The Best Movie About RPGs in 2018 (So Far)

There's been plenty of talk about the future of movies inspired by tabletop games, but the end of 2017 brought a surprise: a movie about a game that doesn't exist. Although it uses video game tropes, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a lot to say about role-playing games. If you haven't seen the movie, this discussion contains SPOILERS.

View attachment 92881
​

[h=3]"Many Effects"[/h]The concept behind Jumanji was established in a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg: kids play a board game and the game's effects seep into real life. Jumanji was a jungle-themed game where the players would face increasingly hostile animals and characters.

The book was the inspiration for the movie of the same name, starring Robin Williams as Alan Parrish, a boy trapped in the game for over 26 years before Judy and Peter Shepherd unwittingly release him. Like the book, it featured animals and a big game hunter named Van Pelt. Williams mentioned that the name of the game was actually the Zulu word for "many effects," but that's more speculation than fact (some supposedly Zulu speakers have contradicted this claim).

The most recent film, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, is less a sequel and more a reimagining, with a character similar to Parrish trapped in the game, Alex Vreeke. Before he is sucked into the game, Vreeke rejects it with a sneer, saying, "who plays board games anymore?" In a sign of the changing times, Jumanji refashions itself as a video game -- but despite its video game roots, this new version of Jumanji is a lot like a role-playing game.
[h=3]Welcome to the Jungle[/h]The protagonists are four archetypes established by The Breakfast Club: the brain (Alex Wolff as Spencer Gilpin), the athlete (Ser'Darius Blain as Anthony "Fridge" Johnson), the basket case (Morgan Turner as Martha Kaply), and the social media-obsessed princess (Madison Iseman as Bethany Walker). They're in detention for a variety of reasons, which turns into an exercise in recycling magazines by removing staples. It also just happens to have the video game version of Jumanji, which of course our four hapless teens decide to play. That's when the fun really starts.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is as much a deconstruction of poor game design as it is a takedown of high school tropes. Spencer's avatar is Dr. Smolder Bravestone the archaeologist (Dawyne Johnson, intentionally playing against type as Spencer's nebbish germaphobe). Fridge picks Franklin "Mouse" Finbar the zoologist (Kevin Hart), because he misread his name as "Moose." Mouse is slow, weak, and vulnerable to cake, but he carries the backpack for our hero -- an inverse of Fridge and Spencer's relationship, in which Spencer does Fridge's homework for him. Martha ends up as Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), a redheaded "dance fighter" who wears skimpy outfits. Most hilarious of all is poor Bethany, who is transposed into the "curvy genius," Professor "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black).

Jumanji goes beyond mocking video games into what it means to role-play someone else who is radically different from you. Each character has three lives, which means that the players take more risks early on and become more cautious as the game progresses. At heart Jumanji wrestles with what Live-Action Role-Players (LARPers) call "bleed".
[h=3]Bleeding Out[/h]LARP scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman explains what bleed is in the context of role-playing:

Participants often engage in role-playing in order to step inside the shoes of another person in a fictional reality that they consider “consequence-free.” However, role-players sometimes experience moments where their real life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’ and vice versa. In role-playing studies, we call this phenomenon bleed.

​

Bowman classifies bleed in two forms: bleed-in, in which feelings of the player affect the character; and bleed-out in which events in the game affect the player. Bleed-in is the source of much humor in Jumanji, where the strong are now the weak, the weak now the strong, and females are now males. The players discover that they must rely on other strengths than the archetypes associated with them (strong, attractive, smart). In doing so, the characters help their players grow emotionally: Spencer learns to be brave, Fridge learns to be a team player, Martha becomes more confident and Bethany learns to sacrifice for others.

Although Jumanji is nominally about video games, it emphasizes teamwork as necessary to survival. Co-creator of D&D, Gary Gygax, would agree:

The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.

​

In Jumanji, the only way the players can succeed is by working together. It's a lesson we can only hope the upcoming D&D film will feature prominently.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[Schmoe]

The thing with 'D&D' is that its' not a story. A Dragonlance movie, for example, would be a thing - story, characters, places; a D&D movie would just be a generic fantasy story with the occasional beholder and a few other D&D specific monsters showing up. You could theoretically turn a 5E adventure into a movie - say, Curse of Strahd.

I don't think it's quite as abstract as that. While the characters may not be talking about the game mechanics, I think it would be great if the viewers could clearly recognize the game mechanics. So the rogue can decipher the runes on a Wand for a Use Magic Device check, the Sorcerer casts Fireball repeatedly, while the Wizard says "Drat, I didn't prepare that one today."

On top of that, though, I agree that the key factor in the movie's success will be the story. In that it could be any old generic fantasy story, as long as it's good.

 

[hutchback]

A recurring question is "What would make it a D&D movie?"

Here's a thought I had in regards to that:
One of the great things about D&D, and TRPGs in general, is that given the same plot arc and decision points, the variables of the players and the dice produce radically different yet equally entertaining stories.

What if "what makes it a D&D movie" is that it is actually several films that take the same story and tell it with a different set of variables in each? So you have the same plot, macguffin, and BBEG, but a different party of adventurer in each. Or even the same party making different choices — succeeding and failing in different areas.

It's a riff off of what they did in the old Clue films, but to the Nth degree. There could be overlap across the films, nods to the other characters, easter eggs, or gaps in story that get filled in by the other movies.

Sure it would be expensive, but it could be amazing.

 

[ddaley]

The thing with 'D&D' is that its' not a story. A Dragonlance movie, for example, would be a thing - story, characters, places; a D&D movie would just be a generic fantasy story with the occasional beholder and a few other D&D specific monsters showing up. You could theoretically turn a 5E adventure into a movie - say, Curse of Strahd.

Well, a Dragonlance movie would also be a D&D movie... So, a D&D movie can encompass a story as well.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Except, I would argue that Peter Jackson does not know what he did in LotR, and is objectively a terrible director that stumbled into a one huge success that ultimately depended little on what he did. Outside of LotR, what would you cite that shows he's a good director? And as a writer, almost all his memorable scenes are verbatim lifts from other peoples works.

The LotR was a tremendous success in large part despite PJ rather than because of him.

I think that is a little harsh on Peter Jackson. He had already earned an Oscar for the screenplay of Heavenly Creatures and made a number of movies before LotR which were critically well received. It's also worth noting that Lord of the Rings was considered unfilmable by many beforehand - with only the peculiar and incomplete animated movie from the 70s as any genuine previous attempt. Jackson was good at getting the whole of New Zealand enthusiastically behind the production of the film and delegated well in an epic that required a whole team of on-set directors that needed a lot of co-ordination.

The problem is that most of his work since has largely attempted to do the same approach in terms of script writing as he did in LotR. King Kong was way too long, and we all know about The Hobbit "trilogy". In the latter case, it should be noted that Jackson initially was just a producer and he had initially had Guillermo del Toro down to direct it. del Toro had wanted to do two movies, and they would have probably been standard two hour movies from my understanding. Unfortunately, due to a prolongued Union strike, del Toro dropped out and Jackson had to take on the direction himself. I think that disruption led to most of the problems, honestly.

 

[Celebrim]

I think that is a little harsh on Peter Jackson. He had already earned an Oscar for the screenplay of Heavenly Creatures...

The dialogue of the screenplay of Heavenly Creatures was just a word for word treatment of every word that had been released from the diaries of the two girls during the trial. It's the purest lift of someone else's words I've ever seen. It's the only time I've seen pure quotation not be plagiarism, and I accept that it is not plagiarism, but it doesn't prove his chops as a writer. It's the literary equivalent of Duchamp's 'Fountain', and he got away with it (just like Duchamp).

...and made a number of movies before LotR which were critically well received.

As above the normal grade b-rate gore fests.

It's also worth noting that Lord of the Rings was considered unfilmable by many beforehand - with only the peculiar and incomplete animated movie from the 70s as any genuine previous attempt. Jackson was good at getting the whole of New Zealand enthusiastically behind the production of the film and delegated well in an epic that required a whole team of on-set directors that needed a lot of co-ordination.

The really amazing thing is that he managed to get someone to trust him to film it as thin as his credentials were before LotR. I personally never considered it unfilmable. There are plenty of texts that are nearly unfilmable, but Tolkien doesn't employ any literary devices that are difficult to film (compare 'Dune', which is much harder to write a screenplay for since most of it occurs in the minds of the characters through internal monologue). I did consider that it needed a 9 hour run time, which he amazingly manage to get approved.

What he's been doing since then is taking stories that don't need long run times and trying to give them long run times, which only reinforces to me that he hadn't a clue what he was doing, he just lucked into something. Even within the LotR, there are numerous times he clearly fails to understand when less is more (such as his strange fascination with exaggerated vertical distortion, that is, so many tall and skinny things to make them 'big') or his famous demands for a bigger flail for the Witch King. He lucked into a story where that worked some of the time, but he has no idea why.

UPDATE: I don't want to get in a long debate on this. My core point is that I wouldn't tap Peter Jackson to helm any film I wanted to succeed.

And further, that I've been in this debate on the internet several times before, and have always felt subsequently vindicated. After 'Sixth Sense' came out, I got in a debate with someone that argued that MNS was the best director in Hollywood, particularly calling him out as being "so subtle". I had a good laugh and said he'd written a terrific script, gotten a great cast, and filmed a good movie, but that the directing was nothing special. I feel vindicated by later events since them. When LotR came out, I said, great cast, great music, great art direction, unbelievably good costuming, but mediocre script and terrible direction. And I feel vindicated by later events for having that opinion as well.

 

[TrippyHippy]

OK. I'll just say I disagree with you, Celebrim and leave it at that.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

No, but I want to reboot the Saturday morning cartoon using the production staff from Avatar:TLA and Zoltron as soon as they finish their Zoltron story arc.

Why do you think there were no clerics or druids in that cartoon? Seems like none of the characters ever had an opportunity to cast Cure Light Wounds or anything like that. It would also be interesting to drop those characters into the Forgotten Realms and see what happens.

 

[Celebrim]

Why do you think there were no clerics or druids in that cartoon? Seems like none of the characters ever had an opportunity to cast Cure Light Wounds or anything like that. It would also be interesting to drop those characters into the Forgotten Realms and see what happens.

For the same reason you don't discuss religion on ENWorld - portrayals of religion are going to be controversial. A quasi-pagan cleric shown performing rituals is going to offend the religious. Whereas, if they provide some degree of cover and hat tip the 'cleric' in the world as being compatible to an active real world religion, then they run the risk of offending the irreligious and even the very people they were trying to mollify because you did something about the portrayal wrong. I mean, fundamentally, the actual mistake that they made was having monsters in the game be called 'demons' because the word itself invokes religious belief and experience in a way that they seemed clueless about. It's absolutely best to sanitize a show - particularly a children's show - of any overt personalized religion.

Generally, in American culture you can make a hat tip toward what I think of as the 'unknown collective god', the 'God' in 'God bless America' or 'In God We Trust' that is sufficiently like the Christian God as to not offend the Christians, but is sufficiently impersonal and without character as to not set off the irreligious or anyone in minority religions. You can call this impersonal fantasy source of goodness "the Light" or "the Force" or whatever, and not trigger any but the most sensitive. But in a children's cartoon, you should probably avoid even that because people - whether they are religious or not - tend to be very sensitive about whether you are indoctrinating children in religious concepts.

I don't think dropping the characters into the Forgotten Realms would be particularly interesting. Indeed, I don't think the Forgotten Realms are particularly interesting at all, and rather much regret that they've become the most well known D&D fantasy world for a lot of reasons.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

For the same reason you don't discuss religion on ENWorld - portrayals of religion are going to be controversial. A quasi-pagan cleric shown performing rituals is going to offend the religious. Whereas, if they provide some degree of cover and hat tip the 'cleric' in the world as being compatible to an active real world religion, then they run the risk of offending the irreligious and even the very people they were trying to mollify because you did something about the portrayal wrong. I mean, fundamentally, the actual mistake that they made was having monsters in the game be called 'demons' because the word itself invokes religious belief and experience in a way that they seemed clueless about. It's absolutely best to sanitize a show - particularly a children's show - of any overt personalized religion.

I think Gary Gygax was willing to take a risk of offending somebody, and he basically started a whole industry of table top role playing games with his introduction of Dungeons & Dragons, I guess in the early days he had little to lose, either his game succeeded or it didn't. The people who did the cartoon were a bit more cautious than Gary Gygax, so they left clerics out of the mix. Worrying about offending somebody is onerous, it really prevents people from doing great things. Besides, if children watched a cartoon called Dungeons & Dragons, they might try playing the actual game, when they did, if they were going to be offended by clerics, they would be offended then. So avoiding clerics in the cartoon only delays the inevitable.

Generally, in American culture you can make a hat tip toward what I think of as the 'unknown collective god', the 'God' in 'God bless America' or 'In God We Trust' that is sufficiently like the Christian God as to not offend the Christians, but is sufficiently impersonal and without character as to not set off the irreligious or anyone in minority religions. You can call this impersonal fantasy source of goodness "the Light" or "the Force" or whatever, and not trigger any but the most sensitive. But in a children's cartoon, you should probably avoid even that because people - whether they are religious or not - tend to be very sensitive about whether you are indoctrinating children in religious concepts.

I don't think dropping the characters into the Forgotten Realms would be particularly interesting. Indeed, I don't think the Forgotten Realms are particularly interesting at all, and rather much regret that they've become the most well known D&D fantasy world for a lot of reasons.

They had an unusual bunch of magic items not found in the DM's Guide, I'll tell you that. I wonder what people in the Forgotten Realms would think of Eric the Ranger, with his magical bow without a string that fires an endless series of magic arrows that do a number of different things. Then of course there is Presto's Hat of Anything, and Bobby's Club of Earthquakes. The Forgotten Realms is a fairly generic fantasy setting, the introduction of unusual elements might liven things up!

 

[Celebrim]

I think Gary Gygax was willing to take a risk of offending somebody...

I don't think Gygax intended to offend anyone, and I think he was rather surprised when he did, and even more surprised at the endurance of the moral panic. And I think that one consideration that is different is I don't think Gygax ever imagined his product being sold to eight and ten and twelve year olds, or considered exactly how parents might respond to that.

The people who did the cartoon...

You mean Gygax? Wasn't his job at TSR at the time official getting the brand into new media? Surely Gygax was the primary advisor from TSR on the cartoon?

Worrying about offending somebody is onerous, it really prevents people from doing great things.

Sometimes.

Besides, if children watched a cartoon called Dungeons & Dragons, they might try playing the actual game, when they did, if they were going to be offended by clerics, they would be offended then. So avoiding clerics in the cartoon only delays the inevitable.

No, not at all. Most gaming tables do nothing of the sort. I've never yet been at a D&D gaming table in 35 years of play where the cleric engaged in actual ritual, recitation of spells, used any religious paraphernalia as props, or even to any really significant degree regularly played out the duties of being a priest of priestess. In my experience, players also are either disinterested in that or would be offended by it or more likely some combination of both. When spells are cast, they are cast very much as they are cast in The Order of the Stick - by declaration of the spell to be cast, that is to say, "Cure Serious Wounds!" or, "I cast 'Cure Serious Wounds'" And that works fine at a table and it works fine in a comic stick figure cartoon that regularly breaks the 4th wall, but I can't see that working in a cartoon. Somethings don't translate between media. You can't actually film, "The City and the City", or if you could, you'd have to use a number of really creative visual techniques. The device that Heinlein uses in "Starship Troopers", where he only reveals that the protagonist isn't white halfway through the story cant' be done in film. The playful hiding of gender in Ancilliary Justice behind ambiguous language works less well in a live action film. And so on and so forth.

The visual presentation of a cleric and how one is played at the table is very different.

They had an unusual bunch of magic items not found in the DM's Guide, I'll tell you that. I wonder what people in the Forgotten Realms would think of Eric the Ranger, with his magical bow without a string that fires an endless series of magic arrows that do a number of different things. Then of course there is Presto's Hat of Anything, and Bobby's Club of Earthquakes. The Forgotten Realms is a fairly generic fantasy setting, the introduction of unusual elements might liven things up!

Let's just say with the attitude (finally) breaking out in Hollywood, I think it would be a bad idea to associate the brand with the Forgotten Realms.