The Quest: L'impresa dei Paladini

This show is about teens from modern times being "transported" to a medieval reality show. Its basically LARPing there is zero chance of pulling off the concept without being corny.

If you can make it past that its a fun watch. The actors do a decent job. The costuming and creature makeup is excellent. The world building is so so, but immersive enough.

The weakest part is the reality show aspect. The format doesn't give much room for the participants to show personalities or interact in a non-forced way. They mostly sit around listening to the characters speak and then run from challenge to challenge. Sometimes they say, "Ewww bugs" or "wow we did good on that challenge." That's the extent of it.

The challenges they face are pretty vanilla and low stakes. Although its really a kids show so don't expect things to get too scary or the storyline to be anything special.

Again, mindless fun and a decent attempt by Disney at this concept.

Low budget where all the money went into costumes.

Acting is really awful, specially the teen heroes. Excuse me, Paladins. They are unproven yet.

As others said, I haver seen high school plays that were much much better.

Plot is thin as the hope of a snowball in hell.

There is almost no world building. We know nothing about the 8 teens that were summoned to boring world. At the end of episode 1 we still do not anything. There is no character building.

And it is boring. Eye glazing boring.

I am a geek who love all things fantasy. This ain't it.

In the history of mankind there have been several epic falls from grace: Lucifer's Fall, Highlander 2, Lost Boys 2 & 3. Eclipsing even the Morning Star, burned into humanities psyche is The Quest 2022.

As all of you most certainly know The Quest 2014 was an amazing fantasy competition that combined LARPing with reality TV. The 2022 Disney+ reboot was as tragic as the Two Corey's last film Lost Boys: The Thirst and a non-sequitur on par with Highlander 2.

A few details: Changing the show from a LARP competition among Survioresque candidates, to entitled young adults spouting aphorisms. The challenges that once were actually challenging and interesting, became trivial and even worse entirely faked. Character development (good or bad, influenced or not) which is a backbone of competition and reality stories was replaced by middle school acting with a bad script.

In short, I've seen it and I curse my eyes. Don't follow my path.

As a fan of the first hour (The Quest 2014 blew me away!), I can't help to compare the old and the new. I'll be honest, as soon as the soundtrack set in, and I realised they had gotten the same composers from 2014 back, I was hooked, and a second later, I was fully emersed in Everealm.

Yes, the show has its flaws, that was to be expected.

Filming with underaged teenagers makes some things more difficult in general with limited filming hours per day and such. Some of the after-challenge-talks among the Paladins came across kind of staged and clumsy although I'm sure they were authentic. As soon as a scripted character was present and asked them questions, this awkward atmosphere was gone, so maybe to that more next season?

The scripted characters sometimes - very rarely though - acted incomprehensively, especially the castle's guards and also Prince Cederic. He drove me nuts with his actions.

Some of the challenges were well thought through, others were hard to grasp for the audience and the Paladins alike, and the fact that there was no elimination this time (Thank the Fates!) often made it hard to understand how the winner was chosen.

While most of the props and costumes were top notch (I SO appreciated that the royals wore different costumes every day as royals would.), a few props and costumes looked super cheap like bad LARP equipment, and the same goes for the creatures, which is very strange because some were SOOO lifelike and others looked like unconvincing Power Rangers villains. It was almost as if two different teams had worked on the make-up, props, and costume department.

Apart from these points of criticism, there's only good things to say.

The writers filled the story with so much lore and history, so much character development. The characters have depths, they have pasts, there is no black and white. The story starts off much darker and with an imminently menacing atmosphere. All actors were 100% convincing, I suffered with them, I cheered with them. The special effects (I know how difficult CGI fire is!) were fantastic, the music combined the old Quest soundtrack and also had new beautiful themes. The Paladins were a fantastic team, each of them super likeable, and they were 100% immersed in this world - as was I.

I can't wait to return to Castle Saenctum next season!

Continue the Quest.

The bad reviews are likely grown adults. I could see this as a positive show for young children. Not scary, positive messaging (team work, wisdom, perseverance). Lots of fun makeup and corny characters.