The highly-anticipated Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves trailer is lastly right here after debuting at San Diego Comic-Con and, after years of exceedingly low expectations, I’m pleasantly shocked. Paramount Pictures and Hasbro’s Entertainment One crew have dropped at life an action-packed heist film with a star-studded forged. And they did it by leaning in to what makes D&D a lot fun — combating monsters alongside your mates at the kitchen desk.
The trailer is merely sensible at introducing our characters and setting the stakes. The core of the social gathering, a bard (Chris Pine) and a barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez). collect to themselves a rag-tag troupe of adventurers, together with a talented warrior (Regé-Jean Page), a strong mage (Justice Smith), and a shape-changing druid (Sophia Lillis, who shared that she bought into D&D by precise play podcasts like Critical Role). Then they proceed to wreck shit.
The shit that they wreck? Only a cavalcade of D&D’s most recognizable monsters. There are dragons aplenty, in addition to a rampaging displacer beast. The mimic, disguised as a treasure chest, bares its tooth earlier than lashing out with its sticky tongue. At one level Lillis’ character transforms into an Owlbear, certainly one of the franchise’s most iconic monsters that goes all the method again to first version — and the bag of plastic “Chinasaurs” that both Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax picked up at the native drug retailer in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in the Nineteen Seventies. There’s even a bit the place our heroes purposefully leap inside a gelatinous dice.
And sure, that’s an terrible lot of fan service. But that fan service is being utilized in very artistic methods. The movie’s set-piece battles really feel much less like deleted scenes from Game of Thrones and extra like what occurs at kitchen tables all round the world on recreation night time. Watching the motion unfold I don’t see the Guardians of the Galaxy stepping as much as the plate, though the banter is clearly high notch. Instead, I see all of the family and friends that I’ve performed tabletop RPGs with over the years, making an attempt — and generally failing — at a roll of the cube.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is set to premiere in theaters March 2023.
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