What Is The Best DnD Movie?
A fun... FUN exploration of what movie best captures the Dungeons and Dragons game and/or experience.
This might seem like an obvious answer, what with the handful of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) movies that exist and only one of them being good, let alone watchable, but DnD is much too complicated for the 2023 Honor Among Thieves to be the defining answer.
The weirdest thing about DnD, weirder than the Satanic Panic (Qanon ain’t new bay-beeee), is that in its 50ish year history (first version came out in 1974), the game has never been good about having any continuity around what it is, and what it presents itself as.
Without spending thousands of words boring you about game theory and/or role playing game theory specifically, DnD has always had a tone problem.
Some people will argue that since the game is whatever you want it to be, there can be no tone problem. These people are wrong, the game is not whatever you want it to be, it is very much its own thing. But… BUT it can CAN be made into what you want it to be. That’s a feature, its ability to be flexible. However, what something is, and what it can be used for are not the same thing.
A rock is a rock, and you can use a rock as a hammer, but a hammer is not a rock.
You can attach a rock to a stick and make a hammer (or a mace/club)) but the rock is a rock without the stick.
In this analogy, the players are the stick, and while you can’t play the game without players, the rules (and the artifact of the rule book and its presentation) can exist without player input and engagement.
DnD/Hasbro/Paramount has, in Honor Among Thieves, done a very good job of communicating a unified brand identity that matches the most vocal and popular sense of what DnD has become/how it is played these days… to a point.
It’s a fun movie, and it has a fair amount of whimsy and exciting action, and enough dramatic stakes to lend weight to both.
It’s a good movie, and it’s pleased a lot of people.
I am not criticizing the movie.
The movie has a ton of strengths, including how vibrant and dynamic the action scenes are, but I think it’s widely agreed that the characters (and the acting/casting) are the movie’s greatest strength… and also where it is the most DnD it can be.
It has the leader, the muscle, the smart one, and the cool one, and they all bring something to the table, and each one also captures a fun and dynamic portrait of their character class (the job: bard, barbarian, wizard, druid, etc.). So, by the above, the DnD movie that came out this year is the best DnD movie…
Except for that whole “to a point” part.
The game has existed for almost 50 years, so what the game is now, to certain groups of players, doesn’t capture the whole of what the game is… and I don’t even mean it doesn’t sum up the whole history of the game (that can’t be done), I mean it doesn’t sum up the whole of what the game is now.
The movie is toothless.
The game is full of teeth, fangs, claws, blood, swords, and death. Death, murder, bloodshed, and evil are in the rule books now. Honor Among Thieves, by dint of who it’s made for and what parts of the brand identity as play style it captures, and how much of the Marvel Movie style it’s cribbing, simply isn’t interested in the more serious and severe elements that are inherent to the game’s mechanics.
This doesn’t mean the movie is bad, or that the absence of immediately consequential violence is a mark against its quality.
The movie successes at what it is.
It’s just, being based on a game where death is real, plausible, and consequential, where the mechanics, art, and presentation of the game are built around fighting, and killing monsters, the focus on the movie reflecting the trend of the game as an improv engine where the point is shenanigans driven adventure, and not unrelenting life and death violence, means it misses this whole other experience of what the game is.
Yes, DnD can be a whimsical romp, and, AND the machinery of the game also includes undeniably consequential violence and monster killing.
Both are valid.
(It doesn’t matter how tedious, quaint, annoying, and/or boring I find the whole Critical Roll game as performance culture and tone, not everything is for everyone, and I don’t begrudge people that like it, or want to play that way. The game CAN be anything you make it into.)
So, if Honor Among Thieves lacks the visceral, and lacks the monster fighting… though it does have some of the libertarian power fantasy of the original game and the original game’s source material (whooooooo, we’re just out here being dirtbags, getting our own shit for ourselves, whooooooooo), what’s the movie that best encapsulates everything else that feels very DnD, and also has that kind of action?
Well, some people would say Conan the Barbarian is the best DnD movie.
It has a ragtag band of adventurers who are out to get their own, dealing with weird magic, monsters, treasure, a merciless bad guy, and while the movie is not like the books, the Conan pulp novels were a big inspiration on Gary Gygax, the co-creator and credit stealer (from Dave Arneson, Gygax is a lot like Stan Lee…) of DnD. The only big non-DnD thing about the movie is that the rest of the characters don’t matter that much. It’s Conan and friends, and that’s a dynamic that’s one of the worst ways to play the game.
(Anyhow, let’s stop for a second and talk briefly, very briefly about the play element cross generally all DnD play experiences, that being shenanigans.
The armature theater, the improvisation, the absurdity, the tone, and the random moments (due to the random nature of a game where narrative is resolved by rolls of the dice) means that even in serious games, shenanigans happen.
Honor Among Thieves, as stated above, centers that aspect above, and were Conan to be a DnD movie, it would have focused on the capacity for gritty, violent storytelling… but the shenanigans would still be there, because Conan and friends do in fact get up to shenanigans and have plenty of chaotic, amusing nonsense.)
Sooooooo, what’s the movie that’s right in the middle point of Honor… and Conan? What’s the movie that feels like a DnD party, and feels like DnD players, that has the occasional absurdity that the game creates and inspires, and captures the, we’ll just say, ass kicking action and violence that the game is mechanically built around?
The 13th Warrior.
Even more than Honor Among Thieves (I should have put HAT in parentheses and referred to it as that), it captures the rambunctiousness of players and setting, in that it has the leader, the smart one, the muscle, the cool one, AND the outsider. It’s the most DnD thing to have one player be like, “and I want to make this character who has nothing to do with what everyone else is making”.
There’s “monster” fighting, there’s tons of absurdity and smart-assery, there’s moments for all the central characters where each one’s strength pays off narratively, and it has both a dungeon and a dragon… in its own right.
But, no magic, and DnD is a very magic-centric game, so while my ideal DnD movie would have been 13th Warrior but with spells and shit, that doesn’t mean the movie is the best DnD movie.
No, the BEST DnD movie is…
Mazes and Monsters with baby Tom Hanks.
A harrowing, made for TV movie, tale of mental illness, roleplay as psychodrama, and being in your late teens/early 20s and just playing the game all the fucking time with your friends.
I’m kidding, that’s not it, but it’s great, high camp nonsense, and you can watch it on YouTube .
No, the actual best DnD movie is…
Willow.
It has all the hijinx, all the visceral action, all the magic, and all the monsters, the typical cast of leader, muscle, brains, and coolness (or comic relief), plus the outsider character (Sorcia, she starts evil then turns good). All the characters are always getting up to some chaotic nonsense, making things go very wrong or very right, but not really as planned, or not wholly as planned, and everyone has their moment to shin
That’s DnD.
Oh wait…
Obviously Fellowship of the Ring is the real best DnD movie, on the surface at least, even more on the surface than the new movie, because the Lord of the Rings books were so influential on early generations of people that played the game and how we think of fantasy, but not Gygax who wasn’t into heroic or epic fantasy.
Yes, there is no better movie for putting together a band of heroic adventurers to take on a quest that needs diverse talents, personalities, and a mix of chaos and dumb luck, than Fellowship of the Ring (since the fellowship splits at the end of that movie, and you never want to split the party in DnD, the other two are disqualified).
The only problem is that while DnD CAN be all about bold and heroic good versus evil adventuring and high fantasy, it is a sword and sorcery driven game at its heart, so by my own persnickety use of “is” versus “can”, Fellowship loses out.