Fenya and Bobby and I took advantage of an empty Sunday night last weekend to see the Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves. As someone who is both a dedicated movie fan and who has also played D&D on and off since he was about 12, I felt a certain obligation to get in on the opening weekend (despite D&D's parent company engaging in recent behaviour that is a long ways from Lawful Good) but I was also really looking forward to it.
The moviemakers and cast seemed intent on both having and providing a good time, and initial reports were pretty positive. My only concern was the writer/directors' pronouncement that there would be no meta-narrative; that is to say, no mention of players, dice or experience points and the like - no Jumanji-like overlay of the real world and the fantastical one where D&D adventures take place.
This disappointed me because if you take that away, are you really making a D&D movie? Or are you just making another heroic fantasy movie in one of the many worlds that D&D campaigns can take place in? If it was released under a different title, would it be recognizable as Dungeons & Dragons?
Well, the answer is an emphatic "yes," and Honor Among Thieves is a great time to boot.
And if you don't know an owlbear from a displacer beast or can't tell a d6 from a T4, you will still have a great time, but there are treats galore for those who know the exhilaration of risking everything on the roll of a single die -that is, a twenty-sided one. This is made apparent very early, when Chris Pine's character Edgin the Bard keeps referencing how important his backstory is to the context of his current situation, and I immediately recognized the wink.
D&D: HAT is set in the Forgotten Realms, the game's most prolific setting for dozens of adventures and a series of novels that must number into the hundreds. I cut my teeth on Greyhawk myself, so my exposure to the Forgotten Realms has been limited to three published adventures I have participated in, two as a Dungeon Master and one as a player. Hearing familiar towns and places like Icewind Dale mentioned was gratifying, sure, but when a character reveals that their axe was made by Ghelryn Foehammer of Triboar, being able to whisper to Fenya that my paladin had 'met' this individual was maybe the nerdiest moment I have had at the movies.
There are plenty of other nods as well, like spells and magical rules working tactically in a rules-compliant way instead of being a hand-wavey means of solving a problem or advancing the story. Monsters looking and behaving the way the Monster Manual describes them. The 'pet' non-player character who is better in practically every way than the party he is helping. But most critically, watching a group of disparate characters work together to solve a problem, not necessarily by the most logical means ("I have 50 feet of rope, I bet I can tie it my axe and throw it across the chasm...") but by doing what will combine the most fun with the least chance of one of them dying - even if those odds are not that great.
This is not to say the directors didn't take a few liberties with game mechanics, but even that is excusable through the judicious application of another important rule...
As someone else told me, there is no overt meta-narrative or referencing in the movie, but it always feels like it is present, maybe just a little offscreen.
And through most of the film, no one is interested in saving the world - the party in helping one character try to reunite his family through the only means he feels he has available to him. And watching the evolution of the scheme to do so as well as the re-evaluation of the goal itself makes for an engaging and occasionally surprising heartfelt tale.
If anyone asks me if they should see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I will tell them, "only if you enjoy a fun adventure movie with fantastic but relatable characters and almost no other connection to our 'real' world."
But if they are a D&D player, past or present, I will likely insist they see it and tell them I intend to go again with the Icehawks, hopefully this Friday.
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