Fri, Dec 15, 2006

: Eragon

Today I had no electricity so I went to the movies. I wanted to see this film as I’d read the book. At first I was frustrated because it started off with a lot of narrated exposition and seemed to be skipping key events from the book, but somehow it still worked — the heart of the story comes through and if you hadn’t read the book you’d come away thinking it was pretty good. It’s not as good as the book in many ways — much of the drama is lost as time is compressed so that events that took months in the novel happen within minutes on film — but in other ways, that’s actually better, for the book did drag on and on bit too much. Overall, a decent and impressive adaptation. The CGI dragon is surprisingly well-done and the actors — many unknown — are not bad. The film does not have the epic feel of the Lord of the Rings films and comes across like a cheap clone; it would have been better served to slow the action at times and let the story build. But it does have a handful of emotional moments and times when you fee like there’s more to the story than just action. But overall it’s not a bad mix: kids will enjoy the action. Readers of the book will probably feel somewhat disappointed, but trust me: it could have been much worse.

Topic: [/movie]

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