I'm taking one for the team and watching the Dragonlance movie...

[bouv]

Alright, I got myself a copy of the Dragonlance movie. (http://www.dragonlance-movie.com/) I'm going to subject myself to it, so that I can report back and spare you the trouble.

Now, let's face it...the original Chronicles trilogy isn't exactly great literature. It's entertaining, and probably not bad for young adults or newcomers to fantasy, but that's about it. Most of the characters are fairly one-dimensional (well...pretty much ALL of them in the first trilogy, only in later books did some of them get some depth.)

The movie has decent voice talent (Kieffer Sutherland, Michael Rosenbaum, Lucy lawless, and a couple well-known voice-over artists,) but that's about it. If you watch the horrendous trailer on the website, you'll see that since they blew their wad on the acting, they had nothing left for animation. It's half CGI (bad CGI) and half traditional animation (also bad.) The CGI looks like a community college's web animation course final project...the final project from the slacker living in his parent's basement that only took the course online and got a D-.

I'll give you the (undoubtedly) bad news in a little while. If 9 PM rolls around and I haven't reported back, send help.

[Kizarvexius]

(Sniff) It's this kind of bravery and self-sacrifice that makes me damned proud to be a member of this board.

Y'all are just so inspiring!

[Sitnam]

Yeah, I read the book 12 years ago when I was a D&D nerd so I felt an obligation to rent it even if it sucked...and sucked it did. It's been so long that I had a hard time remembering how closely they followed the book, but I think most of the events happened right. I don't remember all of Tanis' preachiness or Goldmoon's faith talk, but I could be wrong. The computer animation for the draconians and yet standard animation for everything else was hilariously bad. My roommate and I were looking forward to sass mouth Riverwind dissolving in Black Dragon barf, which is the more memorable of the books events but it never happened in the movie, what the hell? They got Tika's breasts right though so that's a plus.

[bouv]

Wow...just...wow. They actually put this out for the public to see? It was so bad, words can't describe. Honestly. I couldn't even watch all of it. I got about 2/3 of the way through before I just skipped ahead here and there to see what was happening.

I'm not spoiler boxing anything, since the damn books have been out for twenty years.

So it seems they completely forgot what pacing is. The first 1/3 of the movie covers about the first three chapters of the book. Seriously, the time between Tanis and Flint meeting on the path till the time they enter the cursed forest takes for-fucking-ever. After that, everything is rushed all to Hell. The dialog is painful, because it's almost all taken verbatim from the book, and almost nothing seems to be added, so there are several minute long scenes that need dialog, but have none, because in the book it's a five page description of a fight with Draconians. So many memorable moments (the aforementioned near-killing of Riverwind, Tasslehoff pretending to be a dragon, the fight with the slug when Tanis gets the magic sword, Tass's and Fizban's exploring in the fortress,) are just skipped for no reason.

Oh, and as said, the mix of bad traditional animation and even worse CGI is horrible. Not just horrible, but painful to watch. I felt embarrassed for whoever was in charge of "blending" the two.

Do yourself a favor and don't even watch this out of morbid curiosity. Not even worth it.

[jali]

The animation in the trailer is so disappointing. It looks like an episode of Thundercats or He-Man from a Saturday morning long ago. Thanks for the warning.

[Drain Bead]

I haven't been so impressed by a board member's willingness to do something completely unpalatable for the greater goal of fighting ignorance since Scylla's waterboarding escapades.