YMMV / Mazes and Monsters

---

• Accidental Aesop:
  • The storyline makes far more sense if you take the film to be one about the importance of stable families rather than the anti-D&D message which was intended. Daniel's only real home problems are the fact that his parents disapprove of his chosen career path, and in most ways he's the most normal of the group (rather questionable dress sense aside). Kate comes from a family torn apart by a divorce, which has led to her having trouble sustaining her own relationships. Jay Jay's mother seems to care more about her career than her son and frequently ignores what he wants, leading to him trying to get attention by wearing silly hats and pulling stunts like screwing up the group's campaign so they'll have to participate in his LARP; he at least considers something more drastic like suicide to pursue that aim. Finally, Robbie has an almost completely dysfunctional family, which he tries to escape by engrossing himself in Mazes & Monsters to the extent that he starts to believe he really is Pardieu (and given that he was thrown out of his last college because of his Mazes & Monsters obsession, odds are he experienced a similar though less severe problem there).
  • In his review commentary Spoony notes that it's not the game that's the problem, it's Robbie's obsession with it, raising the point that had the movie framed itself around Robbie spending all his time with it and the consequences of that, it would have been a valid lesson about obsession and spending too much time on one thing at the expense of your whole life, which would have been ahead of its time with regards to issues like game addiction/compulsion and the need for Anti Poopsocking.
  • Another Aesop is, "If you are suffering from mental instability or you see a friend suffering from it, encourage them to seek psychological help." Robbie has much-much deeper issues than the fact he's a gamer.
  • The plot could even be taken as a shot against the very anti-roleplaying movement it's supposed to be cashing in on. All of the lines explicitly against it come from the police detective who chooses to blow off all the actual clues to search the tunnels where the LARP was played and be generally useless. Meanwhile the players manage to hunt him down in New York city themselves because they concentrate on said actual clues.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: An out-of-universe one. Was the movie a Stealth Parody by people who didn't take the Moral Guardians seriously? The game was clearly researched and reflects many RL facts about college gaming life—which would almost certainly show the game was harmless. This leads into the in-universe interpretation that the police's certainty that Mazes and Monsters is somehow behind Robbie's disappearance is complete nonsense, since focusing on that angle brings them no closer to actually solving the case.
• Broken Aesop: The film tries to portray role-playing games as the cause of psychological problems and shows that the three students who stopped playing are completely happy now that they refuse to play anymore. This is ruined both by the evidence at the start of the film that they were already having problems at home that had nothing to do with their choice of entertainment. On top of that, in spite of their home problems, all of them had large, supportive networks of friends if Jay Jay's social circle is anything to go by. Finally, Robbie is still suffering from mental problems at the end of the film despite not playing the game anymore.
• Bile Fascination: The film maintains a strong cult status because of how many gamers love to bash it.
• Faux Symbolism: A shot of Robbie standing next to a mirror is clearly framed to try and show two sides of him...but just comes off as extremely clumsy.
• Fridge Logic:
  • When Kate and Robbie break up after Robbie, thinking he is Pardieu, states he can no longer have intimate contact with her (because he's a priest, of course), Kate exclaims that it's "Just like last time!" As this review posits, does this mean Kate has a history of dating guys that suddenly turn into priests that must cease having sex with her?
  • JJ's mom has a habit of constantly redecorating his room without telling him. This amount of remodeling would be insanely expensive if it happens as often as he implies - she replaces all of the furniture, flooring, wallpaper, and paint every single time. Given that he hates it, the character quirk is completely nonsensical.
  • Given how deep Robbie's delusion is, that he mistakes a subway train for a dragon, how did he get to New York? While the setting of the film isn't clear, Robbie at least lives outside the boundaries of Manhattan. How did he get there without using some sort of modern transportation?
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Daniel's parents keep trying to force him into a computer science degree at MIT, which he eventually goes for at the end of the film, because they believe he'll be able to make more money this way than by making games. Thanks to the flood of comp-sci degrees at the time and the subsequent trend to outsourcing software development overseas, this degree has actually become relatively worthless for a period of time...except in the gaming industry.
  • When Jay Jay has his character jump into the spike-filled pit and gets himself killed, the stunned DM replies "it's a trap."
  • It's hard not to laugh at the fact that Rona Jaffe, the author of the original book, shares a surname with a famous D&D player involved with a massively successful cornerstone of modern tabletop gaming culture.
• Memetic Mutation: "Mazes and Monsters is a far-out game."
• Narm: Not shockingly, most of it from Tom Hanks.
  • "I can't! I'm all out of spell points!"
  • The entire scene where he breaks down on the phone while talking to Kate after stabbing someone.
    • To quote Spoony: "WARNING: the following clip will completely ruin your ability to enjoy any Tom Hanks movie you'll ever see again."
  • "Jay Jay, what am I doing?!"
  • "Beware the sacrilege!"
  • After the above "Mazes and Monsters is a far-out game" line from the detective, they defend "it's all imagination!" The detective just stares at them for a moment before rhetorically asking "is it?"
• Misaimed Fandom: The only people who watch the movie today are likely to be gamers.
• So Bad, It's Good: Despite the anti-gaming slant, most gamers have watched this film and howled with laughter at it. Given the movie portrays most of the gamers are perfectly normal, many people believe it's a Stealth Parody.
• Special Effects Failure: The "Gorvil" Robbie keeps hallucinating is a spectacularly bad rubber suit.
  • Honestly, you'd see better costumes in the original Star Trek and Power Rangers.
• Tear Jerker: As ridiculous as this movie is one can't help feel bad for Robbie during his sudden relapse to sanity. Especially after he realized he may or may not have really killed someone.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Inevitable given that New York City is relevant to so much of the film. In addition to the opening of the film driving right past one of the former Helmsley hotels that dominated the city (the hotel that bore her name is now a Trump hotel), a major plot point revolves around the Twin Towers. The film's perception of games and computers is also hopelessly rooted in the early 80s (especially the idea that computer games don't exist).

---