some point. You can really tell the writers have some love for DND.
You people don’t understand how grateful I am that this movie wasn’t shit. It was very ‘safe’ sure but I don’t care. This movie was good enough to warrant a sequel and that’s all I ever wanted I am ecstatic about this movie.
It is funny, charming, and ISNT HORRIBLE! We might get sequels! Shows! I don’t care! It just isn’t a shitshow most game-movies are
I loved how it referenced a ton of things from D&D in terms of both tabletop stuff and TSR novels etc, but didn’t try to cinematize the plot of any book in particular nor really focus on any particular book storyline etc.
I honestly loved it. I felt it was a decent movie with lots of easter eggs and iconic lore/characters in it, that was made by somebody who appreciated the source material. This is as opposed to say, the Mario movie which felt more low “let’s toss in as many game characters and references as we can, then add some plot to that”. D&D was a savory soup with just about the right amount of spices, meat, and vegetables.
Mario was still an ok soup, but it had less broth/base and an almost overwhelming number of chunks of stuff in it.
Lol the party from dungeons and dragons was too old. The kid was like an adult. It was a funny reference but maybe should have stayed in the background.
Frankly I hope they don’t make a sequel. I’d be happy for another one with different characters, or maybe a spin off based on one or two of the party, but they should let this be a standalone success
It is some times campy, but in a good way. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. Overall al lot of fun and a lot of great references for fans.
Highly recommend it!
