Anyone seen it? Is it awful?
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
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.
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 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.
I really enjoyed it. Its very self aware and a fun silly adventure story.
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 honestly enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. They is a chonky dragon. I repeat, a chonky dragon!
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.
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.
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.
Super underrated!! I didn’t expect to be laughing the whole time. Loved it!
It’s been out long enough that it’s starting to get some opinions that hate or nitpick it to death, but I think the fact it got so much overall good reception from the DnD crowd when it first came out says something. And once you realize it’s a visualization of a session between players and the DM, a rewatch to catch the little details that were missed before makes it even more enjoyable.
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
It’s quite good. Far better than I expected it to be.
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). 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?”
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!”
My wife and I really liked it!
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.
