Grymar said:
I know this came out a few years ago, but I just watched it last week and it wasn't bad.
I know that to make a book into a movie a lot of material has to be cut, but I kept thinking while watching it that there were entire scenes were they tried to make up for huge leaps in time or in the book. Beyond that, though, it was fairly interesting.
Kristen Kruek continues to look cute while being completely boring, a skill she mastered on Smallville. Danny Glover cashed a pay check, but looked good while doing it. The guy who played Ged, was he also Iceman on the X-men movies? He was ok, but had no chemistry with anyone else.
How does it compare to the books? Are the books worth reading?
About 10%-15% of the miniseries is loosely based on the books (there are three in the original trilogy
A Wizard of Earthsea,
The Tombs of Atuan, and
The Farthest Shore, and then some
much later written books in the series,
Tehanu and
The Other Wind as well as some short stories found in
The Wind's Twelve Quarters and
Tales from Earthsea). Really, as far as being a translation of the story in the books to the screen, the miniseries is a hideous misrepresentation.
The material concerning Ged and the Gebbeth is about 50% from the book, although the resolution is entirely different in the books, and actually makes some sense. Ogion is in the books, and he is Ged's teacher. The rest of this storyline is entirely made up for the miniseries. The crappy parts are the parts
not drawn from the books.
The priestesses of the Tombs of Atuan do appear in the books, but their storyline is so altered as to be entirely unrecognizable. For example, in the books, Tenar is the chosen priestess
of the nameless ones - she is devoted to their worship. The priestesses revere them, rather than guarding against them. I'd say that about 5% of this storyline comes from the books - mostly the names of the characters and the idea of a group of priestesses living in the desert; everything else was made up for the miniseries.
The "conquering king Tygath" storyline is entirely made up. The character doesn't appear in the books. The Khargad appear once in "war" mode in the books - as pirates; and they lose. The whole crap about "learning the secret to immortality" alludes to an entirely different storyline in the books, and the version in the miniseries makes no sense: Tygath's lame plan to get the secret really seems to have been standing there and yelling at the released nameless ones. None of this storyline bears enough resemblance anything from the books to call it anything other than being made from whole cloth.
So, out of three main storylines, one is about half drawn from the books, and the rest are pretty much just made up from whole cloth. There are other quibbles too - in the books Tenar and the other natives of the Khargad islands should be white, but Ged, Vetch, and everyone else living outside of that area should be dark skinned: Ged is described in a way that makes me think of him as looking like someone from the Indian subcontinent, Vetch is probably best described as black and so on. So the casting diverges significantly from how the characters appear in the books (which really got LeGuin's goat).
A lot of details were also drastically changed - in the books Roke is magically protected, and almost impossible to invade (due to the Roke Wind). Ged's use name is Sparrowhawk, his secret name is Ged (I still can't figure out why they reversed that). The Archmage is not killed,or presumed killed by a barbarian - he dies from exhausting his energy saving a pupil's life. The mages who leave Roke are much better trained than they appear to be in the miniseries. In his encounter with Yevaud, Ged does more than just guess the dragon's name, and uses his power over it for something much more altruistic. And on and on.
The miniseries is a barely passable generic fantasy. It is
not Earthsea. The pile of steaming crap that it could have been was saved (somewhat) by the introduction of the handful of Earthsea elements, but all of the "new" stuff was painfully bad and poorly thought out. Given how little of it is drawn from the books, calling the miniseries "Earthsea" is a travesty, on the scale of someone making a movie out of
Rendezvous with Rama but leaving out the giant alien spacecraft, or having the ship, but having the aliens show up and explain who they are, and why they sent the ship. Or making
Lord of the Rings and having Gandalf take the ring, kick Sauron's hind end in an epic wizard duel, and then rule Middle-Earth forevermore as a benevolent wizard king.
Read the books. They are much, much,
much better than the miniseries.
