D&D Trailer

hubersan writes "The new trailer is up at http://www.seednd.com Oh MAN. Lotsa nice CG.." I suppose it would be rude to link directly to an Akamai URL, so I won't do it. Quicktime, naturally. Conscience strikes: should I see this movie and give my money to Time-Warner? Update: 10/26 6:09 PM by michael : Sadly, we've been asked to take down the direct link to the file.

Comments

Re:Conscience?

[MAXOMENOS]

Lawful Good: Pay to watch the movie. Buy a copy on tape or DVD for the family.

Another take on it:

• Lawful Good: Doesn't see the movie, as tempting as it may be, because s/he knows that that money is going to trample on our rights
• Lawful Neutral: Hunt down counterfeiters on the Web and turn them in to the MPAA
• Lawful Evil: Work for the MPAA, on their legal team.
• Neutral Good: Figure out what's worse: not seeing the movie and possibly harming the role-playing-game genre as far as the corporate public goes, or seeing the movie and paying the MPAA to trample on your rights. Go with your conscience.
• True Neutral: See the flick. Or don't see the flick. Depends on your tastes.
• Neutral Evil: Work for a major movie studio as an advertising executive.
• Chaotic Good: If you must see the movie, sneak in. If the cops hassle you about it, explain that it's a political protest.
• Chaotic Neutral: Buy movie ticket, eat it. Beat up usher with a trout.
• Chaotic Evil: Become a prodcer.

But that's just me.

fearbush.com

Conscience?

[Ptolemarch]

Conscience strikes: should I see this movie and give my money to Time-Warner?

It all depends. If you're Lawful Evil aligned, there's no problem at all with seeing a Time-Warner movie. (If you're Chaotic Evil aligned, you might want instead to sneak into the movie. Chaotic Good might also do this, as they might rationalize that it's not evil since you'd not be giving money to Time-Warner.)

Re:Conscience?

[cribeiro]

The Complete Alignment Table

First, the lawful characters:

• Lawful Good: Pay to watch the movie. Buy a copy on tape or DVD for the family.
• Lawful Neutral: Pay to watch the movie. Sleeps inside the theater.
• Lawful Evil: Does not need to pay to watch the movie. They have contacts in the entertainment industry and have seen the premiere.

Now the chaotic ones:

Chaotic Good: Download a copy of the movie from the 'Net. Watch it on a Linux machine.

Chaotic Neutral: Rolls a dice. 50% chance of paying to watch the movie.

Chaotic Evil: Buy a pirate copy of the movie. Hates the end of the movie, where the good guys always win.

Now the neutral bastards :-)

• Neutral Good: Don't care. Wait for the movie top be released on cable TV.
• True Neutral: Don't care. The last time it has seen a movie it was 40 years ago, in the gold years of Hollywood.
• Neutral Evil: Don't care. Wait for the movie top be released on cable TV, and then ask a friend to record it for him.

Well, hell Slashdot..

[BilldaCat]

You guys went and saw X-Men and did a review on it, so the point is moot, isn't it?

Simple.

[mwalker]

Having a conscience doesn't mean you can't see Time Warner movies. It just makes life more expensive.

Every time you see an $8 TW movie, send $16 to the EFF. That's $24 a movie, so it will make you evaluate what you see more critically.

It's not like we don't have enough expendable income in this country. Today, at my local best buy in rockville, they called in the riot police because the people who lined up at 5 am for Playstation2's were trying to beat up the people who lined up at midnight and fell asleep.

Try going to the local line of rabid PS2 shoppers and tell them that the PS2 is selling their fair use rights out the window. I bet you they'll all ask you if they could sign away their "fair use" thingies for a lower number in line.

A little let down

[xmalenko]

I was hoping to see a home movie of a bunch of kids rolling dice, playing the game, not a CG extravaganza. Oh well, I guess Time Warner knows whats best.

Come on!

[B-Rad]

Holy sweet Jesus, could it get any more formulaic? From the wise-cracking black guy (at least it's not a wise-cracking black guy being CGI rendered as Jar-Jar), to the pseudo-heroic main character who gets the girl in the end, to the evil guy who's trying to take over the entire world because it's his destiny, there aren't many generic points that haven't been touched. Quest for a magical item? It's there! Creepy sidekick to the bad guy with weird facial features? He's there!

Jeremy Irons, how low you've slipped. For shame.

Scathing review of this travesty at Gamegrene.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out www.gamegrene.com for a full synopsis and blistering review.

Plus they also have an ongoing series reviewing some of the best fantasy movies of the 1980s.

Good to see a comparison, and how bad this new one is compared to the old classics.

Waiting for LotR

[Enoch Root]

There's a couple of problems with that movie from the onset of the trailer... To name a few:

The impossibly goody-two-shoes empress who believes everyone should be nice is gonna be the leader of the good guys?

Thanks to that Scary Movie guy for proving once again that in action movies, black guys should play the scared comedic thief with no morals and a thirst for easy cash.

Blue lipstick??? That's supposed to look evil?

If the dragons look like CGI at this resolution, can you imagine them on a movie screen?

"Then we'll make them go through a dungeon! Yeah! Because, you know, we've got dragons, but where are the dungeons? Huh?"

My little brother DM'ed stories that sounded more original when he was 11.

That being said, for some reason, I still find this exciting. First, it's gonna be a filler while we wait for LotR... And if they can make something that slick with the shoestring budget and two-bits director they have, can you imagine what Peter Jackson and a decent budget will turn up?

If I had a time machine, I'd go straight to Christmas 2001!

Great visuals, poor acting...

[Sinistar2k]

I was incredibly excited about the D&D movie until I watched this trailer. For some reason, I was certain that this film would hold me over until Lord of the Rings is released next year. But, there were a few things that struck me as warning signs:

1. The bad, evil sorcerer keeps his hair parted, and when wind blows into his coiffed creation, he looks like Buster Poindexter.
2. It co-stars Jar Jar Binks. Oh, wait, no, I guess that's just Marlon Wayans. Same thing.
3. The main character says, "Trust me," right there in the trailer. The use of the phrase "trust me" in a trailer is a sign of impending crap storytelling 90% of the time. To my recollection, the only film that really bucked that trend was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which used "Trust me" in the trailer, but then didn't suck.
4. The male lead looks like he's fresh from a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers casting call. It just seems "seriously wrong".
5. The use of the word "kinda" in a fantasy setting.

It seems like this is pointed squarely at the teen movie market, but one would think that the market who would connect best with D&D is the 18-34 market (y'know, people who were alive when parents across the US were afraid that their role playing kids would become involved in the occult and commit suicide when their characters died).

Admittedly, I don't know the story here. Maybe it's the same as the old D&D cartoon - a couple of kids are magically transplanted into the game and have to play it to get out. In that case, all this hokey teen crap works, because they would be from a different world, but if we are to believe that these characters were part of this world from day one...

Please, Peter Jackson, deliver us from bad fantasy films.