I too am a bit leery of the word "subversive," especially as it has the
potential to diminish the atmosphere and immersion so necessary for good fantasy. But we really don't know what they mean by that, so I'm not ready to channel my inner nerdrage.
Picking up on a few threads...
So, worthless trash media?
Well, no, nevermind, even the most garbage sharknado garbage has some level of unintentional commentary on the real world.
If it's a good story, it will touch on the human experience in some way that resonates with modern people, which inherently means it will comment on the real world.
I can't speak for the person you are replying to, but I don't think "commentary on the real world" and "touch[ing] on the human experience" are synonymous. They can overlap, but one implies commenting on our world as it is right now, including and perhaps especially social, cultural and political dynamics, while the latter implies something more archetypal or universal: what it means to be human, regardless of time and place (or world). Fantasy is great for exploring the human experience via way of archetypes and mythic forms, but when it becomes a vehicle for social and political commentary it often diminishes its fantastical nature and veers towards social SF or mimetic fiction in the guise of fantasy.
This is not to say that no such commentary should be employed, but that a major part of the joy of fantasy, or at least secondary world fantasy, is the experience of a new world, in which the reality of the world is taken as literally what it is, rather than as an imaginative reference for our own world. The more this fantasy world mirrors our own in terms of socio-political dynamics, the less it feels like fantasy, and consequently the more one has to take a stand in relation to whatever messages are being conveyed.
I would also argue that recent fantasy has involved far more such commentary and allegorizing, perhaps partially as an overall attempt by many fantasy authors (and publishers) to legitimize fantasy in the eyes of the mainstream. Thus we have "literary fantasy" as well as countless YA fantasies that involve characters in coming of age stories with thinly disguised real-world socio-cultural dynamics.
There are lots of great contexts for socio-political commentary, for allegory and satire, but I personally prefer fantasy to focus more on archetypal processes that transcend any particular context: coming of age stories, grail quests, good vs evil, etc. That said, I see nothing wrong with fantasy continue to broaden itself to include a greater diversity of stories, but I don't think a D&D film--at least the first such film--is the right context for a story heavily based in contemporary socio-cultural dynamics.
My first thought on what 'subversive' could mean here give the writers and Chris Pine:Deadpool like 4th wall breaking, only instead of talking to the audience, Chris Pine's character (and maybe others) talk to the DM/the person playing his PC/Other Player's in the gaming group in the middle of the action.
Could be an interesting take if Pine's character hears a voice in his head telling him what to do and he doesn't agree with it but is compelled to follow, setting up conflict between what the character wants and what the player wants and allowing them to learn from each other.
To be honest, that sounds horrible and I really hope they avoid that sort of thing. Deadpool works for Deadpool, and silly antics have their place, but this would utterly diminish any kind of immersive fantasy experience. IMO, of course.
Lord of the rings has been done though. The film has been made. A D&D movie that tries to be a replication of of Lord of the Rings will bomb. It’s been done. Lord of the Rings invented the cliches, it has originality because it was the first fantasy film of that scale with that cast of that quality. It had never been done before. Im sorry to say a D&D film ain’t gonna be the next LotR no matter how hard they try, if they play it straight down the line.
Lots of stuff in your post, so I'll take it piece by piece. I agree insofar as you can't out-Tolkien Tolkien. Create something new, or at least different. And of course D&D is at least as much--if not more so (especially if we believe The Gygax)--drawn from the sword & sorcery of Howard, Moore, Leiber, Moorcock, Smith etc, not to mention precursors and contemporaries of Tolkien like Dunsany, Cabell, Eddison, Lovecraft, Anderson, and others.
My point is that a film about 4-6 adventures that meet in spurious circumstances and quest or defeat the BBEG is not sophisticated enough for a modern audience in a fantasy world. Avengers had a ready made cast of characters already known and liked from their existing films - and this style easily backfires (Justice League)
Starting to diverge a bit. It really depends upon how it is done. Sure, a straight up Tolkien clone ala Terry Brooks would be transparently tedious, perhaps especially to those whose experience of epic fantasy starts and ends with the LOTR films, Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter. But there are tons of variations on that basic theme as it is a basic mythic structure that is universal to the human experience: companions questing together to defeat some "evil."
Perhaps a model that might work well is something akin to Scott Lynch's books, or the great fantasies of David Gemmell, which are in many ways relatively classic fantasy, but with a different tone - one that harkens closer to Leiber than Tolkien.
It has to thread a very fine line between being recognizably d&d otherwise what’s the point, and cliched in which case it will be cringeworthy. The best way to do this in my opinion is with humour and some kind of conceit that allows the story to be told in a new way.
Well it depends. A "new way" can be just as shallow as cliche fantasy tropes, and doing a classic fantasy quest really well could be great. In other words, I think the quality of a fantasy story has less to do with whether it treads familiar territory or not, and more to do with how it explores the terrain, and the authenticity and originality of the authorial voice. Subverting the tropes can be just as superficial as the standard cliches.
I’ll let you into a secret. I love fantasy as a genre but there’s a reason not many fantasy films like LOTR get made. They cost a lot of money, can easily cross the line into being silly, they require the audiences to make huge suspensions of disbelief, have large amounts of jargon that make total and utter sense to a fan and are completely irrelevant and confusing to everyone else.
I think what you are saying that I agree with is that it is really hard to make a good fantasy movie. For myself, the only secondary world fantasy films that I really like can be counted on both hands: Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, the Dark Crystal, LotR, Game of Thrones...and I'm runny out of films and I'm just getting started on the second hand. There are some others (e.g. Princess Bride) but most veer away from classic secondary world fantasy.
Some of those had huge budgets, especially the recent ones, but not all. The early ones required immense creativity and just good old film-craft.
I think the problem, or challenge, is translating an inner imaginative landscape to film, a more limited media form than a book. And of course there's the problem of translating a linguistic media into visual...by way of example, I just re-read the beautiful Riddle-Master trilogy by Patricia McKillip and had the stray thought, how could this ever be translated to film? McKillip is a perhaps unsurpassed wordsmith: her prose is extremely poetic and evocative, and so much of the beauty of her work would be lost in a visual medium.
I’ll let you into another secret. Generally fantasy writing isn’t very good. It tends not to win awards or receive literary approval (unless awarded by the community itself) and the fans are fairy rabid who are easily pleased as long as the books conform to certain expectations. They tend to be pretty similar and again tend to be bought by a pretty specific group of individuals.
This is only partially true, imo. Genre fantasy--meaning, the mass produced fantasy of the post-Tolkien era, before whom there wasn't really a "fantasy genre"--has a generally lower standard of writing craft than mimetic literature. But not only is that true of all genres (e.g. sf, thrillers, horror, etc), but it is because fantasy employs different domains of writing than realist literature: especially creating an imaginary setting, whichopens up whole new worlds (quite literally) of challenges and complexities. And of course most who read fantasy just want a good story, first and foremost, so readers (and publishers) are less picky about prose than they might be of the latest postmodernist treatment on family pathos.
But the fantasy tradition also includes a huge number of quality prose stylists. Just off the top of my head, in rough chronological order: William Morris, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, ER Eddison, Clark Ashton Smith, JRR Tolkien, Hope Mirrlees, CS Lewis, Avram Davidson, Alan Garner, Peter S Beagle, Ursula K Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Gene Wolfe, John Crowley, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Holdstock, George RR Martin, Robin Hobb, Neil Gaiman, Steven Erikson, etc etc.
As others have said, don't confuse winning the Pulitzer and other literary awards with quality. I think a lot of it has to do with an inability to understand the fantasy genre by mainstream critics - it is like asking a fan of classic rock to judge House music.
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