When Iron Man and Avengers came out, I wasn’t a comic book person. I liked Batman when Dawn of Justice came out, but that movie was super bad. This is the first movie in a long time that I’m “meant to” love. Stakes are high! And… they were fulfilled! I liked it a lot!
- Plenty of reviews praise the film’s refusal to take itself too seriously, keeping its premise light while and its character arcs clean. Even reviewers completely unaffiliated with D&D liked it, which makes me really happy!
- As someone very affiliated with D&D (hobbily, not professionally), that this movie honored the spirit of the game completely floored me. In sort of vapid ways — monsters we recognize, magic spells we recognize, situations we recognize — but in profound ways, too. If Honor Among Thieves has a core theme, it’s that failure is a part of progress. If it has a core loop, it’s the heroes formulating a ludicrous plan, that plan failing ludicrously, and the heroes riding that failure upward. Maybe, eventually, to success. This is the heart of D&D. Honor Among Thieves’ plans are more contrived and better produced, but their goofiness is instantly recognizable.
- Corrollary to this, I love the idea that this movie could make new players into better Dungeon Masters. Failure moves the story forward rather than stalling it. Each action/reaction puts the characters in a new situation with new decisions to make. Now, this isn’t solely the claim of TTRPGs: Indiana Jones, really any great adventure story, does the same. But it’s cool to see an honest-to-goodness D&D adventuring party go through an honest-to-goodness adventure.
- I absolutely did not show up to see a rules-accurate rendition. From what I’ve seen, no one else did either. Knowing the D&D community, that’s really refreshing! Something I thought was interesting, though, is that druids can’t turn into owlbears or wild shape more than twice at a time. The action economy makes one-versus-many brawls basically fruitless. Attunement is automatic. Spells, in general, don’t work that way. That the movie ignores these rules is fine — good, even — but it begs the question: if these rules are unintuitive, un-cinematic… then why are they written that way? I’ll probably introduce some house rules inspried by the movie.
- The writing’s actually funny?? And like… kind of restrained? Characters recall previously spoken dialogue without needing a ghostly voice to echo it in their subconscious? That alone knocked me over.
- I know I always save this bullet for last, but yay Chris Pine yay Sophia Lillis yay Justice Smith. Whatever your mileage on Hugh Grant, he’s very good at playing a sleazeball.
- Oh, one last bullet actually. The names are so silly, in the legendary lineage of high fantasy silliness. I don’t know that I remembered even half of the cast. I know I didn’t know Chris Pines’ character’s — which is Edgin, by the way. Love “Forge” for a conman, though.