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I really like fantasy movies but I think I'm gonna pass on this one based on the reviews. I'll wait for it on HBO or whatever. Even if the reviews were somewhere in the middle, I'd give it a shot. Oh well, there goes the streak of entertaining December fantasy movies.
I really like fantasy movies but I think I'm gonna pass on this one based on the reviews. I'll wait for it on HBO or whatever. Even if the reviews were somewhere in the middle, I'd give it a shot. Oh well, there goes the streak of entertaining December fantasy movies.
My girlfriend loved the book, she even got me a copy of it for my birthday so I'd read it. So we went out and saw it today at the first showing at a local theater. . .
They took a decent fantasy novel and turned it into a run-of-the-mill fantasy movie. Far better than the really cruddy fantasy movies, but far worse than the novel.
The movie feels like a fantasy version of the basic plot of Star Wars, which while a number of parallels to the general "heroic journey" plot are in the novel, is a lot less screamingly obvious. It's almost like they want the movie to be cliche so it will be like other successful movies, instead of like the book.
A lot was cut out of the movie from the original book, including some significant characters and plot developments, and a lot of scenes that set the mood and feel as something other than generic cliche fantasy were cut. If you disliked the movie as cliche and shallow, but like fantasy in general, try the novel (which is still a little cliche, but far better and more entertaining).
Now, in many ways I do see this as Jeremy Irons atoning for being in the Dungeons and Dragons movie, since his acting, dialogue, and general performance as Brom was far, far better than his appearance in the D&D stinker. Honestly, Jeremy Irons's acting was probably the high point of the movie. John Malkovich did a good showing too as the evil king.
Now that's a misinformed opinion if I ever saw one. Despite what you may think, critics are not there to bash a movie you expect to like. No, they are there to offer commentary on whether a movie is worth the viewers time or not. And I don't know whose reviews you read, but a lot of reviewers offer some intelligent and entertaining insights in their write ups. To dismiss them as "childish drivel" is doing them a disservice.
Of course the critics (even the ones I like) are not right all the time. But more often than not, their assesment of a film is dead on.
Now that's a misinformed opinion if I ever saw one. Despite what you may think, critics are not there to bash a movie you expect to like. No, they are there to offer commentary on whether a movie is worth the viewers time or not. And I don't know whose reviews you read, but a lot of reviewers offer some intelligent and entertaining insights in their write ups. To dismiss them as "childish drivel" is doing them a disservice.
Of course the critics (even the ones I like) are not right all the time. But more often than not, their assesment of a film is dead on.
My problem is I rarely agree with critics. Sounds like I will agree with this one though. At least now I can read the books, knowing the movie is going to be lame whether I have read them or not.
Find a critic you're in synch with -- it's the age of the Internet, so most of them have substantial backlogs of movie reviews easily available -- and you're golden.
For me, Peter Travers at Rolling Stone matches up with my opinion 95+ percent of the time, so I just glance at what he thinks of a movie, whereas Ebert & Roeper are usually hit or miss for me, and that idiot at the LA Times, Kenneth Turan, is almost 100 percent turned around from my tastes.
And no, critics aren't there to bash films. If you had to watch 10 or 20 times as many movies as you watch in theaters or on DVD a year, whether or not you wanted to see them, you'd grow pretty intolerant of crap films as well. I did theater reviews for a newspaper for several years, and I eventually would get furious when a director would waste my time with garbage.
If you feel like everything you like the critics hate, just pride yourself on being an iconoclast. Or cheerfully admit to liking bad movies (I think "Barb Wire" is a hoot, myself).
Hmmmm, so it's better than Krull, I enjoyed Krull*, ergo, I may enjoy this.
*Not saying Krull is a work of timeless classic nature. But isn't that a problem nowadays? We keep raising the bar. As long as I can be entertained by it...anything else is a bonus.
Just got back from seeing it. I have not read the book(s) nor even knew anything more than the title when I walked in.
A bad performance in the lead role - wooden. It's not all the actors fault as the scripting was obviously HEAVILY hacked from the first scenes. I could just FEEL the fact that there were massive amounts of material that was being cut and the script utterly failed to properly move the material from novel to screenplay format and retain any special cachet it might have had.
It LOOKED allright but there was absolutely no sense of PLACE, of a living, breathing fantasy world. References were made to other races and places but they were strictly throwaway. They were tossed out at us without preamble and then left to hang embarrasingly alone in the air without any follow-up exposition to justify their presence. We saw a map several times but it meant NOTHING. Reference was made to people "over there" but no indication where HERE was represented on the map. No names could be read. No identification of notable landmarks or terrain features. No mention is ever made of direction of travel except, "we need to go there," or, "that's in the wrong direction." Not North, South, etc. If Eragon's hometown had a name I would SWEAR it was never mentioned. It was all, "we need to found a route through THESE hills," when it should have been, "The Coffee Hills are now full of people looking for us - we'll have to find another route. The land being portrayed on screen was quite empty of people for being a Luke Skywalker story about joining up with the last of the Rebellion in their dead-end stronghold. We are similarly given no adequate sense of the amount of passing time. Is it days? Weeks? How long ARE they travellng? How far is it REALLY to get where they're going? How is it that opposition forms AHEAD of their arrival?
We are given no reason whatsoever to care about the plight of the hero because - the hero really has no adequate plight...
Begin spoiler text
Two lads in the village are pressed into the army of the "Evil" oppressive king. Eragons half-brother leaves the village to avoid a similar fate. A girl is taken captive by forces of the king and her guards(?) killed as she tries to keep the "rock" she stole away from the king - an encounter utterly unseen and unknown by Eragon. That's it. That's the great shroud of evil against which Eragon is destined to fight. Okay, that's not pleasant, but it's hardly a good sample of getting the audience to identify with the hero. So then Eragon gets his dragon and his uncle is killed - OFF SCREEN - while the sinister agents of the king try to find and kill Eragon. These plot points are presented with all the interest and panache of a paperweight. It does not improve as the movie progresses, not the least reason for which is that we later get people stating that they have heard rumors of a new dragonrider - yet WE never see anyone who witnesses anything that might really lead to that rumor (certainly not to the point where such rumors PRECEDE his arrival at any given place.) Eragon's not saying anything. The one or two individuals he travels with aren't exactly shouting "DRAGON RIDER APPROACHING!" as they move along. And it's made clear that the king and his minions don't want word to get around. So how does anyone "hear rumors" of a new dragonrider?
End spoiler text
CGI is adequate with few exceptions. A few adequate fights, but never anything that would have anyone but a 7-year-old feeling any kind of dramatic tension. Indeed the whole movie, the entire screenplay lacks dramatic tension. Coming out of it it felt like it was a 2-hour piece of introduction and expostion that you might get at the outset of a 6-episode mini-series. Like something you kind of acknowledge that you have to sit through at the start to appreciate any of the good stuff later on - except you know that that was IT. It's over. In a couple years there may be a sequel. You might want to see it but it won't be because THIS movie has instilled any such desire.
Those that I attended the movie with (ranging in age from single-digits to 30's) had actually read the book together with enthusiasm in the two weeks prior to the films release came out. They universally said how disappointed they were, how so many locations and events that would have been of more interest had been left out, and those that were included had been heavily - and seemingly pointlessly revised. I asked, "So it had nothing but NAMES in common with the book?" to which the reply was, "No, not even that." I don't know how accurate those sentiments might be - but I could sense VOLUMES of omission of plot and story throughout the movie without having known a thing about the actual plot, characters, and story. We got home and watched a few minutes of Return of the King playing on TBS. Naturally the conversation instantly turned to how it was an example of how to do this sort of thing RIGHT. Even Professor T. got his worked HACKED in places to make it into a proper film format, but what we just left at the theater... ?
Now I did get some interest and entertainment out of it. Despite it's clear failures it wasn't a total waste of time. More to the point of the OP it wasn't the EMBARRASSMENT to the genre that [a certain movie which shall remain nameless] was. Jeremy Irons actually gives a decent performance here and to his credit his part (like all the parts in this one) was nearly as devoid of written character as... that other movie. So it's not so much that there's anything really BAD to say about it (aside from terrible screenplay & adaptation) as that there's nothing at all to genuinely recommend it.
