Review of Mazes and Monsters (1982) by Edith N — 19 Jun 2007

Oh, boy. This was all kinds of not good. I mean, yes. Young (just barely post-[i]Bosom Buddies[/i]) Tom Hanks, and Wendy Crewson, who's done a few things with Paul Gross. But really, if you're looking for more quality than that, I suggest you start by watching something else.

As an indictment of what, I suppose, must be called "M&M" in this, it fails as well. I mean, let's look at this seriously. Yes. Yes, indeed, Tom Hanks's Robbie goes nuts and really believes he's the cleric he plays in the game--and yes, indeed, he really does just about throw himself off the top of the World Trade Center in the apparent belief that he can fly because he's got a spell that would let him fly. (Clearly, the makers of the movie have [i]no[/i] idea how high-level a flying spell would be, even assuming a cleric could do one at all, which I doubt.) But does the movie show that this is the game's fault?

Not so far as I'm concerned. Now, granted, I'm biased--I'm a gamer myself, after all, albeit a bit of a dilettante at it--but I think the movie pretty clearly shows us that he's mentally ill and has parents who don't know how to deal with it. His brother apparently up and ran away from [i]his own birthday party[/i] some years prior to our story, and his parents don't seem to care. Granted, we don't see much of them to care or not care, but still!

We get a very bad perception of parents from this movie. One boy has only a mother, and one who doesn't bother [i]trying[/i] to understand him. One has parents who don't care what he does. (I imagine them kicking themselves when they see how much a good video game designer could make.) One has parents that seem to believe that all they need to do to show concern is tell him not to roleplay. And one . . . well, I assume she [i]has[/i] parents! (No, that's not fair; her mother's in the first ten minutes and mentions she's divorced from the girl's father.).

So I would say that the movie brings up quite a few issues that are far more likely than Live Action Role-Playing (LARPing) to bring on serious mental health crises. We're just supposed to ignore those, I guess.