No Sense of Huma

Looking at it's component parts, it really should never have been as big as it was.

A series of books written to accompany some new modules that were designed to try and re-energise the D&D franchise. It was basically 'Lord of the Rings' Lite (TM).

At first glance, the writing was economical, the world of Krynn wasn't particularly innovative, and the characters were pretty much your typical adventuring party types (in fact, they were designed to be just that) and yet...not only did the Dragonlance 'Chronicles' series, and later the 'Legends' follow up meet it's intended purpose but they managed to leave an indelible mark on all of us that were lucky enough to be enveloped by the story of the War of the Lance.

It was 1987 and the first year of high school for me when a friend first handed me 'Dragons of Autumn Twilight' and between the long bus and train trips that it took for me to get home each day, I had that book finished in about a week. Then I read it again the next.

Unlike Lord of the Rings, this was a fantasy story that grabbed you by the scruff of the neck and said, 'We have to keep moving!' From the first chapter to the last it was action all the way, with a story that escalated higer and higher, and with a cast of stereotypes that you came to realise were people all along. The theme of balance played through many aspects of the story - from Tanis Half-Elven battling the natures of the two races that formed his name and personality, Raistlin's love/hate relationship with his brother to the 3 moons of the world itself and the aspects of good/evil/neutrality they represented. This Libran loved it.

The second book in the first trilogy, 'Dragons of Winter Night' was the first book I can remember ever waiting for to be released.

So with the above outlined, you can imagine my level of excitement when I learned that a Dragonlance movie was in the works. It made sense - the success and quality of the LOTR movies had caused a spike of fantasy based movies to be released, and while all D&D based movies released to date have been steaming piles of crap, if there was ever going to be a successful effort, this was going to be it.

I can sadly report that the D&D movie tradition continues.

This was...awful. A kids movie - animated to boot. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, but this was mish mash of dodgy traditional animation (worse than the 80's D&D cartoon) and horrid 3d graphics.

No one who has seen Larry Elmore's vision of Lord Soth's charge could be happy with this.

Granted, a 90 minute movie was never going to fit all the content of the first book (which this is all the movie covers), but the treatment of the characters, the plot and more importantly, the audience is just abyssmal. I couldn't watch it all, it was that bad.

To try and take a positive out of the experience, I have to hope that perhaps this movie will expose others to the books, and in turn lead them to clamour for a proper effort sometime in the future.

People, if you've never read these books go and do so - they're fun, thrilling and sad.

While you do that, I'll keep on hoping that one of you is talented and lucky enough to be able to right this wrong and make me a version that used to fill my imagination when I was a kid.