Eh, ragon

Went to see Eragon this past weekend, with two of the boys, both of whom had read the book and liked it.  The 14 year old was bored, the 12-year-old thought it was cool.   I found it a compendium of cliches, in setting, characters, plot and art direction, without a single witty line of dialogue, or interesting bit of character business, or unforseen plot twist to spark a moment of interest and make the movie memorable.  Cool-looking dragon, though. 

I wondered who was more responsible for this mess, the original teen novelist, or the screenwriter, so I asked my sons how the book differred from the movie.  All I got was "The book wasn't boring."  I had the distinct sense that much streamlining had gone on, as happens with the Harry Potter movies, when every scene that does not directly advance the plot gets tossed by the wayside.  When that happens, characterization and setting can get left behind.  It seemed to me that several characters who got short shrift in the movie probably had large parts in the book, like the character Murtagh, who probably was meant to be the Han Solo to Eragon's Luke Skywalker.

When we got home from the movies, I found a copy of the book Eldest, which is the sequel to Eragon.  To my delight, the first five pages of Eldest recap the first book, so I didn't have to read the whole damn thing to see where the screenwriter went wrong.  The book Eragon is ridden with all the tiresome sword & sorcery cliches, but the storyline is much more emotionally complex.  The book has elves, which were only mentioned in passing in the movie.  Normally, I think any movie is better without elves, but when a major character is an elf, and that elfness is central to who this character is and how she acts in the story, well, you need to make her an elf.   The movie's storyline has been compared to Star Wars, but the synopsis make it clear that the screenwriters deliberately made certain incidents in the book much more like Star Wars, like when Eragon invades the Death Star (sorry, Castle) to rescue the princess (sorry, elf ...er, dragon girl... uh, whatever she was supposed to be).  To sum up - the filmmakers wanted to make a family friendly epic like Narnia or Harry Potter, but lacked the will to make a faithful movie or the talent to make the right changes to the material.  What a waste.

And what the hell was Joss Stone doing in this?  She has one scene as a fortune teller, and has no luck with the script's pompous mock-medieval dialogue.  To be fair, nobody else does either, except Jeremy Irons. But from what I've seen, she should stick to singing.