Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

There was a book, in the 70s, when it was still a new thing, called "What Is Dungeons and Dragons?"

One of the trendier fanzines, for people who had already moved on to more cutting edge games like Chivalry and Sorcery or Tunnels and Trolls suggested the title should have been: "Why is Dungeons and Dragons?"

Why is Dungeons & Dragons? It's still a good question.

There is no reason, or indeed, excuse to turn Dungeons & Dragons into a movie. It is a stupid premise for an entirely unnecessary film, and it knows it.

D&D (as we old timers used to call it) was a system of mechanics to adjudicate war games and puzzle solving games set in a fantasy world; and a huge grab bag of monsters and spells and treasure and traps and magical artefacts from which a fantasy world could be constructed. But, very quickly and perfectly understandably the horse and the cart switched places. D&D ceased to be a set of rules with which to umpire fantasy games; and became a reductive description of how fantasy actually worked. Fifth Level Chaotic Neutral Elvish Monks knew that they were Fifth Level Chaotic Neutral Elvish Monks; and all three hundred and seventy six monsters in the Monster Manual could be assumed to live within a few hexes of your local tavern. Words like Bard and Monk and Paladin acquired specific D&D reference points. We found out what the "vorpal" meant in "vorpal" sword and how many Hit Points Cthulhu had. 

And now the logic of D&D (the game) is applied to a zillion dollar movie. It would be a little as if you did a production of Murder in the Cathedral in which the three knights kept turning corners and St Thomas could only move diagonally. Which might be awesome, now I think about it. I am actually less surprised by D&D getting a big-screen movie treatment than I am by there being a full-on Pearl and Dean advert for Settlers of Catan.

Some of us saw Game of Thrones and felt it took us back to what was fun about our teenage D&D habit. A great big epic world in which Arabian Knights deserts rubbed shoulders with dragons, zombies, high medieval jousting tournaments, sleazy cities, pirates, and well, basically, all the cool bits out of every heroic fantasy story you ever vaguely recalled but with all the dull connective material left out. Which, indeed, was precisely how Bob Howard had built the Conan stories half a century earlier. D&D is often treated as being synonymous with Tolkien; but the original game was primarily inspired by the pulps: Conan and Lankhmar and ERB and Moorcock and the Dying Earth. A lot of us were positively confused that Gandalf was such a high level wizard but had such a mediocre supply of spells. 

Game of Thrones may have been a derivative trope-fest but it was a derivative trope-fest which came together in a convincing fantasy setting with a more or less convincing phantasiepolitik. At least until the final season. The average D&D game is more like a fantasy mashup set in Disneyland. Merlin riding a  dinosaur? Hobbits vs zombies? Hit points for Cthulhu? Bring it on. 

I bailed out when D&D was still called Advanced D&D, but I get the distinct impression that Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves cleaves close to the mechanics of Seventeenth Edition, or whatever it is we're up to. The spells we catch the names of (Time Stop, Hither-Thither-Staff, Sending Stones)  certainly sound like the kind of thing you'd find in the Appendix to the Supplement to the DMs guide; and a number of the monsters are far too ridiculous to be found anywhere else. A gigantic feathered woodland beastie called an Owlbear; duck-shaped brains called Intellect Devourers; a giant-corridor blocking lump of acid jelly called a Gelatinous Cube; and leopards with tentacles which are, I believe, known as  Displacer Beasts. And some of the place names (Baldur's Gate, Sword Coast, Winter-something-or-other) sound distinctly as if you could find them on one of the Official Game Maps. For all I know, some D&D nerds are at this moment complaining that the movie radically departs from the established geography of the Forgotten Realms, and some other D&D nerds are vehemently condemning them as Pedants and Gatekeepers and Class Traitors for doing so. (There is a second series of Rings of Power in production, apparently. Why do you ask?)

It's relatively rare that I go and see a lore-heavy movie without being passably familiar with the lore. I know some people are Very Angry that the recently revealed Big Bad in the Star Wars TV universe appeared a long time ago in some non-canonical books and more recently in some definitely-canonical cartoons. There were undoubtedly references in DADHAT that I didn't pick up on, but at no point did I feel lost, confused or indeed insulted. I was perfectly able to laugh at the results of casting a Speak With Dead spell, even though I had never heard of it. But if I had been able to say "Whoot, whoot, I remember when my character cast exactly the same spell and had exactly the same problem" it would have added an additional dimension. (The Astral Plane, possibly.)

The movie, like the game, is stuffed to the gills with High Fantasy but entirely devoid of a sense of what you might call wonder. Magic is a mechanism; a form of technology; nothing more. There is no suggestion that Speaking With The Dead would feel spooky, or gross, or sacrilegious; or that dead people might mind being disturbed. It's just a pretext for a series of Pythonesque gags around the fact that the spell only allows you to ask each corpse five questions. Our heroes literally go around a graveyard casting the spell repeatedly until they find a cadaver who can give them the next clue in their treasure hunt. The primary McGuffin is a magic item that will bring the wife of one of the main hero back to life; but there is no sense that bringing someone back from the undiscovered country from whence no traveller returns might be religiously or mythical or numinous. Death is merely a quite serious illness. The waddling brains are a threat (they can suck people's minds out) and a joke (everyone is insulted because they don't think that party's intellects are worth devouring) but otherwise just a piece of local fauna. The wizard in the party has something called a Hither-Thither Staff, which opens a magic portal from one place to another, allowing our party to magically cross a chasm after a bridge has inconveniently collapsed. Later on, someone spots that they can use the same staff to create a magic portal on a painting, which can be hidden in the wagon carrying the bad guys treasure, which is then placed in the bad guy's treasure vault, giving the player characters an infallible route into the bad guy's strong hold. This is just the kind of thing which a clever D&D party might have come up with: but it's game-logic, not story-logic.

It's very much the way things work at Hogwarts as well. Magic is a mechanical slot machine that can be hacked and repurposes by sufficiently ingenious heroes. I doubt if the thrice-wise Joanne had played much D&D, but I imagine that by the time her particular pot had started to boil, Dungeons & Dragons had become the normative mindset for Shitty Wizard Books (TM).

There's a plot. It's the same plot as every other action movie. The hero wants to reestablish links with his daughter (currently living with a slimy ally-turned-adversary) and bring his dead wife back to life (resurrection token currently located in the stronghold of said baddie). So he makes contact, Magnificent Seven style, with a handful of previous allies; and they embark on a Quest. In order to get into the vault they need a magic helmet; in order to find the magic helmet they need to enlist the aid of a Paladin; in order to find the Paladin they have to question some corpses in a graveyard. There are various side-quests and digressions I have almost certainly forgotten. It all ends with a huge setpiece fight that starts in an arena and ranges all around a fantasy city. It's much more frenetic than the actual game: the heroes race around labyrinths like Indiana Jones where a real party would crawl along tunnels with torches in their hands, tapping with their ten-foot poles and checking the ceiling for traps. We're a team of superheroes with special powers, not a party of adventurers with backpacks. The individual scenes are short enough that they doh't ever become boring, and they are self contained enough that if you happen to forget why everyone is currently wandering around "the Underdark" it doesn't matter all that much. It's not as soul-numbing as the Crumbs of Dumbledore, but lacks the high seriousness of, say, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

The film has one massive positive overwhelming point in its favour which makes it more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Astonishingly, the main characters actually work. They work individually as likeable protagonists whose side you are on; and they work collectively as a mismatched bunch of losers doing their very best against improbable odds. The main hero, played by Chris Pine playing Chris Pratt playing Starlord, wisecracks his way through proceedings relying on hope and optimism even though he is patently out of his depth.

"I make plans; I'm a planner. If the existing plan fails, I make another plan."

"So you make plans that fail?"

"He also plays the lute."

"Not relevant."

Where Peter Quill is an asshole, albeit a charming one, we never for one moment doubt that Edgin is a good guy with a cynical manner. (He took an oath to be part of a secret society of good guys called The Harpers, but quit to become a thief.) He has a buddy-movie friendship with Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) a barbarian who he has been hanging with ever since his wife was murdered by bad guys. There's also a perky nerdy Druid (Sophie Lillis) and a self-deprecatingly useless magician (Justice Smith). They both have pointy ears, although the wizard's stick up like an elf and the druid's stick out like a pussy cat. For part of the story they are helped by a disturbingly serious Paladin (Regé-Jean Page) who walks in a straight line and takes everything literally. ("He's a real son of a bitch?" "You attribute his evil to his mother?")

But the star turn, unquestionably is the villain, Forge, who used to be a member of Edgin's party but who has allied with an evil wizardess, taken control of a city and turned Edgin's daughter against him. He is played by none other than Hugh Grant, with exactly the same mannerisms he gave to Jeremy Thorpe a year or so back; so slimy and plausible and British that you want to punch him in the mouth every time he opens it.

The characters all have slightly different motivations for wanting to defeat Forge, but they are all working together; and until the inevitable climax they are all useless in impressively different ways. The banter never lets up, but manages to avoid becoming annoying; I think largely because there is no cynicism to it.

"Just because you have given up on your oath doesn't mean that your oath has given up on you" says the Paladin

"Just because that sentence is symmetrical doesn't mean it isn't nonsense" replies Edgin. He rallies the troops before the final act by admitting that he is the most hopeless hero of the lot of them. And of course the Paladin is quite right: he goes back to the Harpers by the end of the film.

So: a story that makes no sense; a mechanistic attitude to fantasy; wholly redeemed by a group of characters with sharp dialogue, who bicker and banter and disagree, but who like being together and who are fun to be with. And who -- no matter how awful things get -- know that the whole thing is in the final analysis only a game. A film about friendship.

Never mind your Magic Missiles and your Feather Falls. Someone involved in this movie totally gets Dungeons & Dragons.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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