(Never let it be said I can't write good clickbait headlines when I want to.)
So, there is a new D&D film coming out. I am so thoroughly and profoundly outside of its target audience (I don't even really watch films per se anymore, let alone big blockbustery ones) that I feel like a churl even expressing an opinion about it. So, sorry for the disappointment; I'm not actually going to do the 13 reasons thing. What I will do is express some reservations about the aesthetic on display in the trailer.
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films are responsible for a lot - and above all for staking out a particular highly influential mood and look, which I suppose one could call 'Dimly Lit LARP with CGI Andy Serkisface Monsters'. When I was a university student, there was a 'Scandinavian Society' on campus who would get together on Sunday morning to hold re-enactments of viking raids. My friends and I used to watch, hungover, from our dorm windows; it was on the one hand impressive (a lot of time and energy went into all the costumes) and yet on the other very anticlimactic - an awful lot of fuss and shouting over essentially nothing. If you were to take that basic framework and bolt on lots of CGI creatures participating in all the fuss and shouting over nothing and make them all look a bit like Andy Serkis, and then shoot the whole thing at night when it's raining and visibility is poor, and possibly hire a Hollywood actress to stand in the middle of everything looking very serious while waving a sword and mouthing important-sounding gibberish, you capture this aesthetic perfectly. You all know what it is intimately; you know it the instant you see it. It is just what modern fantasy cinema and TV looks like.
D&D: Honour Among Thieves looks as though it is moving us into new territory, and for that we should be grateful. It appears as though the viewer will actually be able to see what is happening clearly and there may even be some sequences happening during the daytime. There is also a distinct lack of baddies who look like Andy Serkis. This is all very welcome.
However, we seem to have reached a point of technological advancement at which, while it is possible to make CGI monsters look 99.9% real, they still don't quite - with the result being a viewing experience taking place at the bottom of uncanny valley. When watching a cartoon, or a Ray Harryhausen film, one's imagination works overtime to paper over all of the obvious differences between what one is seeing on screen and what it would really 'look like', and the result is a satisfying amalgamation of the director's vision and the viewer's. When watching real people do real things, the viewer's imagination is largely irrelevant, and he or she can enjoy the director's vision unfiltered. What we seem to have achieved with modern blockbusters is a (to me) undesirable middle ground, in which the director is able to realise a vision which is very close to what a real owlbear (say) would actually look like, but not quite; the consequence is the viewers spend most of their time simply studying the behaviour of the CGI creations on screen and being aware they don't look altogether real. This communicates a feeling of weightlessness and lack of consequence, and ruins immersion - what is taking place in the film comes to appear like, well, a film.
I personally would prefer watching a very brilliantly realised animation to a bunch of real actors running around playing make-believe amidst not-quite-real-looking monsters. But maybe this is why I am firmly beyond that target audience, as I mentioned.
I'm 100% with you on this.
ReplyDeleteyeah, with you on this one. there's still plenty of smaller films being made with a more anti-realist approach to special effects-- check out the lovely and sweet Strawberry Mansion that came out a bit ago for a peak example-- but I do wish mainstream big-budget fare let itself out of its shell a bit more in that regard. still, despite the D&D movie looking like it's gonna be a quippy, trite Guardians of the Galaxy ripoff in terms of script, the Princess Bride-inspired costuming and aesthetics pretty much guarantees I'm gonna at least pirate it eventually
ReplyDeletey'know I was thinking about this more and I've actually got a similar level of nostalgia for CGI that's fucking bad but KNOWS it's fucking bad and runs with it. like the cityscapes in Repo: The Genetic Opera, not believable for a MINUTE as "realistic" but still massively flavorful. idk.
DeleteWhoa, "Strawberry Mansion" looks cool! Thanks for the tip!
DeleteI've bounced off (or ignored) most post-LotR fantasy and TV for these reasons. That said, I love the MCU.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest bugbear with this D&D movie, and most other sci-fi and fantasy of recent years (decades?), is that they always either ignore the chance to build a MCU-like shared universe, or DCU-style, screw up the attempt immediately. (I bounced off the TV DC thing hard, but I accept some people love those shows.)
Why aren't they adapting any one of the many great, epic D&D adventures or novels? Why? WHY?
In theory, I'd love to see Warhammer (fantasy or 40k) adapted to the screen, but I just know they will screw it up. Grumblegrumblegrumble...
Yeah, be careful what you wish for. Film adaptations are almost always dreadful. They would butcher Warhammer.
DeleteThey absolutely would.
DeletePeople's tolerance to CGI's imperfections tend to vary from person to person. I'm pretty forgiving personally unless it's really egregious and this one seems OK to me, the only thing that looked really weird and wrong were the various bits of goo which'll probably get fixed between when this trailer was made and when it releases.
ReplyDeleteBut for the movie, I'm just happy to see that it seems like a specifically D&D movie rather than a generic fantasy movie with the label "D&D" slapped on. Personally I'd like something like Dorkness Rising (fun virtually zero-budget D&D fan movie that's a lot of fun) but with an actual budget with the focus mostly on comedy.
Ha, I still say Krull is the fist and best D&D moving despite Gary Gygax not remembering a connection. Wasn't Gygax partying it up in the Hollywood Hills all around this time ? Also, the Krull aesthetic is almost pure Dave Trampier "Rufus and Burne" from the 1981 4th printing of Village of Hommlet.
ReplyDeleteI've still never gotten around to watching it!
DeleteIn the grand nerdly tradition of arguing over something meaningless on the internet, I will maintain it's The Princess Bride - and I've discussed that in further detail on my blog.
DeleteYou should really, really watch Krull sometime. It's not that many minutes out of your life, and some of its bits are brilliant.
DeleteIt is an odd feeling when you first realize that you are no longer part of “the target demographic” isn’t it? My mind keeps going back to the dedication in House of Leaves – “This is not for you.” Particularly in the US, where it seems like we worship everything new and young and have little regard for or even sense of age, the realization carries with it a sort of dysphoria. I don’t know how true this is in other countries – when the pub down the road goes back to the 1300’s or the temple around the corner was built in 800 AD, I think the culture picks up a better sense of age and time and possibly intrinsically has a little more respect for it as well. I know these are generalizations and of course there are exceptions, so it's possible I am only speaking for my own experience.
ReplyDeleteThe film will probably be dumb fun and there’s no sin in that or in enjoying it. But it does seem like it will be insanely derivative and in the OSR at least, and in D&D in general, I think we prize creativity and enjoy (or at least don’t mind) being challenged by the media we consume. It would surprise me very much if this film has any of the staying power that comes from being challenging or creative in ways that we haven’t or have very rarely seen in the past. Not that OSR works aren’t derivative as well, but there’s an undeniable streak of creativity that runs through the works I associate with the community and I think we prize seeing older things in new ways. Again, generalizations and perhaps I am only speaking for myself. Of course, trying to generalize the OSR is a bad idea!
When I look back on it, D&D movies (and the animation to some extent) have never been great, and I find myself wondering why. Is it that D&D (at its best at least) not only requires but facilitates the inhabitation of some other personage that replaces or overlays your own ego as a player whereas movies never truly take you “out of self” and instead facilitate the relation to rather than inhabitation of the characters they present? Is there some conflict there that hasn’t been solved? As I read your post I wondered why the makers, if they were going to be derivative, decided to (apparently) invent a new cast rather than rely on one that D&D has already spawned – Dragonlance or maybe Baldur’s Gate stuff? (and here I have to parenthetically insert a small tribute to the passing of David Warner, who did the voice acting for Jon Irenicus, but how could I not love the same guy who did Sark in Tron and Evil in Time Bandits?) Or is it that even the fiction that D&D has birthed (at least that with the actual label on it) largely “of its time” and no longer fits “the target demographic?” Or that D&D is cooperative and encourage engagement whereas films are passive and encourage consumption? I’m not sure. Movies based on those stories would not necessarily be more attractive to me, but regardless I feel like I matter very little in the movie maker’s calculus.
I also think you are right on as well about CGI. I find myself thinking of Time Bandits again here, and how good the practical effects for that movie looked. The idea of “weightlessness” is maybe the best way I have heard it described.
I will probably, at some point, watch the movie. I might even enjoy it! I liked Thor: Ragnarok after all. But I do not expect to be challenged by it, to have my intellect or imagination engaged in the same way that the best works of the OSR engage me or that an actual session of play engages me – if the human dopamine system is built on unexpected reward, I find those rewards in the materials of the OSR, but not necessarily in big “blockbustery” movies. Which, let’s face it, are not for me anyway.
Interesting questions, and ones that I feel require another blog post. Bear with me, and I'll write it!
DeleteFor me having kids kind of resets that counter, if my kids like something it's hard to not get some of that love infecting me. Hence me watching all MCU stuff despite its shortcomings. Also nothing makes me happier then showing my kids old stuff and seeing that it still holds up and is just as enjoyable as when I was young, and that I'm not just enjoying it because of the nostalgia filter.
Delete@Bosh that makes perfect sense, and I'm glad to get your perspective! I do not have children and honestly forget how they can do this. I've seen it at work so I know exactly what you mean.
Delete@noisms thanks for taking the time to write the new post! I suspect your arguments in that post are basically correct. I tend to overthink things - must remember Occam's Razor!
The best thing you can say about the upcoming D&D movie, even if it's terrible, is: there's virtually no way it can be as bad as the 2000 D&D movie! XD And on top of its many other failings that movie also had infinitely worse, 2000-era CGI!!
ReplyDeleteYeah... I have seen the 2000 one, but it was so long ago I've forgotten what I hadn't already blanked from my memory. I have a vague recollection Jeremy Irons was in it?
DeleteAlas, the Scandinavian Society never made it out to Park Wood. We had hungover rugby players roaming the woods like sore bears instead.
ReplyDeleteReason #1: They made it.
ReplyDelete