User blog:BadCatMan/Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

After everything, I felt I simply had to review Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But, to be honest, I'm not sure I can fairly review this movie. After seven years monitoring and documenting its production (and it's not even that old), scouring social media for clues, poring over images, reporting on it, researching connections and developing articles, all just to help get the wiki ready ahead of time and feeling I'd banked the wiki's reputation on it, I'd made myself an obsessive fan long before it would be released. And also the person most primed for disappointment in the whole wide world.

It started well before the release, of course. What I'd heard about the tie-in novels made me worry that it'd compressing and dullifying the Realms, making it too much like a generic fantasy. And then I made the mistake of reading Honor Among Thieves: The Junior Novelization, a book that's little more than an abridged early script of the first half of the movie with some sparse and perfunctory prose to connect it, draining all hope of humor and heart, of tension and drama and wonder at the world. Has children's fiction really become so bland and basic? It made the movie seem indistinguishable from garbage, with terrible lines in place of the promised humor.

Nevertheless, I went to work, frantically writing wiki articles to get ahead of the movie, even if the n-th pass through of the novelisation helped matters not all. I'd spoiled the plot, the bad jokes, the surprises, and worn it all into tedium. I wearied myself out, and on the day of the preview screening, I was sick with nervousness all day.

In 2000, I went with a friend, a D&D player who'd been gifting me with classic fantasy novels including Dragonlance, to the first Dungeons & Dragons movie. Me, unfamiliar with D&D, thought it was okay, but he complained about the dungeon and the beholder. Now, 22 years later, I'm the D&D fan and going with my brother-in-law (only an ex–Warhammer 40,000 player) to see the latest Dungeons & Dragons movie and wondering if I'm going to be the one complaining about the dungeon and the beholder.

But then I bloody loved it, and now I'm not sure what to think.

I'm still not sure I can fairly review this movie. I don't know how, for one. I'm an editor, I'm like that Marvel character Karnak who can see the flaw in all things, except, instead of using it to break things, I can, if I may, suggest a possible improvement...?

So, I say review, but it's more of a metatextual metagame analysis. What do I think as a DM and as a Forgotten Realms fan?

Title
First off, the name: Honor Among Thieves. It is one of the more generic titles, just yoinked from an old saying. And yet, it works, the movie does what it says on the tin. Simply calling it "Dungeons & Dragons" would've been terrible, as if it was meant to sum up the entirety of the game and world, and impossible goal. But Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves establishes this movie as one specific story in that game and world. And it needs that. Though I would've preferred Forgotten Realms: Honor Among Thieves, naturally.

Campaign
The plot is, let's be honest, rather thin, as well a complete mess. That's made especially obvious by the novelisation paring it back to its bare bones, of which there are few. Sure, one can say it's just a D&D adventure, it's just a MacGuffin fetch quest, it doesn't need to be complex. No, it doesn't, but it also doesn't have to be quite this simple. It's hard to think of any D&D adventure module, Forgotten Realms story, or DM worth their dice since the 1980s running one this join-the-dots simple and so full of loose ends. The Forgotten Realms can afford to be be sprawling and deep. And yet, none of it seems to matter in the movie itself, where it keeps moving on through its set pieces and introductions and it still feels complete and internally consistent. Do we really need to know what the red horn is? (Well, I do, I need to write a wiki article about it.) In fact, I said the 80s, and that may be the key: this movie is much more of a classic 80s fantasy adventure, like Willow or Krull, comprising a sequence of settings and set pieces strung together, each of them a memorable moment and sometimes introducing a new character, like an old adventure serial—or multiple sessions of a D&D game. Since I grew up on and love those movies, then it works for me.

Nowadays, many movies are one-for-the-price-of-two deals: one storyline split over two parts, each of them often overlong and overpadded enough as it is. (Looking at Dune here, in particular.) Honor Among Thieves is the opposite, being two movies for the price of one. The first is the hunt for the Helm of Disjunction, which the novelisation recounts. The second is the heist of Castle Never itself. Rather than being padded, it's cut right back, rushing through some parts. With a tighter focus on one of the other storyline, I do think it could have relaxed, breathed, explored some characters more, and luxuriated in the Forgotten Realms setting, which is made to be luxuriated in.

The first is the MacGuffin quest. I think this is the ghost of an old script, written and rewritten. If the thread of old summaries in the press and industry publications is correct, then possibly it's the original Chainmail script by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, and reportedly rewritten by Michael Gilio. This apparently great enough to get a D&D movie made in the first place, but not enough to retain in any creditable form in the movie that resulted. But I guess maybe Hollywood is just like that. In any case, as popular as the speak with dead and Themberchaud sequences will be, removing this may have allowed for a cleaner storyline. The Chainmail storyline will be one of those could-have-beens of D&D history, like Gygax's original movie idea, but likely much much better.

The second is the heist movie, most likely introduced by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. The heist works, it's very clever and inventive. With D&D and its all spells, the temptation is often to just roll Hide and Move Silently or Bluff checks or use a spell to teleport in / adopt a disguise / turn into mist / etc., which can be underwhelming, but this storyline understands the idea of magical defenses and limitations too and employs its magic in novel ways to still make that interesting. While a heist is unusual, it is well within the range of D&D when it comes to getting inside castles and making off with loot.

So, what we have is a D&D campaign formed from two adventure modules, adapted to the setting and cobbled together and run one after another.

You All Meet in a Prison
That said, I feel the heist movie structure works against it. Not the heist idea itself, but the set-up to get there. There's the two leading actors, Chris Pine as Edgin and Michelle Rodriguez as Holga, going around recruit a team of skilled people for their heist. That's how a heist movie normally goes, sure. But it's not how D&D ever goes. It sets up an inequality between the player-characters: Edgin and Holga are main characters, who get top billing, most of the screen time, the heart of the plot; Simon, Doric, and Xenk are supporting characters, who get what's left. In a D&D campaign, player-characters

But the books lied. The promotion lied. It is not some big flashy blow-shit-up Marvel-style movie with a lot of wisecracking and jokes at the expense of the material. It is a classic fantasy adventure movie that treats it all with respect, runs with it, and has a little fun with it. Don't get me wrong, it's a complete mess. It's not quite the quintessential D&D movie, nor a perfect Forgotten Realms tale. There's still a bit too much Hollywood moviemaking in it. But it may be as close as a movie will come. It has a way of making all that not matter and working anyway, and feeling like a Realms tale should.

There are gaping plot and lore holes in it, and some things are never explained. But it wouldn't be Forgotten Realms without that last mystery, that one loose thread to tug on. And keep asking Ed about until the NDAs lift. And while the books made travel times non-existent and the Realms seem more compressed than the average open-world computer game, the movie has plenty of travel scenes and grand landscapes to make it feel large. Faerun is as big and beautiful as we always imagined.