watch tHe skies

After the abysmal movie that was the original Dungeons & Dragons, who would have thought that it would ever get a sequel? With an army of fanatical D&D players and fans waiting for their vision to finally make it to the big screen, the original movie, Courtney Solomon’s vision in the original movie was just another fantasy adventure, rather than digging in to the rich and expansive world of the D&D game. Apart from a rather neat dragon battle at the end, the film sucked big time.

And so that was the end of the franchise before it started. Until, that is, the SciFi channel, resurrected it in the form of a made for TV movie…

The producers have wisely severed almost all links with the original movie and set it far enough forward that all surviving characters from it are pushing up daisies. Only Damodar, the nasty fella with the strange tentacle things has returned, and this time he’s vexed.

And so after a cheesy introduction, the film gets going with a cast of unknown (mostly british) actors, in a film that was made mostly in the fields of Lithuania.

And apart from a few dodgy effects, the script is strong and acting good for a low budget production, and importantly, it actually delves in to the D&D mythology, with concepts such as the different types of magic, character classes, skills and monsters all instantly recognisable to anyone who has played the game or its PC incarnations (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights etc). The characters are good fun and although I can’t quite believe that a barbarian would have a toff’s accent, we also get a Xena-type hottie in Ellie Chidzey’s Lux, nice. All in all much more satisfying a movie for fans than the original. Apparently another one is on its way.

It amazes me to this day that we haven seen a Dragonlance movie. Particularly after the success of Lord Of The Rings, the DL novels have plenty of excellent storylines to plunder, as well as some unforgettable characters (Caramon, Raistlin, Tanis, Tika to name but a few). The Dragonlance fanbase is large and the demand is surely there if dealt with better than the D&D movie. Perhaps if the forthcoming Narnia movies are successful, the studios might be looking for another fantasy franchise to plunder…

And then of course we have the Forgotten Realms universe, the stories in Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 PC games are deep enough to produce some excellent movies tv shows etc. So come on guys lets see fantasy back on the big screen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 8:52 pm and is filed under movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.