Where I Watched it: Paramount Plus
English Audio Description?: Yes
I think we should wait for Jonathan.
Well, I hope we can all agree this is better than the last big screen attempt at a Dungeons and Dragons movie. I say this with the knowledge that I’m not a D&D fan, so I’m not sure how those dice rollers feel about this comic take on their game. but, it reminds me of the last cinematic attempt at power Rangers. Way better than anyone thought it would be, yet still somehow never got a sequel.
The whole cast is entertaining, but its Chris pine who truly makes this film work with his charm and swagger, something that has long helped him across his roles. it’s the wink and a smile he brings to Captain Kirk, even though we all believed William Shatner to be irreplaceable, and it’s that same leading man charm that has put him in everything from a Jack Ryan film to voicing Jack Frost in Rise Of The Guardians. It’s quite effortless for him.
But, the rest of the ensemble works too. Hugh Grant is an inspired choice for the charming baddie. And Michelle Rodriguez is perfectly chosen for her role.
Where the film falls a little short, is that despite the humor and camaraderie, the script can’t shake the feeling that you’re going from one place to another, almost like in a video game, where you have to get through each level before getting to the final boss. There’s either something that needs to be acquired, or someone who needs to be fought. So instead of spending the majority of the film on what it feels like they are tasked with, they largely spend it just going from one thing to the next. It ends up feeling a bit choppier than perhaps it needed to be as a result.
Actually, it’s almost like rushing through a condensed season of The Legend Of Vox Machina. Instead of being able to sit with each episode, take a break, and come back later, it’s like all the episodes were slammed together in a two hour speed run.
As far as the audio description goes, I have to bring up size relativity again. This is a fantasy film, where lots of things exist that have no basis in the real world. We ahve to start using terms to describe how tall something is, other than just various adjectives of “large”. If something is twice or three times as tall as a human character, that’s a great place to start. Even if we don’t know the exact height, we can pick a typical human height, and then imagine two more of that standing on the shoulders to create the height needed. Just choosing what you believe is a more intense version of large as the descriptive word of the day is a habit I’d really love to break the industry of doing in general. What is gigantic to you may not be the same gigantic to someone else. but we can certainly envision five stories tall. We can figure out what fantastical beast is threatening our heroes using size relativity.
Mostly, this film has been cheered on for good reason. It’s fun, it’s well written, and it creates a world you’d want to go back to. Where it falls short is feeling like instead of having a typical three act structure, our characters constantly are bouncing around like we would in a videogame that is supposed to offer hours upon hours of game play.
If we get more, try and think of it less like a pinball game, and more like the battle of good versus evil, in a simplistic form.
Final Grade: B+
