#this is gonna be cringe to those who aren't into dragon age

[centrally-unplanned]

Watched the new Dungeons & Dragons movie and the original D&D film from the 2000's back to back yesterday, which was a very amusing comparison. The new movie was quite good! Its highly standard of course, but its not afraid to be that, who doesn't like a scampy rogue and a gruff barbarian and an ecoterrorist druid wild shaper and all that. Dead moms and daddy issues for an arc as required by law, which is fine as a structure. On that structure is a lot of very fun action scenes, creative directing, and a really good cast, Chris Pine & Justice Smith in particular know exactly how to play their roles, and when has Hugh Grant ever not knocked it out of the park.

It was very smart about limiting down and keeping small the crew, their goals, and what everyone can achieve. Chris Pine's Edgin is presumably a bard, but that just means he plays the lute; he has no spellcasting abilites, no Songs of Inspiration, he is the idea man and he uses his charisma to lead a team like any person would. As I joked, the druid is not a druid, she instead can only wild shape, since that is enough power for one film. Our guest paladin is the same, just a warrior with principles. The team has a sorceror and that is enough 'mechanics' for the squad. What this frees up is a lot of space for worldbuilding; you visit a ton of places in the Forgotten Realms very quickly, but since its just a team of dudes who you understand you spend that time getting to know the setting and the characters. The actual plot has a lot of moving parts, you can be legitimately surprised at times due to that, without giving you things you aren't gonna understand in that plot.

Even with the powerset they have some of the fight scenes need idiot balls to make sense; the Underdark sequence is the biggest culprit there, many many moments of "bro you can teleport, and you can turn into a bird, why are you running on your little human legs?". But its never for things that really matter, a little idiot ball here and then is fine.

Meanwhile *man* is the 2000 film a trainwreck - it has a very stacked deck going against it. It was a film trying to use 2000 CGI to the maximum extent, for which nothing has aged worse - every sequence with a dragon should honestly just be removed. It was shackled with of-the-time humor styles that age awfully, in particular Marlon Wayans porting in the wacky-black-sidekick character archetype that he (as 1/2 of the Wayans Brothers) popularized never works once, it was always cringe my guys and doubly cringe in a fantasy world. I didn't realize this, but its apparently trying to recreate the success of The Mummy (1999)? The male lead is 100% styled after Brendan Fraiser as a leather-clad explorer with the same exact hair, and the female lead is styled after buttoned-up librarian Rachel Weisz. Which, when you know, makes it really embarassing, its a failed attempt at recreation.

The issue is all of these 'ambitions' reduce its ability to be a fun fantasy b-movie. If the dragons were cool obvious puppets, no one would care, thats great! If you just had a fun likeable cast fighting bad guys, you would like them, you would accept it, but they try so hard to be zany and filled with conflict (there is a whole mage-commoner caste system plot line....ughhhhhhh) you don't like any of them. It even simultaneously has a badass action chick on the side while its main female lead is reduced to powerlessness due to plot demands and the romance arc, in the same film, which is *worse* than just having either one.

Also award for literally the worst case of boob armor I have ever seen in my life:

She better be storing some long-range MK-class explosives in there because otherwise those torpedo tubes are fucking empty.