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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5091234" data-attributes="member: 58197">Mmm... Earthsea... well, I'd love to see a Wizard of Earthsea movie that hewed true to the spirit (if not necessarily the letter) of the original, but translating it to the screen would be tough, and selling it to Hollywood tougher still.(spoilers follow)[sblock]The ending especially. The theme of the novel is that Ged can only get out of his dilemma by acknowledging his shadow as a part of himself. It embodies his own capacity for evil, which he can neither run away from nor destroy; only by accepting it can he learn to deal with it. It's a subtle thing and very challenging to convey on screen, and the studio execs would be pushing hard for a standard-issue good-triumphs-over-evil final battle.[/sblock]Also, being faithful to Ursula LeGuin's vision would require casting almost entirely non-white actors (Ged and most of the people of Earthsea look like Native Americans, Vetch and a few others are black, only the Kargs are white), and outside of the action and comedy genres, that tends to go over like a lead balloon in Hollywood....You know, I think this really ought to be an indie movie. Don't know if the special effects fall within the reach of an indie budget, though.Still, it wouldn't need as much as a traditional fantasy epic; the only scenes requiring major CGI would be the showdown with the dragon and the escape from the Court of the Terrenon. And you'd probably have to cut out at least one of those anyway, for length. The battle with the Kargish barbarians at the start is conveniently shrouded in fog, and everything else is on a fairly personal scale.</blockquote>

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