Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - Our Verdict

Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author but I also am a director of the Centre and today for our review of the film Dungeons and Dragons on or amongst thieves. I've been joined by Toby Saunders who also happens to be my son and we went together as a family outing. So laying our cards on the table I should say that we aren't a family that plays Dungeons and Dragons. Some of us have played it a couple of times but we're not the real experts. So our review is really from the point of view of different generations coming to see this just as a piece of entertainment in its own right. So first of all Toby what did you think of the film? What was your expectations going into it and how did you actually enjoy watching it? Let's give the overview first. Yeah I didn't know 100% what to expect. I think I thought it was going to be whimsical. I'd seen the trailer and I'd seen the kind of the Alba and that kind of grabbed me and I thought oh I haven't seen any fantasy shows recently that kind of go for quirky kind of Terry Pratchett like elements. So I guess that grabbed me and made me want to watch it but yeah I didn't really have that many expectations going into it. Yeah I think the reason I wanted to go was because originally when I heard about it there was quite wasn't that much excitement in the in in sort of places I'd seen about it and then suddenly just as the interview started happening and there was a sort of a rush of people saying oh yeah it's actually much better than you think. So I sort of went in the expectation that this is worth seeing. So what about the actual structure of it? I should say here that Toby is a fellow writer he's also studying literature so he's got a sort of writer leave you on this. What did you feel about the structure of the film? Yeah to me well as we've said we we don't play the game but it definitely seemed like it followed the kind of structure of a game in terms of going on a quest together kind of a hero's journey you could say but it's got a kind of I like the family centre of it where they have to kind of save his daughter or convince his daughter that he's good. Yeah I definitely did follow the Joseph Campbell hero's journey with the call to adventure I mean you could probably map it against that which you could imagine them using almost ironically when they're in the writer's room thinking about this because they know that so many fantasy films use this as a trope you know all the way around to the dark night of the soul where they think it's all gone wrong you could actually tick off the points. The downside of that is that it is predictable in the sort of overview I think it felt as though I wasn't really watching anything that was making any new territory in terms of fantasy films and for me in terms of pacing I felt that the start didn't grab me so there were a couple of good jokes in the start but before the credits that sequence I was thinking oh oh this is a bit of a letdown I'm not actually going to enjoy this as much as I wanted and for me the film picked up once the Edgin who is the Chris Pine character once he began to gather his team for me the pace and everything got much better at that point. Yeah I had a good one that I thought before then there were some elements that grabbed me and some of the humour here especially with the Jonathan character I think that character kind of became a band favourite even though there any future in about two scenes for those scenes enough and to kind of grab the audience's hearts I think. So let's think about the characterisation so we're looking at it you're in your 20s I'm not and so we are a family audience what did you think about the characterisation who were your favourite characters what a peel to you who do you think were the stars amongst the cast which is already a quite a starry cast let's be honest. Yeah I think Hugh Grant was probably all thought was probably the best in some way quite predictable I don't think at any point anyone thought he was a goodie but he just played that role perfectly I think. Yeah there was a couple of really interesting stock characters we say so he forges the baddie the friend who becomes the bad guy and he reminded me in the way he was playing it quite broadly and archley as to how good Alan Rickman was in Robin Hood Prince of thieves another thieves film back in the day where he stole the show in a way because by how much he was clearly enjoying being the bad guy and the strong part of Hugh Grant's performance is that it calls on the other thing he's done which is play politicians so he was playing this fantasy character as like this smarmy politician and it worked very well because he felt you you could feel as though that character could really exist it's more relatable in a way than the evil evil characters the red wizards who are another sort of layer of super evil I felt that calling on his performance is in things like a very English scandal and of course even love actually where he plays the prime minister calling on those things you could actually enjoy his range that he has of this you know insincere bounder that he does very well my life I was just saying what you said about tropes there is quite important because really the characters are supposed to be types which well that's what it seems to be in terms of people who play the video game the game and say oh I've played that role before you have the bar to figure you have the wizards you have the kind of politician you have the warrior and they all kind of are playing roles aren't they yes and I think that's my other favorite character who again is a bit outside the the band was the one played by Regisionn Page the zinc character who's like a paladin or something who's like the perfect warrior and I saw an interview with him that was one of the reasons for going to see it because he's you know he's he's a great actor he's very funny but I saw an interview with him where he said what he liked about his character was it was as though he had walked in from another storyline where he is the hero and he is on some really super serious spiritual quest where everything is very perfect and pure and his this you know he's functioning at this level of ideals then he's thrown in amongst his group of thieves and he sort of passes through their story and passes out the other side he doesn't stay for the whole film and I like that the idea that he had his own every you know every character is the hero hero of their own story and he was really enjoying being this ideal knight and sent it up perfectly he was the straight man for the other people to play off so I think he was another fun part of it and not taking himself at all seriously even though he was of course investing in it as if he was that's where it works he was playing it straight there was no wink at the camera so that was another good part for me what about Chris Pyners Edgand who of course is the lead in the in the film did you enjoy him his character I was reading somewhere that there is some idea that maybe recently some of his roles haven't been as big a hit as he had when he started out as Captain Kirk in the reboot of Star Trek because he kind of fizzled a bit and ended up as the support lead in Wonder Woman do you think this is a good franchise for him to reboot his career if he needs it well I think so I think it's a fun role I don't think he's nice what is the main actor in it I don't think he's necessarily the highlight of it that the role he does play played very well I thought there was some very funny scenes when he was using his kind of music and it seems like he enjoyed the role being the role and the star as well was very good with him kind of giving his defense and telling his back story those are kind of what stood out to me about his performance yeah he's also playing a slightly more mature man so he has a daughter and he has had a wife and his beard is you know slightly silver so he's moved on from the boyish charm heroes of the young Captain Kirk role to play that kind of mid not middle age but mid-age role did you buy him in that role because yeah he felt quite young to me well I think so because it's a kind of peasant culture where they probably would have had their families quite young I think that's that's allowable I think the other part about it is he's clearly not the action hero the action happens with other people like Zenk and Holger and other people and I think that was quite good seeing him playing against type in a way because so he can play out more on his comedic check talents so I did like that you know he's weapon of war is a loot which he sort of hits people over the head with so I did enjoy seeing him do that and I think if it is the first of others I would go back and watch another one if they did a different enough plot I think there is one weakness in that the actual family story which is his driver with wanting to bring his wife back to life again and she's seen a couple of times in flashback which is quite cute but it's also I've seen that before and also the thing of there's this magic widget that if you use it you can bring someone back to life again every film you know that's a bad idea it's just like and you know that probably it's not going to happen because that's the that's the moment of moral weight you know sort of maturity character arc where they say actually know I will not do this because it's not the right thing that was all a bit predictable and the relationship with the daughter the daughter Chloe Coleman is Keira she was lovely and fine in her role but I did feel they didn't give her enough suspicion because she wasn't a baby she was like you know like what 10 12 that kind of age and she accepts forge's version of her father and Holger having abandoned her she wasn't giving any real pushback and she was given a magical object which made her invisible and I was expecting them to use that so that she had some agency I thought she was very much given a sort of passive maiden in a tower role when in fact these days it would have been nice to have seen her have a bit more participation in her own rescue she gets something right towards the in the final sequences but up to that point she's a bit dim really believing forge and which is a shame it's not the actresses fall to tall I think it's just not having the writers not having really developed that younger role there's lots of characters to develop but I didn't think they did enough with that that character yeah we didn't really see her interact with anyone in particular I agree that could have done with more showing her being suspicious of forge because there are a few scenes that kind of hinted at this or maybe it could have been interesting if we if she'd seen the witch I've seen her doing something evil and kind of yeah she'd gained a sense of something wrong and that way yeah because there was moments when they could have done that you could also imagine previous drafts where they did that and maybe time reasons they cut it out because they kept it to a sort of you know average length movie they didn't go over over over long on it so on the other female characters I very much enjoyed Sophia Lillith who played Doric who is this and this is where I think you need to know your dungeons and dragon law but she has this sort of shape changer role where she's an owl bear at one point and then she's a worm and she's a she can change her animals but she's rather sweet looking with her red hair and her little horns and I like the fact that she was there was a lot of reversal of roles in the gang of thieves so her the man who was in love with her played a much more sort of the role that you often see young girls play that sort of passive role where he's trying to court up and not doing very well and she's the one who's kind of saying you know basically you've got to impress me more mate and she can change it this enormous owl bear so she's got the sort of strength and the other one who's sort of sort of obviously big presence in the group is Olga who's Michelle Rodriguez who is the strong woman playing that role so she's the one who wades in with her axe and has her sort of fondness for small hobbit like men which sort of makes the joke of the sort of different races in this world even more obvious where these giant women have these little guys as their partners so they did quite a lot of trying to change the the standard line up of how the men and female male and female roles break down. Did you enjoy the any of those characters? Yeah like thinking about that you can think of a plot where we're a version of that story where some of those characters could have been the main character quite easily so Dora could have quite as you'd be in the main character or you could have had a sign that's the main character I think so I think that also leans into the the game aspects of this because when you are playing the game I mean to you you are the main character so I think there was that side to it I definitely agree with that. Yes and just the other person we haven't yet talked about is Simon who's the wizard Justice Smith now he for me was the one who most resembles the what you would imagine was the original player of this i.e. when Dungeons and Dragons first started it was a sort of late 70s early 80s ballgame play by Geeks and Nerds that's a largely men or boys that was its kind of image and it's not a very good job but reinventing itself I think but he does feel like a kind of nerdy guy and that was quite sweet to see the original players of the game kind of represented in a fun way he gets some good powers as as it goes along so that was I enjoyed that aspect of it I think yeah and he definitely felt the most like he was playing a game as the movie went along you'd say from his introduction so before we move on to the sort of standout moments in the tone and the special effects that those aspects of it I think that one part of it where again then maybe they just didn't have time but I did feel that the red wizards and their agenda didn't really come across to me I was a bit confused about who they were what they were doing and what their what their motivation was other than taking over places and producing armies of the undead maybe that is all I needed to understand but I didn't really find myself understanding them there wasn't I forget the name of the main red wizard who's Serfina played by Daisy Head who's had to have a severe haircut for her part she looked as though she was quite a tortured soul and there could have been an interesting back story there that just wasn't explored but it seemed as though they didn't really try and explain what the evil was about forge was more much more understandable as why he's on that side of the you know the bad guy I didn't really find anything interesting about the red wizard agenda they just felt quite alien to me what about you am I missing something yeah I think perhaps they they definitely wanted a evil character was kind of unambiguously evil I think and as they're trying to like turn everyone into zombies you know they they've got that quite quite well because I guess they don't want to focus too much on the villains they want to focus it on the team and when you to root for the team so it seems like it's kind of again leading into tropes it's probably why they've done it I mean I should just accept it's like a dark lord but red I think and not worry too much about it okay but maybe I just felt she had more potential because her face looked so expressive of someone who yeah there was something about I felt oh you could be interesting and they never really materialized anyway okay so let's think about the tone of the piece this is what I think probably is why it has hit the right spots for a broader audience and just the dungeons and dragons fans in that I think that if you like Guardians of the galaxy for example you will like this film because the tone is similar and Chris Pine is not unlike Heather Chris Chris which one not Hemsworth the other one front thank you Chris Pratt um in particularly yeah the way he sits within the group is a bit similar to Chris Pratt's character in Guardians of Galaxy so there is it's it works as a sort of buddy movie um but there is also elements which I think are drawn from particularly Monty Python and Terry Pratchett so for me well you tell me I mean do you I've got a couple of favorite scenes um the fat dragon and the the burial ground so the fat dragon felt quite Terry Pratchett to me yes so yeah I agree um I want to add to those favorite scenes the one at the start um where they break out and and the people shout we were going to release you yes yes that's so that's so Monty Python isn't it yeah and the sequence it's not plot spoiling the plot but um which we would not do but the graveyard sequence definitely has um Monty Python and the Holy Grail elements about it and you could imagine it becoming the kind of scene that people might do as a skit later on because it has this question and answer format which is very funny um so I thought those were very successful tonally and worked and the actual ending the way the treasure is redistributed is also was a surprise me it was the cleverest light of hand which fits with the um with the thieves movie in that all the elements were foreshadowed and you could have worked it out but the way they they were slotted together at the end wasn't exactly what I was expecting and I like that surprise they managed to find a way of um again I don't want to spoil the plot but there's a cleverness about the way those elements came together um so for me the less successful parts I've mentioned a couple already but I wasn't didn't think the special effects were that great I'm sorry guys who spent a whole year doing these but so for example the the Hobbiti characters the Halflings they really could have done um a better job on the perspectives because the Bradley Cooper cameo as Holger's ex-lover he just looked as though he didn't fit it was his house and yet he was sitting on an enormous chair you know they they hadn't thought this through I don't think um because it was and having seen so many Lord the Rings Hobbit movies technically that's hard to do but it can be done I just thought the perspectives there looked all kind of strange and looked poorly executed I don't know did did you did you like that I think there are a couple scenes but that was the case I didn't mind it too much because ultimately like when you're watching seeing that well I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and just kind of enjoy the whims call aspect of it I thought another scene that might be similar to that is the scene uh to the Hell Met and pick on the Hell Met seem to be I don't know the see you seem a bit strange in that to me as well and didn't they forget about it as well well they didn't yeah I don't think they seem to use it that much in the end um yeah so the big quest to find this widget then was used once and then yeah that was it was like a little bit under underdone about that I felt what about the landscapes and the sort of world building aspect of it aside from the special effects because you know the fact Dragon was a good special effect those things were fine and I'm sure there was a lot I didn't notice because you just taken for granted but there was also a lot of external outdoors filming wasn't or studio work did you like the locations yeah and I thought it was fun how they used kind of all terrains I mean they went from kind of an ice biome to volcanoes to kind of conventional fancy cities kind of conventional fancy villages so you know it did a good job but I think it showed the richness of the world and it did feel a bit like you're walking around in an open world video game which I think suits the movie very well yeah and I looked at the sort of places they'd they'd filmed and there's of course the inevitable Iceland but also I did at some moments think this feels very much like they're in the UK and sure enough some of the film some of the location shots were I think in the UK which was nice because it had that not too spectacular but realistic feel when they're riding along a river valley not everywhere has to look like the Alps or New Zealand so there were some places which felt more like yes people can live in this communities can live here yeah so what's your verdict if you're thinking about giving it a star rating out of five where would you go I would give it a wheeled out half stars I think so I would give it a somewhere between a three and a half and a four yeah no I agree I'd say I'd probably distinguish different things I would say that a lot of it was a four you know a very enjoyable evening and but I'd sort of say three for the actual story because there were some elements which weren't brilliantly executed weren't up to the it wasn't consistently of a sort of really snappy standard there could have been and and some failures to develop certain characters so sort of a three for the kind of script and screenwriting which is pretty good but still not amazing whereas actually I enjoyed it at about the level of four star because I just felt ready to enjoy it yeah I think potentially what I'd say is I give it a full but then it's quite it's a success I think it's quite hard to repeat there's almost kind of one or I bet they're trying to make another well they probably will be interested to see if it catches the same kind of tone or success or if it's kind of a one or thing that works because at the same time I don't think I'd necessarily watch it I don't think it's repeatable because a lot of the jokes work once but I don't necessarily work over and over again but I don't know I have to see it again I think they'd have to do something quite different I wouldn't want to watch another they'd have to really rethink the formula I'm sure there's a lot of lot and game playing within dungeons and dragons that they can draw on because decades of people writing the this the adventures and the experience of leading these games but they would have to shift quite a way for me to go and watch a second one definitely so just thinking a little bit more about the trend at the moment for turning things which exist as a video game or a ride or a toy into films and what do you in your generation think is the product that has been best treated in that way and the one that needs to be treated so to give an example the biggest opening this weekend was the Mario game which actually has Chris Pratt in doesn't think talking about the Chris's and clearly there's been a massive audience for that even though critically it wasn't particularly well reviewed and earlier just after you were born in fact there was the perhaps the Caribbean franchise which wasn't supposed to work that was a film based on a failing or tired Disney World or Disneyland ride which was given a reboot by a pirate film and pirate films were supposed to no longer you know be very out of fashion but yet they turned out to be a great idea so if there anything you think has been well treated as a property and what would you like to see treated to a film a film a film were working out of it yeah well it's also worth mentioning at this point that there was a Dungeons & Dragons film before that is absolutely horrifically at the box office I think in the early 2000s as well so yeah that's an early failure I guess but one thing that I think has been done really well in recent years is the arcane series which is on Netflix which is based off the League of Legends video game and I haven't played League of Legends I kind of am familiar with how the game works and what it looks like but I have watched arcane and I really enjoyed it and I think a lot of people were surprised by it how how kind of when it was done and it's an animated show rather than live action but it does really well right it's it's a much more serious in tone than the Dungeons & Dragons movie but it does the serious tone really well and I'm pretty sure that was made by the video game studio and kind of given to Netflix as a place to distribute it rather than made by Netflix so that's the one that I think has been done really well I'm interested also as these films are coming out there's also another film with Taren Edgerton called Tetris which takes a different approach to revisiting the early days of video games Tetris was one of the very very early console games back in this of time and what they've done there is tell almost like the biographical story around it about a trip that Taren Edgerton character takes to Russia where this was coded and so it's more in the line of a social network or thriller even so it's about the people behind the game rather than trying to be inside the game because obviously the Tetris is actually a very simple computer concept there's not much story there it's like trying to make a story out of a game of Babington you know it doesn't work so that's another interesting approach is to do the the story behind the creators like could imagine an interesting film made about the people who came up Dungeons and Dragons it could almost be a teen friends movie could be quite comedy but I would actually quite interested to find out about that how it actually came about and how it grew to be this massive thing with the conventions and websites and all the rest of it so I'm looking for the human story yeah I don't know what the story is I'd have to find out maybe they all love each other and there's no story there because there's no conflict but were there rival groups split I mean I just don't know so for me that would be something I'd be quite interested in seeing explored more so than another version of this film you know it went up to because it it has become such a big part of a certain slice of culture and it's also linked because I'm interested in Tolkien it's also linked to the whole way Tolkien has been received by later generations because it's mixed up with these games that sort of are riffs on ideas that came out his world originally yeah well I know that there's in terms of recent adaptations the recent one was there was a halo adaptation on I believe Paramount Plus which was received quite negatively by fans of the halo games franchise because the way they adapted it I haven't seen it but apparently the way they adapted it isn't very loyal to the source material and there's so much good material in terms of music from the original games and also plot lines which they haven't used and have moved away from in an attempt to make something original so I think you increasingly see this kind of preference amongst this kind of super fans for material which is loyal to the material that they like the games and there's kind of attention there between what the fans want and what the studios believe the casual viewers will want yeah and also probably quite a lot of the studio execs because they've got full on studio execs roll I'm not going to be aware of what it's like to play any of these games yeah and that's why it's really important that for the showrunners that you get someone involved who is very familiar with it and they kind of have to be a fan I think to do it successfully yeah I think this has that feeling that the people love the source material I've mentioned a couple of times on this podcast but for me the best of all these films about something else is Galaxy Quest because it's a loving sort of joke about Star Trek the tone is just perfect all the way through it does hits it's a good film in itself but it hits all the rights sort of fan moments too and so now when I watch Star Trek I'm often thinking of Galaxy Quest and I don't know presumably for fans of the game they were ticking off their Easter eggs as they went through of things which they and they're probably an extra layer of jokes which passed me by because I don't play the game thank you Toby that's very helpful helping me think about this so if you haven't yet seen the film I would say it's worth going to see it's fun it's not going to possibly going to change your world but you're certainly probably laugh a popcorn movie that all the family can watch so that's that's not bad and we always end with a segment about where in all the fantasy worlds is the best placed or something we have mentioned dragons a bit but I've never actually thought where is the best place for a dungeon so in all the fantasy worlds and I know you're a massive fantasy reader where would you think is the best dungeon you could do it from the perspective of the person caught in it or the person actually controlling the dungeon yeah is this the dungeons that I know in books I've read yeah that's right okay well there's there's a book I haven't read but I really want to read so I think send then a sends and in this book you've got this person who enters this tower with multiple floors and I think he enters it in pursuit of his wife who's kind of trapped in it it's kind of a full of dungeon so I think towers we're kind of multiple layers I just enjoy the progression that that has so I would say yeah maybe a tower which your hero can kind of climb up and find all sorts of things along the way yeah that reminds me a bit of that doctor who episode with Peter Capaldi one of the best ones in his reign as doctor who where he had to keep it was like a tower puzzle that he had to get through it was one of the cleverest in that period with him as doctor who for me I would say that the best use of a dungeon that I've come across is in a book by Maria V. Schneider called Poison Study and it starts with the heroine of the tale in what she thinks is the condemned cell and it's the and you get a very strong evocation of the the deprivation of a dungeon and how her life has become this sort of just very narrow and she thinks she's walking to her death but to start of longer novel it doesn't turn out that it's the end and I'm very interested in the way that book then opens out from this dungeon so yeah Maria V. Schneider Poison Study that's a excellent dungeon in fantasy actually if I can have another one there's a book for what is series called Lightbring by Brent Weeks and that has a very inventive dungeon in it in terms of what it does with magic he's got a very intricate magic system which is based on the light spectrum and colors of light and it's very fun how he played with that in that dungeon which a character is trapped in so that would be from a pure kind of magical fantasy point of view followed magic systems that's a very fun done yeah that's a I haven't read that one that looks that sounds great and the very final thing we do is give a fantasy tip it could be something you've read something you've watched that listeners the podcast might like to check out you got anything you'd like to suggest yes well recently I just finished bingeing Shadow and Bone the Netflix show which I'd describe as a very kind of fun YA fantasy show which has an enjoyable magic system they've got kind of a crew called the crows who kind of exist in this kind of de-candy and city and they do all sorts of odd jobs and kind of fevery and they're very fun and their dynamic it's pretty pretty fun so that would be my recommendation as a kind of fun slightly light fantasy watch on TV excellent so I've just been to Bath for a day out and Bath itself is obviously more obviously associative people like Jane Austen but Graphnix has just published a book about the booksellers of Bath which follows on from the left-handed booksellers of London so he's doing this fantasy series about booksellers and so I just want to recommend that because Graphnix who I've met first in when he wrote his sabriel apportion trilogy which is a great YA series he's now come back with these bookseller fantasy bookseller series so that's something you might want to check out and even better if you can buy a copy of it in Bath and read it in Bath in amazing surroundings so that's my tip thank you so much Toby and thank you everyone for listening thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide