Sylver Dragon's Journal: Movie Review: Eragon

I'll start off by saying that I have read and liked the book. While it followed many of the fantasy stereotypes it was overall well written and a good read. Since the movie is supposed to be a retelling of the book, I'll compare the two from time to time.

The Good: The dragon looked really good. Obviously the dragon is done with computer graphics, but looking at it you can hardly tell. It's movements are very fluid and when they have Eragon riding it, it doesn't suffer from the obviously fake creature under a blue-screened actor problem, which is common in movies where you have a person riding some sort of creature.

The Bad: Just about everything else about this movie. Ok, so the book was stereotypical for fantasy, but the dialog was at least believable. The movie's dialog went from corny to bad to downright horrible. What few dramatic scenes this movie had were just ruined by dialog which sounded like it was pulled out of some Saturday morning kid's special. Which leads me to the next problem: This movie was about an hour short. The entire movie felt rushed from the start to the finish, none of the characters were ever developed at all. The movie kept jumping from one important scene to the next with overly dramatic music and a fly-over. Unfortunately, this transition usually signaled that the script writer had decided to skip several chapters from the book which had all of that boring character and plot development stuff in it. In the end this had the effect of preventing me from really caring about any of the characters. This really shows when a short way into the movie the character "Brom" is killed. In the book this is a sad event, as you had spent a lot of time learning about him and seeing his effect on Eragon. In the movie, he's dead so quick and with so little screen time that he may as well have been a Star Trek "Red Shirt" for all I cared about him. Because of this, the subsequent burial of Brom and the dragon, Saphira, turning his grave into some giant crystal just seems out of place.

Conclusion: I would give this movie a 2 of 5. What little of it there was, was fairly faithful to the book, and the dragon looked really good. But, I think that, if the second book gets made into a movie, the producers should really try to hire a writer who has actually read the book and not just the Cliff Notes. If you get a chance to catch this movie on HBO, watch it, but don't waste the money going to the theater for it.

Faithful to the book?!?

[pythorlh]

My sons and I (and the majority of their Boy Scout troop) went to see Eragon yesterday. The general consensus from those who had never read the book was the it was an OK movie. Not bad, not great. The general consensus from those who had read the book(s) was "That was Eragon? But what about..." My opinion was that someone read a cliff-notes version of the book and turned it into a movie.
CGI? The dragon was great. The Ra'zac looked cool. But it would've been nice if they didn't spend 90% of their eff

Re:

[Sylver Dragon]

Ya, I noticed the problem with the elves and dwarves, I'm wondering how in the world they are going to deal with the second book, assuming it gets made? Once the Varden get to the dwarven homelands they should be surrounded by them, what are we just going to get humans with long beards and dirty overalls?
As for the creatures, it had been long enough since I read the book that I had forgotten what the Ra'zac and Urgals looked like. I started re-reading the book once I got home from the movie, and was sudd

Re:

[pythorlh]

We're a small town. $6 is the matinee. I had just read Eldest in the past week, so I was particularly aware of the changes. If they do a second movie, it might make out better. Not more faithful, but better. In this one, they dropped a lot of the plotlines that feed into the sequel. For example, a lot of what trigger's Roran's journey was just left out. That being the case, they will pretty much have to leave out Roran's journey in the sequel as well, which is almost half the book. That leaves a lot

Luckily

[Shadow Wrought]

THe movie is secondary to eating copious amounts of popcorn;-) We'll see it this week because my stepson loved the book. And, while he'll probably be disappointed about the "but, what about..." I think he'll really enjoy seeing the dragon, too.