I saw Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves last week. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It was fine. Quite frankly, I didn’t expect it to be good, but it surprised me with its heartfelt story, themes of accountability to your loved ones, and how often it made me laugh out loud. It wasn’t a masterpiece of cinema, or groundbreaking in any way, but the two-hour runtime went by quickly, and I left not entirely regretting that I’d spent a weekend night watching it instead of playing Yakuza 0, which is as much as many movies can hope for.
I liked that it had moments of winking to the audience, like when a member of the party entirely destroyed a puzzle on accident and suddenly discovered another item they could use to bypass the puzzle altogether. If you play D&D, you’ve likely experienced this – countless times, I or one of my equally clue🐽less friends have ruined a car🌼efully laid out puzzle the Dungeon Master had put before us, and she would sigh, rub her temples, and hand us a deus ex machina.
I also liked that instead of following instructions, the characters engaged in creative problem-solving that always led to unforeseen 𒉰consequences – it’s earnest, silly, and felt much like playing an actual campaign. Is the film still formulaic? Yes. Full of cliches? Without a doubt. The movie is more geared towards newcomers to the D&D universe, because there are many more of those than hardcore D&D fans who want a lore-heavy, drama-fille𝓀d movie, so it was never going to be gritty or particularly revolutionary in terms of storytelling. But it’s fun, and we might be getting a sequel.
According to , the movie wasn’t made with the intention of turning it into a franchise or even giving it a sequel – director John Francis Daley said, “The cardinal mistake many studios make is to put the cart before the horse, where they start crafting a cinematic universe before they even make a good single film.” Cough cough, nudge nudge, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. However, it seems like now that the movie is out and it has d👍one pretty well (namely, a $71.5 million global opening), the directors have started considering where they want to go next with the series.
Unfortunately, the directors have said they’d want to stick with the party established in Honor Among Thieves, played by Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, and Sophia Lillis. I have nothing against these actors, and I think they did perfectly fine jobs with the roles they were given – I even like Chris Pine as much as the next person, but the characters weren’t particularly compelling. Sure, campaigns are built for you to develop your characters as you go along, but I’m simply n𓄧ot that interested in the characters we already have. They weren’💟t executed well enough in Honor Among Thieves for me to be invested in seeing their relationships evolve.
What I was hoping for was a whole new cast of characters, new dynamics and new worlds. I think structuring the burgeoning series as one-shot adventures instead of an ongoing campaign would be far more interesting, because of the potential to explore different parts of the world, and explore the diversity of characters one could build in Dungeons & Dragons. Much of the fun of D&D is making characters because of the wealth of factors to play with – the movie is already working with what it feels like to play the game, and sticking with the same characters goes against that. It could even be interesting to see the same🔯 cast playing new characters.
I don’t want to see more of Chris Pine bumbling around the D&D universe with his teenage daughter, I want to see movies with different tones, degrees of seriousness, maybe even different genres. There is so much possible creativity in a series that hasn’t yet been created – please, let’s not MCUify this one. Let's see some creativity in our blockbuster franchises for once.