Dragonlance - Dragons Of The Autumn Twilight

I have a confession to make: I play Dungeons & Dragons. I say confession like I am admitting some dirty secret like I stuff firecrackers into gopher holes for the glee of exploding varmints. There is a stigma to role playing centered around the prejudiced of maladjusted hermits huddling in someone's mother's basement. Sure, there is a lot of truth underlying this notion, but that discussion is for another post.

Today, I want to talk about Dragonlance - Dragons Of The Autumn Twilight. Blockbuster On-Line dropped off this DVD a week or two ago and I finally had a moment to take a look. Now, I have never been a big Dragonlance fan (for the last few years I have been more of a Forgotten Realms kind of guy). I read the Chronicles back in high school 15 years ago and I haven't spent much time on Krynn since (outside an occasional computer game perhaps), so I didn't have a lot of back story in mind when I put the DVD in the player; just enough to recognize where the story was going.

DoAT (the movie) is an animated feature-length film mixing 2D and computer graphics in a form factor that distracts from the story. Looking past the visuals, the script does a passable job of catching the high points of the book on which it is based. The story, a classic D&D yarn in which a group of adventurers set off from a village inn to stop the evil dragon warriors causing chaos to reign, mixes adventure, comedy, and a bit of romance in a classic Hollywood recipe. Saundra, by no means a D&D fan, stumbled in for half the movie and was passably captivated by the story and more so by the action of killing goblins and draconians.

The movie has a couple of A-list names in Kiefer Sutherland and Lucy Lawless doing major voice work. Still, it is clear why this project went straight to DVD. The story was sufficiently complicated to distract a casual observer (as Saundra had to ask me about draconians and cleric spells and such) and with the weak visuals, the overall project did not have enough umpf to get into the mainstream.

However, as the Harry Potters and Lords of the Rings of the mass media world continue to permeate the collective culture, high fantasy projects like Dragonlance - Dragons Of The Autumn Twilight will get more familiar and become easier to sell to the masses. Let's just not talk about Eragon.

Overall? 2.5 Ms out of 5
as a D&D movie? 4Ms out of 5