From Brian Webber:

(edited due to content)

I need to say this:

1) I am a fantasy fan
2) I play D&D (and other role playing games, but you don't care about that, right?)
3) I have a developed sense of taste when it comes to so-bad-its-good movies. I have Plan 9 from Outer Space on tape. Yes, it is as bad as they say. It's terrific!

Add all this together and you know what I think of the D&D movie?

I HATED the D&D movie. OH MY GOD!!! What a complete waste of my time! What really PO's me about the movie is gamers (and non-gamers) who call the movie "empty-headed" fun. It's not fun. If it was fun, I would have had fun. It's not even worth MST3King.

I suppose another reason why is that non-gamers, such as yourself will get the completely wrong idea about the role-playing hobby from it.

You see, playing D&D teaches you two things: teamwork and imagination. The movie lacked both in spades.

Only Justin Whalin's character performed actions of any consequence. D&D is about a group of characters with various special abilities working together to achieve a common goal (which for most people is killing monsters and taking their treasure, unfortunately, but it's another thing the movie lacks).

Whalin's Ridley is the only one who enters the "dungeons" and I hestitate to call either of the underground thingies in the film dungeons. He's the one who does everything. It made me wonder what the other characters were there for.

And this movie had a serious drought of imagination. The "maze" really wasn't a maze, but a series of rooms with traps that must be figured out and gotten past. Those traps came straight from Indiana Jones. Not that originality is a big part of the game, but they could've at least taken them out of the order you would've seen them in Raiders.

I spent half the movie clicking off what movies the writers watched before banging out the script. Like Aladdin, The Princess Bride, probably Masters of the Universe, too.

Pity they didn't watch movies like Aliens or Saving Private Ryan, which has a group with varying abilities working together. Sure, not all of them make it, but those who do wind-up making it doo because they managed to pull together.

That would've been cool. That would've been Dungeons & Dragons. I have no idea what that piece of poop was.

Brian - I completely agree with you. And other movies that the writers must have watched prior to "writing" this one are The Phantom Menace (the empress and the senate) and The Neverending Story (the look of the empress & her youth & her in general) (but then, I thought TPM took that from TNS, too).

A giant bucket of ass.

Amen.
What a big pile of S**T this film was.It sucked in every single possible way, and what the hell was Irons thinking?!? He's meant to be a proper actor, and Thora Birch should have known better too.Couldn't care less about any of the other people involved, as no-body except Ridley was of any consequence to the film whatsoever, It did have some decent moments, but I can't be arsed to think of either of them.

I taped this tonight on cable and just saw it awhile ago and I gotta agree with you folks, it's awful! Thora Birch is a better actress than this, Jeremy Irons, a better actor. They should've and could've passed on this. The only thing I liked about it were all the dragons flying around at the end cuz, well, I like dragons. I knew before watching this film that it'd be bad but I was sort of curious just how bad. Well, there's worse but it still sucked. I'm not into D&D at all, not unless you count playing PC games like the Baldur's Gate series and Icewind Dale which use the D&D 2nd ed. rules, but I've never played the board games, or really had any interest in them.

Regarding the remarks from "Anonymous", "cableface", and "MarkN": This site is for NITPICKING. It is not a general do-you-like-the-movie-or-not. If you want to give general opinions, go to Amazon.com and rate the movie on their site, although "Anonymous" would have to clean up his one-liner.

The other comments, especially by "Jtodhunter", are what nitpicking is about; that is, pointing out specific things wrong with a movie or TV show episode. In this case, "Jtodhunter" hit the mark about the movie "D&D" not showing teamwork as opposed to the game D&D (or any role-playing game, for that matter), in which teamwork is all-important. I was disappointment in the minimal amount of dungeon compared to the large amount of dragon (I guess sets are cheaper than CGI).

Also, the puzzle that Ridley has to solve at the Thieves' Guild is okay until the end. What gave him the idea that breaking the hourglass would stop the roof from coming down? It's never explained.

And the elimination of a key scene (because the moviemakers didn't like the way it turned out after filming it) where Ridley and the mage are inside the map makes for more confusion. What happened in there to make Ridley promise to help the girl (which is tantamount to helping the mages, who are the oppressors to his, the non-mage, people)? I think it would have been better to leave the scene in, however it looked to the moviemakers, than leave it confusing.

This movie could have been so much better. Justin Whalin helped it a lot by playing an interesting, likable character. But although the dragon at the beginning of the movie looked good, the ones in the fight scene at the end looked cheap. Less would have been more at the end. And as far as the comparison to the game D&D, this movie comes off more like a prequel, where the characters who have had to learn to trust each other in this adventure would be able to work as a team in the next. Only there probably won't be a next as far as movies go.

Margaret, granted this site is primarily for nitpicking, but not entirely. People are free to express their opinions of the movie or show, though it is hoped they will do so in a polite manner. From what I have heard, this movie has done well enough in the US and overseas to warrant at least one sequel.

By the way, as I can not recall having seen your name before, welcome to nitcentral. Ignore anyone who is rude, and enjoy yourself

Margaret Ernsberger: This site is for NITPICKING. It is not a general do-you-like-the-movie-or-not. If you want to give general opinions, go to Amazon.com and rate the movie on their site.
Luigi Novi: This site is for talking about whatever we want to talk about, Margaret. Unless Phil Farrand died and left you Nit-C, it isn't your place to dictate to the rest of us what we have to talk about. Sure, the Guides and the site started out as a site to nitpick Star Trek, but it's obviously expanded since then, but the bottom line is, it's a DISCUSSION board.

It's a tad bit unreasonable to expect people to confine their comments to nits only and not give any mention of their feelings about a movie or episode's overall quality, and I really don't see what authority you have to order people to go here and there and wherever. A person is more than free to discuss opinions of movies at Amazaon. They are also more than free to do so here, unless and until Phil says otherwise.

Well said Mr.Novi....

Did well enough? By Ed Wood's standards maybe. It was a FLOP! Not a Battlefield: Earth flop, but still a flop.

And besdies, i think Richard Roeper said it best when he said,

"This movie isn't so much based on the game as it's based on the cover of the box the game comes in."

Though of course, in most of its incarnations, D&D doesn't come in a box... ;-)

Well when I got all the books, plus the Core Rules 2.0 CD-ROM, it came in a box.

Actually D&D orginally came in the boxed set as well as several of the adventures and world sets came in boxes.

True...and I've still got all that stuff. But the core AD&D rulebooks (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual--or whatever they're calling them these days) have always been separate hardcover books. Remember the difficulty you had in getting the concept across to non-gamers? "Well, where's the board? How can you play a game with no board? You mean you shelled out eighteen bucks and all you got was an instruction manual?" How they would have scorned us if they had actually read those old first edition rulebooks and discovered that there was no possible way to actually learn to play the game simply by reading them! Remember? They DIDN'T EXPLAIN HOW TO PLAY! They just talked about character creation and technical stuff. AD&D was the only game in history where you were expected to know how to play before you actually bought the thing. Ah, memories...

I personally always liked one of Gary Gygax's opinions on the movie... I'm not going to risk quoting at the moment and screwing it up, but he was wondering who the heck told Jeremy Irons he could play Boris Karloff playing an over-the-top villain.