I finally watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves today. Just got back from the theater, actually. Some brief context: obviously, I'm not thrilled with much of anyone in Hollywood right now, and seeing them all fail—with the exception of the people who seem to go out of their way not to be hateful anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American malignants. Wizards of the Coast, who presumably would profit from the success of the D&D movie are terrible people, as the OGL controversy, the white men can't leave fast enough, the half-elves are inherently racist controversy, and on the Paramount side, the emasculated leading men controversy.
That said, I think I'm having my cake and eating it too. Our tickets were free. I don't know how it counts when we cash in free ticket rewards from the theater, but I do know that now, nearly three weeks after it's out, even if it does count our tickets as money, it's too late to do the movie or the studios much good. The story of a movie is told in the opening weekend, and to a lesser extent in its second weekend. After that, it's success or failure is pretty much determined, with the very occasional exception of a handful of sleepers that have legs.
And maybe D&D has some legs. I haven't seen that in the discussion I've seen about the movie, but realistically, people aren't talking much about the movie. My usual pop culture complainers, like Nerdrotic, or Ryan Kinel, and that whole ecosystem of YouTubers have only briefly mentioned it, and are much more content to dump on Amazon, Netflix, Warner Brothers, and especially Disney (and for some reason G4. As near as I could tell, nobody except them really cared about G4, but they cared a lot.)
That said, the people who would profit from almost any movie are terrible people. Not many posts ago, I showed how George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan and Stephen Spielberg, while brainstorming back in '78 on what would become the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark had an unironic conversation about how it would be cool and interesting if Indiana Jones had had a sexual affair with Marian when she was twelve years old and he was in his thirties or even forties. This incredibly creepy idea was obviously discarded, and the casting of Marian made it look like she'd have been old enough to have been in college, while Indy was maybe a good ten years older, but honestly... even in the form that it shows up in the movie, where Marian punches him in the face when he first shows up, is still a bit on the creepy side. It'll be hard to watch that movie again without thinking of that now. The old pulp heroes didn't have old flames that they'd taken the virtue of, they had dames that maybe they'd socialized with and who pined for them, but they were too taken with their adventuring lifestyle to settle down with them. Very, very different, but especially so if the girl was supposed to have been literally pre-pubescent.
Point is, yeah—almost all entertainers and people who work in entertainment industries are terrible people. If that means you won't watch their work, there's literally nothing that's ever come out of Hollywood in it's 100+ year history that you can watch guilt free. At best, you can hope to patronize people who are at least professional enough to keep their toxic ideologies and pathologies to themselves instead of try and rub our noses in it. And that said, I don't think anyone directly involved with this movie really qualifies. Even the "emasculated leading men" controversy didn't quite mean what it sounded like it meant. Although hopefully the backlash against that will scare off others who want to go that direction again. I'm really more concerned at this point about the content of the movie (or other entertainment media of any kind) than I am about the people who make them, who should know better than to open their mouths.
And in that sense, the new D&D movie is not really woke, other than a kind of low-grade ambient wokeness associated with Michelle Rodriquez being a Hispanic woman playing a member of a Nordic tribe and being stronger and more physically capable than anyone else in the movie (with the exception of Rege-Jean Page's character), and the other wildly diverse casting, which I got no sense of when reading R. A. Salvatore's books in the 90s, for instance. In fact, the two main female characters were both considerably more capable then the two main male characters. At this point, even non-woke people are into that. Larry freakin' Correia, who is not at all woke, still has ridiculous pixie-ninja hot girls who can beat up multiple men at once without breaking a sweat. Maybe Larry's never played any co-ed sports. More likely, this kind of ambient wokeness is so prevalent that most people don't even notice anymore. A sad reflection, if so.
Rather, it's fairly fun. I had heard this, or something similar previously, but after it was over, my wife (who liked it much better than she expected to) agreed with my assessment that it was Lord of the Rings meets Guardians of the Galaxy. She also agreed that it probably moved too fast. You couldn't stop and think about what was happening, which is probably a good thing to do if a lot of the details don't really make too much sense. Not that the plot was absurd—although in some ways it was, but not obnoxiously so.
I recommend it. I may see it again in theaters. I've already pre-ordered the blu-ray. It's not a brilliant movie, but it's obviously fun enough. It's at almost $160 million according to Box Office Mojo at the point that I'm writing this. With streaming and media sales, it might yet squeak into profitability. I actually hope that it does. For what it's worth, my theater was much more full than I expected. A movie that's performing mediocre financially, in its third week, on a Wednesday evening... there were at least a dozen small groups and couples in the theater.
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Saw the movie a second time this weekend, this time adding my daughter and son-in-law to the mix, who are also D&D players (my son-in-law in particular, although my daughter is actually kinda coming around.) Still liked it. Still have it on pre-order for blu-ray, with tentative release date of June.
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