Movie Review #22 - Eragon
Feb. 14th, 2007 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catalyst2This movie has got a lot of bad reviews - this one's going to be mixed, largely, I suspect, because I haven't read the book. Most of the really virulent reviews focus on how much of the book is simplified and/or missed.
First check of the watch - about forty minutes in
As a tale of a fairly standard Thud and Blunder genre movie, this does quite well - good special effects, good battle scenes and well-choreographed action sequences (the two "dragons" dueling at the climax of the final battle was heart-stopping). This isn't a standard movie - it has got some damn good actors in - Jeremy Irons, Robert Carlyle, John Malkovich as examples - and, with the exception of Irons, all are uniformly ordinary. The one other exception is Rachel Weisz whose voice work for Saphira is very expressive.
Sadly, the story was poor even for this type of movie. The very second I saw Brom, I thought that he was either the last surviving rider or one of the killers of the dragons who was now overcome with remorse. Either way, it was 100% predictable that he would become Eragon's mentor. Nothing stood out in the story so I guess it became a featureless canvas that the actors tried to act in front of.
Overall, an OK movie - not great, not terrible, just ordinary.
First check of the watch - about forty minutes in
As a tale of a fairly standard Thud and Blunder genre movie, this does quite well - good special effects, good battle scenes and well-choreographed action sequences (the two "dragons" dueling at the climax of the final battle was heart-stopping). This isn't a standard movie - it has got some damn good actors in - Jeremy Irons, Robert Carlyle, John Malkovich as examples - and, with the exception of Irons, all are uniformly ordinary. The one other exception is Rachel Weisz whose voice work for Saphira is very expressive.
Sadly, the story was poor even for this type of movie. The very second I saw Brom, I thought that he was either the last surviving rider or one of the killers of the dragons who was now overcome with remorse. Either way, it was 100% predictable that he would become Eragon's mentor. Nothing stood out in the story so I guess it became a featureless canvas that the actors tried to act in front of.
Overall, an OK movie - not great, not terrible, just ordinary.
