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Eragon
 | Eragon Stefen Fangmeier — DVD / VHS Rating: |
What can we learn from Eragon, the recent film adaptation of wunderkind Christopher Paolini's YA fantasy novel? First and foremost, we can learn just how important writing is to a movie (even if Hollywood would like to think otherwise). I haven't read any of Paolini's novels, so I can't judge this film on its merits as an adaptation, but I assume that the plot is at least along similar lines as the novel. Of course, we've got a 500-page novel cut down to under 104 minutes. It's hard to tell much of any story in that time, much less a story that's supposed to be epic (The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was 143 minutes and the original book was about 1/3 the length of Eragon). How would we describe this plot? Two words: derivative and predictable. Still, films have survived and flourished with mediocre plots before; too bad the dialogue and storytelling don't come to the rescue, because they don't. Rookie director Stefen Fangmeier doesn't help the cause any: it looks like a good cast on paper, but you wouldn't know it from this movie.
The special effects were good, which is no surprise--Fangmeier started as a special effects man and he's using the special effects people behind Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and also the folks over at Skywalker Ranch, and the landscapes were beautiful--I want to vacation in western Europe now. The story wasn't completely unengaging, but it was nothing to write home about either, unless you're writing to tell Mom not to bother. I won't recap the story here because you can read the synopsis on any review--anyway, after I've panned it, why would you care what the story is? To be fair, the target audience is probably children. Of course, if they've read the book they probably won't be satisfied by this pared down version and if they haven't read the book they may very well not be that interested, but I suppose it's a decent kids' film: adventurous but not too gory, happy ending and maybe the kids won't be able to predict how it gets there as easily as the adults will.