A few caveats first:
1. I run a 5th Edition D&D game currently. Have been for the last 3 years and we're probably going to finish our campaign this year. Prior to that, one of our current players acted as our DM and ran a shorter campaign for about a year. We started offline in my basement, then when the pandemic hit, took our game online (started with Roll20, and transitioned to Fantasy Grounds Unity). I can talk your ear off about running 5e, as well as running it on those two virtual tabletops, if you care.
2. Although I didn't play earlier editions (other than as CRPGs, of which I've played and re-played many), I have owned copies of the Moldvay/Cook Basic books (B/X), and the 1e AD&D core books since about 1988. I also owned the 2e books back when they were new (gave them to my cousin, then re-bough copies a few years ago). I've read this stuff plenty and am very familiar with the older editions.
3. I collect old RPG stuff and have a pretty extensive collection of D&D material (as well as Star Wars RPGs, Babylon 5, Firefly, Middle Earth Roleplaying, Star Frontiers, Pathfinder, etc., etc., etc.). While I haven't read everything (or even most of it) that I own cover-to-cover, I'm familiar with all of it to a greater or lesser degree. I dig RPGs. I'm hoping to run more than just D&D for my table at some point, too.
All of this is to establish my own perspective on the film.
So, that said...
I really enjoyed it! To me, it felt like watching an actually entertaining version of that conversation people in the hobby have when they wanna tell you about their campaign. To them, the campaign is awesome, epic, has such fun and cool moments, has these really funny moments, too, etc., etc. Trouble is, most people aren't especially good storytellers, and it's led to a sort of hobby-wide trope about how nobody wants to hear about your campaign. Well, this film seemed to me like watching that story, but actually handled well.
The film is generally pretty lighthearted and, well, lightweight. There are stakes, of course, but partially because it feels like you're watching someone's story about their campaign, there's never any sense of "Will the bad guys win? Will our heroes survive?" Of course they will. That's never really in doubt (although individual character deaths are always possible). It's got some heart to it as well, but it's not a great drama for the ages -- because it isn't supposed to be.
Overall, I thought it was
If the goal of enforced diversity is to have characters more relatable does that mean this movie is meant to appeal to emasculated men?
Within the D&D community, and the tabletop RPG community on a larger scale, none of this is new. Paizo publishing (The guys who do Pathfinder) have been creating inclusive adventures and rulebook artwork for about 20 years now. Wizards of the Coast -- the company that owns the rights to D&D and makes the current game -- has been very up front about inclusivity in their gaming.
Moreover, D&D itself has exploded in popularity with the combination of several factors (the release of 5th edition, the star of Stranger Things, and the rise of actual play podcasts/streaming shows like Critical Role), all of which massively popularized the game and brought it to
much wider audiences than RPGs had enjoyed in decades past. The hobby as a whole has significantly broadened, and is being enjoyed by a wider range of players, and as a result the people who make the game are very, very careful to put diversity front and center. You can take issue with that, but as regards to the film, it's basically depicting exactly what the game is now and has been for a while.
There's also no "emasculation," but I'll get to that.
I finally watched it and D&D was huge when i was a kid...IDK...I didn't really like the movie at all. My wife watched it with me and i was sure she would hate it but...she actually liked it. The reason it didn't resonate with me is because they were just spitting off one liners and cheap laughs way too much where it felt more like a Monty Python movie, which is why my wife liked it. Yeah, it was way too obvious to me that the men were wimps in this movie while the women were dominant. Growing up, even as a kid, D&D had a more serious tone as i remember which is probably why they tried to lighten it up some. I might be wrong, just an observation. My favorite part of the movie was the Easter Egg callbacks to the animated characters because i really liked that cartoon. The fact that they made toys for this movie was somewhat laughable. All i can picture is kids in their bedrooms playing video games while their parents break out the new figures and tell jokes for the remainder of the night because i can't imagine any kids playing with them at all.
So, first, D&D when you were a kid was not "more serious." It may have seemed that way to you
as a kid, and some
tables might have run in a more serious tone, but the actual playing of D&D has always included a LOT of "Monty-Python-Esque" stuff. People were riffing on The Holy Grail back in the 70s and 80s.
Now, it's true that D&D back in the earlier editions was a more
lethal game, which I could see leading to certain tables running things more seriously, but even the old school adventures didn't take themselves all that seriously. Gary Gygax's home campaign was set on a planet called "Oerth" (which he pronounced kinda like Bugs Bunny saying "Earth"). A lot of characters in his home game were just he and his friends' names written backwards. Drawmij, a famous wizard, is Jim Ward, a designer for TSR (the company that originally created D&D). Gary had a wizard named Xagyg. Orcs originally had pig faces. Like, basically they looked like green versions of the pig Muppets that show up for the "In the Navy" sketch on the old Muppet Show.
The pre-written adventures could be sort of silly or at least not especially serious. I mean, there were plenty that were super cool, but if you look at them now, it seems laughable to take them especially seriously.
All in all, I think this film accurately reflects the tone of a D&D
game, and was clearly made by people who are huge fans of the game and at least past players/DMs (if not current players/DMs). But I can also see how it'd be jarring if you're expecting a serious fantasy film set in the world of D&D.
I liked it. Though, if felt a little sterile in places where they had huge opportunities to create great drama. Some things just felt too easy. But maybe that's true to the game... where... people flip in a moment, because they are players and not really the characters in that exact moment, so they have clear oversight and not chaotic in the moment. I don't know. There were just a few places towards the end, where they could have played things a lot more dramatic and emotional instead of just... okay... we are doing THIS now, jolly-ho.
Yeah, I agree with the general sense of "It felt too easy" or "stuff just kind of wrapped up a little too tidily." But I think that's also true in games in many cases. There's something inherently a little silly if you are even a teensy bit self-conscious about what is essentially just playing pretend, but with a bunch of rules tacked on.
The movie also maintains a pretty brisk pace, and I agree that certain moments aren't really given time to land too hard...but I think that's also by design.
It's worth remembering a few other things (which many here may not be aware of). First, this film was made with close cooperation from Wizards of the Coast. It's a cross-promotional opportunity for them, as well. So, I can see where they want to hit the absolute broadest audience possible, and that means probably erring on the side of keeping things kinda lightweight.
Second, Wizards of the Coast is going to be coming out with a new edition (6e) in the next year or two. They're working on it now as a kind of public beta test. BUT, the first steps in that process were
an absolute disaster. Without getting too far into the weeds, WOTC tried to change some of the legal terms around how players and other content creators are allowed to make certain products that use the core rules of D&D to run other kinds of games. These legal terms have existed since the early 2000s, and while they were never what I as an attorney would call a model of clarity, they were widely accepted and there'd been common practice surrounding them for the last 20ish years. A little while before the film released, WOTC tried to massively alter that stuff, and it
really pissed off a lot of people, both players and content creators alike. (If you want a more in-depth examination of this, I'm happy to explain, but it'll get into copyrights and licenses and such.) Anyway, long story short, this film also acts as a kind of PR move at a critical time for WOTC when they want to encourage people to try the latest edition of the game, which will be 6e in relatively short order. So, again, the goal is "Hit as big an audience target as possible,"
especially adolescent kids around 11-14 who are the prime target to get people interested in the game.
I think with those factors in mind, the kind of lightweight nature of the film make sense. Grownups aren't the primary target; adolescents and teens are.
--EDIT--
Oh, right. I forgot to get into the "emasculation" thing. Bottom line, nobody is emasculated in this film UNLESS what you want is a Conan film. Everyone is basically behaving exactly how you'd expect their character class to behave in the game. If seeing women be physically stronger and more ferocious warriors than men = emasculating, well, ok, yeah, I guess it is. But (1) get over it, and (2) especially within the context of "THIS IS A MOVIE BASED ON A GAME," the context in which it happens makes perfect sense within that game world. You can play a female character of any species and any character class (i.e., job, basically). So, there are female barbarians, fighters, paladins, warlocks, rangers, sorcerers, whatever. They can be half-orcs or elves or humans or half-giants or gnomes or whatever. It's all part of the game. Hell, it always has been. While old Basic D&D and 1e AD&D had strength scores modified by sex, by the publication of 2nd edition in 1989, that was dropped, and species-based ability score penalties have been gradually being phased out (in much later editions, notions of racial essentialism are likewise phased out, with the exception of things like being able to see in the dark). But again, all part of the game.
Bottom line: the Bard isn't going to be the big ass-kicker in your party, but the Barbarian is. If the Barbarian is a woman, ok, you've got a female ass-kicker. Nobody who actually plays the game bats an eye at this, because it's all based on party composition by role, rather than by sex.