Roll for Damage

Well, the verdict is in: Never, but never let someone direct a film chiefly because that person was a huge fan of the material.

We can see why in Dungeons & Dragons, a labor of love by director Courtney Solomon, a D&D fan himself. Translating the game into a major motion picture had been a dream of his since high school, he says — but judging from the finished work, the dream had not matured much since then.

The trouble is that realized dreams like this are usually of interest only to the dreamer and, perhaps, his psychologist. It’s not that the dream itself is necessarily unappealing, but the director is often so in love with it that he loses his objectivity and forgets that he needs to sell the dream to his audience before they can love it as well.

That, or Solomon and company simply and cynically assumed “movie based on game = built-in audience guaranteed to show up no matter how the movie turns out”.

Of course, the real question here is: If American Beauty put Thora Birch on the map, will Dungeons & Dragons, which came so soon afterward, take her off it?