Eragon
What a huge disappointment. The twins and I all read the book, discussed at great length the parallels to Star Wars and LOTR (along with some Dragonriders of Pern, which the boys haven't read yet), and eagerly awaited what we thought would be a great movie. The pre-release reviews were promising - great effects, yada, yada. The effects were good - especially the flying sequences, but nothing we haven't seen before. The rest - pure crap.
The twins devoured the book and absolutely loved it. I was okay with the book, admiring the fact that it had been written by a teen and appreciating the concept while recognizing too easily the characters and some of the scenes. Using universal literary themes and formulas is one thing - blatantly "borrowing" the details is another. Still, I thought it held promise for a decent fantasy movie.
Where the book succeeded with creating characters that were full and detailed (albiet, familiar), the movie completely failed. Several of the characters that appeared in the book were either flat and undeveloped (Murtagh) in the movie, or not even there (dwarf king). Having read the book, I recognized some characters like Orik, who didn't even get called by name in the movie. I'm not one of the freaks that thinks that every detail from a book should be in the movie. I do think that this movie (clocking in at 1:40), cut itself short by having flat characters with no back story.
The twins devoured the book and absolutely loved it. I was okay with the book, admiring the fact that it had been written by a teen and appreciating the concept while recognizing too easily the characters and some of the scenes. Using universal literary themes and formulas is one thing - blatantly "borrowing" the details is another. Still, I thought it held promise for a decent fantasy movie.
Where the book succeeded with creating characters that were full and detailed (albiet, familiar), the movie completely failed. Several of the characters that appeared in the book were either flat and undeveloped (Murtagh) in the movie, or not even there (dwarf king). Having read the book, I recognized some characters like Orik, who didn't even get called by name in the movie. I'm not one of the freaks that thinks that every detail from a book should be in the movie. I do think that this movie (clocking in at 1:40), cut itself short by having flat characters with no back story.
1 Comments:
I'm sure I'll end up watching this movie at work, since all of my students loved the book. I agree that the book is very similar to many other fantasy novels. I also saw a lot of parallels to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It's too bad they couldn't make it into a worthy movie.
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