Fantasy Film Ranting
I love
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. Love them to death. For the first time ever, a filmmaker was actually able to pluck the images of epic, high fantasy right from the synapses of my brain and onto celluloid. DAMN that prologue battle scene between
Gil-Galad, Elrond, Isildur and company and Freaking
Sauron was awesome. I remember when I first saw it, my mind was screaming COOLNESS. I yelped with each swing of that elf-hurling mace. A chill went up my spine seeing that line of elite Elf footmen with those double-headed polearms blunt that orcish mob. DAMN.
And to think that just a scant couple of years ago, the high fantasy epic film was basically non-existent.
Dragonslayer was great with wonderful effects (for the time) and atmosphere, but it was about a waning world with one last dragon (reflected many years later by that dodgy
Dragonheart farce with Sean Connery). We wanted a fantasy world in its prime. There was
Willow, but while I love that film (I know a lot of people don’t, some of my friends included) I recognize that it is far from being an epic fantasy. It was more action fantasy, a buddy-movie that could have been titled
Two Men and a Baby and the Evil Empire. Heh.
Remember
Wizards and Warriors? It was a somewhat short TV series which was based on the Dungeons and Dragons game (though apparently the producers weren’t able to afford the license, so they just made their own generic world). I can’t recall all the cast members, but I do remember that
Duncan Regehr was there as the charismatic but evil
Prince Dirk Blackpoole. Strong-jawed TV series actress
Randi Brooks (she appeared in Last Precinct; Police Academy on TV) played the evil sorceress
Bethel. Other characters include the good guys
Prince Eric Greystone, his portly but mighty sidekick
Marco (heh), the evil wizard
Vector and a Dumbledore-ish mentor wizard.
Wizards and Warriors was pretty strong and ambitious in the action part of the fantasy genre, with swordfights and deathtraps, monsters and spells. Reportedly each episode cost about a million dollars to produce, but still the limitations showed. Well, it was done before the time of the Herculeses and Xenases of the world, so that made it a pioneer. It didn’t last long, but you have to love it at least for having chapter breaks similar to The Wild Wild West.
And then there’s the much abhorred, infamous and totally horrible
Dungeons and Dragons movie. Let me say that an episode of Wizards and Warriors is preferable to this turdpile. It has the distinction of having an infinite well of heroes, settings, mythologies, storylines and other treasures to dip into… but ignoring all that in favor of a script that an orc with an intelligence of 4 could have written better.
DRAGONLANCE would have been better. Anything in the
Forgotten Realms would have been better. Or
Greyhawk. Or
Athas (but did anyone ever really PLAY Dark Sun?). But noooo... the producer/director has this story he thought up while in the crapper...
The wonders of this film experience include a party of ‘heroes’ which include a Wesley Crusher lookalike, a Wayans brother (whose death in the film was one of the few joys), an elf whose natural skills are limited to spouting out cryptic lines and looking prissy, a dwarf whom Ghimli (in LOTR) would not mourn if he got skewered by an orc, and a magic user who can’t cast a single spell without a bag of ‘magic powder’.
Ranged against them… a ranting
Jeremy Irons as the evil archmage who is lacking a curled moustache to complete his image and a bald, BLUE-lipsticked warlord (played by the same guy who played the villain in the Wesley Snipes’s thriller Passenger 57) who speaks at the rate of one word per second (That is painfully slow, mind you).
SEE! A Beholder appear (Audience squeals in delight) and then be distracted by a thrown rock (so I guess all those eyestalks can’t actually see) to disappear forever despite the alarm being rung some minutes later (Audience groans).
SEE! A whole sequence that would have explained a lot of the hole-ridden plot and drive the heroes’ quest be totally passed over as an unseen event.
SEE! A funny sequence where an army of armoured soldiers in flaming red stand right outside a bar and NOT be noticed at all.
SEE! Two professional thieves sneak after someone like they are sneaking after someone.
SEE! A perilous, unending, legendary labyrinth (overseen by
Crystal Maze’s Richard O’Brien no less) that consists of a couple of rooms in a straight line.
SEE! Our low-level thief hero defeat an obviously high-level fighter despite not having levelled-up any (maybe his sword was +20).
HEAR! D&D terms being forcefit into regular conversation. ("You're so dumb, you must have had a feeblemind spell on you!").
SEE! A crappy CG dragon finale battle with
Thora Birch (who is playing a childlike Empress… maybe she wandered off from
Neverending Story).
REALIZE! That if the heroes didn’t go on their stupid quest in the first place, everything would be a whole lot better.
Ah. There is so much more to appreciate in the horrors of the Dungeons and Dragons movie, but suffice to say that you have to see it for yourself to get the whole experience. Seek it out, and then bask in the glory of LOTR after.
Ah, the Lord of the Rings films. Bliss. Thanks be. Thanks be.
Thus enduth the rant. Heh.