YUP.
Look up the inital reviews for movies like ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER, THE THING (1982), STAR WARS and CITIZEN KANE.
While there are one or two reviewers that have similar tastes to me and that I trust? Most reviewers have a barely hidden contempt for ANY type of genre film, specifically Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, etc. So I've learned to ignore most reviewers.
This really hit home as a regular viewer of AT THE MOVIES with Siskel and Ebert. They often panned movies that I'd seen and loved. I think I finally gave up on them with their review of DIE HARD. Ebert gave it a two star review mostly because he thought the Paul Gleason character (Dwayne T. Robinson) was annoying. Ebert while a well known and popular film critic was also like most film critics, a snob.
Yeah, like the Legend reviews are just asinine. The acting is spot on, the visuals are gorgeous, the creatures are evocative, the tone of the movie is perfect in it's evocation of fairy tale and the beauty and terrible danger of the magical and fey, it's just an absolute treasure of a movie, that because it's weird and earnest and didn't have cute muppets in it, got panned, and snobs like to hate on it.
C'mon people. When I hear "magic trains", my first thought is the Final Fantasy video games, not D&D.
For non-D&D folks explaining things like how magic trains are a thing could use some explanation. Being abducted by a spaceship is a pretty common trope, warforged are not. I think if the setting matters (it doesn't really need to) an intro scene would help.
Besides, having scenes of a warforged being created could be kind of cool.
You could have such a scene, but it's no more needed in Eberron than in FR. Hell, the FOTR movie didn't need it, it just kicked enough ass that it stayed in, rather than explaining the history over several scenes where Aragorn or Gandalf or Elrond gives context to some history, and it made scenes like Boromir's first meeting with Aragorn more immediately poignant, because you have already had a chance to attach meaning to the sword and the heirs of the guy who wielded it against Sauron before that scene comes up. So, it adds to the movie, and it works really well because it's so bloody good, but it wasn't necessary for the movie to work .
But Eberron needs even
less than FoTR did. Nothing about a magic train needs any explanation whatsoever. At most, use a moving shot to visually tell the viewer how the train works, showing lightning streaking along between the magic glowing stones underneath the train, and the bottom of the train.
As for warforged, don't give them robotic voices, make it visually clear that they are made of living wood (ie show the wood moving like Groot when they move), and just let them be some scenes with people reacting to them appropriately. Done.
As for the last war, the whole setting is defined by it, and the main character or at least some of the side characters should have a history in it, which is already a narrative Americans and really everyone is quite familiar with in film, and if you really want to explain the Last War, give someone a war-related nightmare and make the main character a scruffy merc from Cyre. Or an agent of Prince Orgev.
But Eberron is still a classic fantasy world, with knights, wizards, priests, witches, curses, dragons, demons, and things which cannot be understood by mortal minds.
I don't think any modern audience needs "lotr meets indiana jones meets guardians of the galaxy" explained to them.
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