Review of The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf (2021) by Roastboeuf — 26 Aug 2021

Although visually stunning, the technical brilliance of Kwang Il Han and his team cannot quite make up for the lack of character in this bland Americanization of the beloved source material.

Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Beau DeMayo work to strip away all traces of the Polish and Slavic folklore and mythology that were so brilliantly researched and intricately brought to life to captivate the minds and hearts of the millions who fell in love with the Witcher books and video games.

What is left are characters that are 2 dimensional in more than just their artistic style, goodies and baddies with haughty RP accents and generic poorly thought out backstories in a seemingly random somehow multi cultural medieval setting displaying none of the well thought out world building that lays the groundwork for the immersive stories of the books and the games.

The "Story" itself also goes to several lengths to both ignore the lore of the Witcher universe and in several cases outright break it, delivering a cheap deus ex machina to provide a bad guy antagonist, followed by a rallying of all the good people to fight for a good cause just like the ill received ending of Star Wars The last Jedi.

A good feat of animation this is, however Vessimir this is not, and The Witcher this is not, just an animated Marvel film about a generic monster hunter with some shameless stabs at further milking the IP of The Witcher.