^after seeing that second dungeons and dragons movie, I detest any movie that has the word dragon in it.
Heh yeah that D&D Sequel could turn anyone off. I finished watching Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight shortly before this post. There certainly are some major critiques, but overall i think they did a fair job. I suspect it will depend how much of a Dragonlance fan one might be, and how eager someone is to have it in a visual medium/understanding to the fact that books are never translated verbatim.
The spirit was kept alive, and it followed the story more or less accurately, but here are some of my more major gripes (in rough order of appearance. consider this a
SPOILER alert) :
News of Takhisis return happens right away.
Silvantesti is destroyed right off the bat. I guess that means we aren't going to have anything to do with Lorac and The Dream?
The way they choose to compress and convey the coming romance with Caramon and Tika is by having her boobs just about slip out of her clothing and Caramon get all flustered (and as she walks away, they make a big deal out of her ass movements, which of course Caramon is watching). Somehow, this takes a bit of the heart away from it all. He could have noticed she was a woman now without all of the gratuitousness. For that matter, they show Onyx in human form with a pan shot from the boobs up. More gratuitous fanservice. Way to treat Chronicles with respect.
Otik is mentioned (by way of his potatoes) but not shown.
Tas is portrayed entirely too trivial, even for a kender. He comes off like some early teenage boy and it just feels off.
They didn't get off the road when the "monks" came.
The scene where the monks are revealed as draconians is not the first scene to use 3D, but it is one of the first where we really get to see 2D and 3D characters mixing it up. It just looks awful. I have NO problem with the 80's 2D style. I just wish they had picked one or the other and went with it. The creators said they thought some of the combat stuff looked better in 3D. They are just wrong. The only use 3D really was, was laziness when coming out of Pax Tharkas they are faced with a whole draconian army. It was easier for them to render it in 3d.
They have flint allergic to horses. I don't remember this. Seems a stupid thing to add.
Xak Tsaroth is SEVERELY abridged. There is no Tas/wicker dragon scene. Everything to do with the Gully Dwarves (with the exception of Bupu) is cut. There is no Highbulp or any of that, and no blessing for Bupu to have a long life (showing a side of Raistlin that is still human). They just meet Bupu, go in and are instantly at the dragon and kill it.
Pax Tharkas also fell heavily under the abridging knife. For example, there is no scene where Tanis gets Wyrmslayer from Kith-Kanan and there was nothing to really show how Laurana starts to grow up.
Also in Pax Tharkas, the children are separated, but you see women in with the men. In the books, they were all kept separate from each other as a means to control them. I understand this had to be done as a time saver, but it brings me to my next point.
The entire pace of the movie feels rushed. They wanted to be sure they hit everything from the books so it was like "ok we hit a bit of this scene, lets get them over here and give them a bit of this next scene and moving on now..". Really, it could have taken a lesson from the LoTR movies and instead of being 90 minutes, been at LEAST 2 hours, if not a bit more so it could have felt paced properly and captured more of the epic feel.
And then my two biggest gripes:
1) The revealed Fizban to be Paladine at the end of this first movie. In the books, we readers figure it out well in advance, but it isn't revealed to the characters until the very end of the trilogy.
2) They revealed Kitiara as a Dragon Highlord at the absolute end. Why was this necessary? It really deflates the suspense leading up to everything in Tarsis.
Obviously there are other inaccuracies, but you have to let some of them go. Still, as a fan, i'd buy it again, and i will buy Dragons of Winter Night if and when it ever comes out, but there is no way i'd ever suggest that someone watch this before reading the books. It does seem that the DVD is selling well. It makes me hope that the powers that be will notice that there is money to be made in Dragonlance, and perhaps at some future point we might be a better treatment (a faithful big budget lotr style live action adaption would be a dream come true)
Heh you know (considering i am posting about this on the OSA), i wonder if Tuomas will ever see this (having been a Dragonlance fan himself). It might be interesting as both a Dragonlance and Nightwish fan to hear his take on this animation project.