“DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES”, AN ADVENTURE JOURNEY TO FANTASTIC LANDS
Cinema Writer/Film Critic Efe TEKSOY; wrote the action, adventure, and fantastic film “DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES”, for America’s Los Angeles-based Internet Newspaper @alaturkanews.
ACTION AND ADVENTURE TOGETHER
Shot on a $150 million budget, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the rich world and player spirit of the legendary Role Playing Game (RPG) of the same name to the big screen in a funny and action-packed adventure. Made by Paramount Pictures, Entertainment One, Allspark Pictures, Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC), and the British Film Commission, the film is directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley. Considered the ancestor of all RPG games, Dungeons and Dragons has redefined the idea of adventure for a generation. Published by the Seattle, Wash.-based company Wizards of the Coast, now a division of Hasbro, Dungeons & Dragons has achieved mainstream popularity that seemed unimaginable in its days when it was mostly an underground phenomenon, and This shows that audiences from all walks of life are somewhat familiar with, interested and engaged. in Dungeons and Dragons. While evolving the nearly 50-year-old franchise into a thrilling blockbuster film may be a challenge for any writer-director, we see it as a formidable challenge for veteran directors Goldstein and Daley. A literary scholar, linguist, and fairy tale scientist, Vladimir Propp, who made a significant contribution to the analysis methods in the fields of ethnology, folklore, and semiotics with the analysis technique he applied to the fairy tales, examines all the fairy tales in the world in depth in his work called “Morphology of the Folktale” and the common 31 functions of all of them, namely the point. In Dungeons and Dragons, we see that the path of our heroes does not go beyond the basic structure that Propp stated. Lithuanian scientist A. J. Greimas, who is considered an important turning point in the history of linguistics and in the field of text analysis, reclassifies the functions identified by Propp, resystematizes them according to his semiotic point of view, and divides them into three tests. It is observed that the story told in the movie is in accordance with Greimas’s 3-stage (Restorative, Conclusive and Honorable Testing) scheme, as in Propp.
TOPIC OF THE FILM
A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers embark on an epic quest to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.
Stars; Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant, Daisy Head and Chloe Coleman.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Filming Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves began on 4 May 2021 in locations around Belfast Northern Ireland. Director John Francis Daley adds: “There’s a mix of natural beauty and exotic places that feels like you’re in another world, in another time, and so is the movie. We have extraordinary backdrops and beautiful locations, like straight out of a fantasy novel.” This place where the fantastic production was filmed was famous as the location of Game of Thrones, and the shooting studios of Titanic Studios, where the series was shot before, were used in the new movie. But when determining the look of the film with directors Goldstein and Daley, cinematographer Barry Peterson and production designer Ray Chan, they wanted to create something visually surprising and completely original that would be true to the colorful role-playing game. In some ways, staying true to the world of Dungeons and Dragons has been easier for the writers-directors to set the story within the geographic boundaries of the locations of the legendary Forgotten Realms, introduced in 1987. In the intervening years, “Realms” has been used as the setting for novels, video game adaptations, and comics. The Forgotten Realms, which also greatly influenced the design of the new film, represents the pre-industrialization world of the 13th or 14th century technologically. Still, the film’s production designer, Ray Chan, states that the film’s creative team doesn’t want to restrict their designs to just shades of brown or do anything that resembles previous movies or TV shows. He says: “I saw in many Medieval movies that we watched in the past that we always knew what we knew from history books, and I preferred to look at very different worlds. “We want to see something unique,” Goldstein and Daley said. Dungeons and Dragons is a great platform, have some fun with it.”
MASTERFUL TOUCHES
One of the most feared edge predators in the Dungeons and Dragons world, Owlbear is exactly like its name, a mixture of a giant owl and a bear, two and a half meters tall. So the druid Doric wisely chooses an owlbear from the moment his adopter must transform into an impressive creature to fear a member of the Elven family. Director Goldstein jokes: “We had a chance to capture and tame an owlbear and we use it in the movie.” To find the inspiration needed to create the creature, the makers turned to nature and created the creature using cutting-edge visual effects. It took months to finalize the design. It looks like a snowy owl with its beak and white feathers. Visual effects supervisor Ben Snow, who has four Academy nominations and whose work includes the films Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), says: “The directors take great care to keep it realistic, so we found lots of snowy owl photos and then borrowed an owl as a reference.” Also on set, the producers attached a cardboard model of the owlbear’s head to a pole so players could see how tall the creature was. Then, a stuntman in a white suit did exactly what Owlbear did when attacking Forge’s forces. His movements were then digitally embedded into the CGI creature by visual effects artists working at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). The creative team worked with California-based Legacy Effects in their desire to make as many creatures and places as possible hands-on, and the company’s Oscar-nominated co-founder Shane Mahan and his team delivered the famous masterful touches.
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
Filmed in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Iceland, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, is an action-packed production that will take you on a fun adventure in fantasy lands.
EFE TEKSOY
References
Vladimir Propp, Masalın Biçimbilimi ve “Olağanüstü Masalın Dönüşümleri” & E.M Meletinski “Masalın Yapısal ve Tipolojik İncelemesi” (Morphology of the Folktale), translate. Mehmet Rifat-Sema Rifat, İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları press, 2018
