The Week In A Bad Education Towers #30

We’re still back! Despite this cough that will not quite go away and an annoyingly runny nose we’re still up and about and able to do stuff. Not lots of stuff, but enough you know? This may extend to having to mow the grass once it stops raining for like 5 minutes, so pray for more rain please.

Years ago I went to see Game Night at the cinema and had a much better time than I expected. It was a fairly breezy comedy that was funnier than it should have been with a great cast having fun with everything.

Cut to last year, or whenever it was, and I saw the first trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves and I was like “well, that looks like a hoot”, gave it a Google and saw that it had the same directors as Game Night. The question would now be was Game Night a fluke and, if not, would they be able to pull off the same trick in a film based on the granddaddy of fantasy RPGs?

Now, it’s fair to say that D&D has had a fairly rocky time when it comes to popular culture; from its beginnings as a niche hobby before being proclaimed as a Satanist cult, to the terrible film of the early 2000s it’s been a rollercoaster ride. It was always seen as the nerdiest of all nerdy activities, but then things shifted. You had the Lord of The Rings films firmly putting high fantasy back into the mainstream, then in the 2010s you had things like Critical Role and Stranger Things that arguably did a lot to make D&D a cool thing to do. So you can understand why a big media group like Hasbro (who owns D&D through Wizards of the Coast) would want to exploit this as much as possible. We’re in a post MCU world where everyone wants a big cinematic universe, something D&D has access to thanks to all the lore behind it. But would a film work? It’s one thing to watch characters we like play the game, but does an audience actually want to be in that world and to connect with it?

Turns out, very possibly.

Honour Amongst Thieves is a cracking film; it throws a bunch of D&D style characters together (a bard, a barbarian, a wizard, a druid, a paladin, a rogue), has them go off on an adventure whilst bantering with each other good and proper. The story is pretty straightforward but what it gets right is making the characters likeable and then getting the casting right. The caveat here is that if you’ve no time for Chris Pine then you probably won’t have much time for the film. It leans on Pine’s easy going charisma in a way I don’t think we’ve seen since the first of the Stat Trek reboots. And depending on how that makes you feel, then that should decide if the film is for you or not.

But before I wathced that film I managed to also watch the new Apple film Tetris. Yes, a film based on the game. Or rather, based on the making of that game.

Now, years ago I picked up Arcade magazine which came with a free copy of Game Over, a book that detailed the rise of Nintendo in the video game industry. And very good it is too, lots of interviews with folk around at the time in the mid-eighties when they were trying to reignite the console market in the US. And a good chunk of the back of the book is to do with Tetris; where the game came from, how its rights got sold despite no one really owning them and the whole mess being sorted out by Nintendo so they could package it with their new handheld console, the Game Boy.

Its a good interesting story, but its mainly a story about people sat in board rooms discussing contracts whilst other people sit in other rooms not knowing the other people are there. Its not exactly a thrill a minute story.

Being that this film is from Marv Studios, the company behind the Kingsman series, you could tell that they weren’t 100% confident of this being able to hold people’s attention so whilst you get a retelling of the story you also get some KGB guys thrown in and a car chase with digitised graphics put over things.

Look. Its a good film, and in the main was a good re-telling of that story. I’ll defend the hill of Taron Egerton all day long (he very much deserved to be at least nominated for his turn as Elton John) and he holds the centre of the film really well.

But we’re in a world where something like Succession is a huge world wide hit, a tale of business intrigue and skullduggery. The film should have leant into that, rather than adding in corrupt Russian politicians taking bribes. Or go watch Line of Duty, some of the most tense moments are people being told to look at page 4 of their slide pack.

This corrupt politician side story gets in the way of some other more interesting ideas in the film and ends up skirting around them. Like theres this idea about how the deal for Tetris was when the capitalists were let into Soviet Russia and was almost the spark for what followed but it isn’t dug into enough to really explore it.

One major bonus of the film is the casting of Roger Allam as Robert Maxwell. Now, true film aficionados will recall his film stealing turn in Speed Racer as the head of a business who also represent the rampant greed and corruption of capitalism who fully unleashes in probably the best scene of the film. He gets that role again here under a load of prosthetics, fully immersing himself into Maxwell’s character. Its a bit more subtle than in Speed Racer but he still brings a great impact to the film.

Well worth your time, but if you want to go read the book instead I’d totally understand.

That should do it for it for another week, we’re into half term so next week’s newsletter might end up being a list of reasons why both kids should live in the shed but we’ll see. Maybe John Wick? Who can tell.