On a cold and sunny day yesterday, we rented Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (yet another crappy website).
This is the "sequel" to the first Dungeon and Dragons movie. I say "sequel", in quotes, because that's what the folks at Wizards of the Coast call it, but it has nothing to do with the first one. Which is good.
I saw the box on the night I rented Dukes of Hazzard but I left it there thinking that Vero would want to see it too. When we browsed the store yesterday, I pointed to the single copy of the movie they have, she checked it out and agreed.
She actually enjoyed it. I see the "geekiness" growing in her every day!
It was, surprisingly, not bad. Not great, but for a lower budget movie that requires a lot of CGI, they did pretty good.
The whole thing is rushed -- they do fit an epic quest in a 1h45 movie -- but the writers did pretty good at making believable characters. It seems a lot of the creative team knew about DnD (but not from playing it) and they used the complete DnD literature to provide the background and mechanics of what is happening. It was nice to see, in the "making of" feature, the cast and crew flipping through the pages of the player manual between takes.
They dropped the ball on a couple of things, unfortunately, most notably in having a diversity of races and classes. The main character, it seems, doesn't have a class (at least, nothing we could figure out); they made one of the evil sidekick a half-orc, but I only know that because they explain it in the special features. They did a pretty good job on a couple of things, too, like in what the rogue does and how he does it. Quite neat.
To the DnD fan out there, I will stop here (so as to not give too much away) and recommend you go and rent this movie. To everybody else, you need not worry that you are missing out on a great movie by not renting it.
