Come to think of it, I don’t know why I thought it might not be execrable.
But it is. Hoo boy, is it ever.
I thought about renting it but decided to give my money to a drunk homeless guy instead. Perhaps it was better spent. Care to elaborate?
The animation is terrible. The voice acting is terrible. Flint (who may be John Rhys Davies again) is comic relief, just like Gimli.
The animation is shoestring budget stuff, which can be good if done right. But this is not done right. It’s like watching Dragonlance as channeled through an old GI Joe cartoon…but without being cool.
I got it from Netflix thinking it might be amusingly bad. But no… it was just bad. Really, really bad. Did Keifer Sutherland lose a bet or something?
I took this screen capture representing the fine animation quality found in this film. Yes, that’s Verminaard’s mace going through this own body.
Everything about it was terrible. The animation was some bizarre meshing of poorly done CGI and 80’s style animation (as seen in my screen cap). They didn’t work together at all but you constantly saw the CGI draconians & dragons interacting with the pen-drawn characters. It was very jarring, to say the least.
The voice acting was lousy. The pacing on the voice acting seemed especially poor and it was as though everyone was just handed the script that day and told “read into this microphone”. A lot of the lines were flat and emotionless. All of the character interaction was stilted.
Really, it was just bad. Like God awful bad. Here’s the trailer. It doesn’t look any better in the finished product.
Oh wow. These CGI Draconians are TERRIBLE.
I honestly don’t think I can watch the rest of this.
Well… yes, the CGI/animation being on the screen together was horrible, horrible, horrible. Whoever made that decision should be fired. Kiefer Sutherland as Raistlan, however, actually worked. He nailed Raist. And while the animation wasn’t that good, it wasn’t all that horrible and…
Okay, fuck it. The movie pretty much sucked. But the trilogy is awesome and for a fanboy like me, it was a blast, crappy animation and all. Here’s hoping that they make two more, and that they do a better job.
Edit: to be fair though, Flint was pretty much comic relief in the books, too. They actually got that part right.
I personally found the books to be tiresome drek[sup]1[/sup] and abominably written, so I shall neither be watching the film nor wringing my hands over how badly it’s been done[sup]2[/sup]. But was it just me, or were all of [del]Tiamat’s[/del] Takhisis’s heads using the same breath weapon?
1 I read both the original trilogy and “Time of the Twins”, but I re-a-a-a-a-lly don’t care if I never see either them or any other DL fiction ever, ever again, and that must be like eighteen hours of my life I’ll never get back.
2 Other people are at liberty to be equally indifferent to the rumoured poor quality of the two Gor films that have been made, for example. De gustibus and all that.
They already gave away the Kitiara reveal!
I read the book when I was 16 and saw this craptastic movie a few months ago. I didn’t remember all the religious talk, was it in there?
And WAY bummed I didn’t get to see Riverwind turn liquid from the black dragon acid, that was the only thing that kept me plugging away.
I’m trying to figure out what happened. Did they blow their entire budget on fairly well known actors, and couldn’t get up enough money to do the animation beyond a Saturday morning cartoon?
I mean, how hard would it be to have gotten more investors? “Duuuude! We have Keifer Sutherland as Raistlin. What more could you want?”
Seriously, I’m really confused how this all fell apart.
I also recall the writers praising this mound of garbage. They seemed genuinely happy with the result.
“Yu-u-u-u-u-u-ni!”
I eventually had to turn it off. I got through the horribly mangled and abbreviated Xak Tsaroth adventure, and the voice acting got so bad that I just had to abandon it.
Is it Afghanistanimation?
Hideous.
I bought it.
I’m a whore.
Old news. It is an atrocity against man and everyone involved should be rounded up and sterlized with rusty chainsaws. People who rape childhood memories like this deserve a new ring of hell, one where they spend the rest of thier days being repeatedly violated in a crowded cheering gladiatorial arena by things yelled out by the crowd.
I described the animation to my gaming group like this: They send out a request to 1000 different people who had some form of animation software on thier computer for a small clip of the movie ‘as a skill demo’. Then they took those clips, slapped em together, and put some voices in.
I’m hoping it was abad enough that 10 years from now when they go to do the live action film they’ll stick closer to the storyline. All the preaching was terrrrible.
Yep, the movie quoted, almost verbatim, from the book, IIRC.
Okay, I must just not be groking something here.
What preaching did you find terrible, and how did the preaching in the movie differ from the book?