Let’s say that we have a really good book. It’s a book by someone who is only a teenager, and his coming-of-age shows through in it. It’s a very good book. Then, some greedy Hollywood filmmakers crapmakers come along and turn it into, well, crap.
That’s exactly what happened with Eragon. Christopher Paolini, who was only 15 when he started writing the book, wrote it in such a way that teens could relate to. It was a great fantasy book that seemed slightly familiar *cough*Star Wars*cough*Lord of the Rings*cough*. But it was all good. Until the movie was made.
Like The DaVinci Code, Eragon is one of the products of our time where any popular book is rolled up and squashed together into a movie which tries to ride the book’s popularity. Only, it’s usually crap. The DaVinci Code was okay, but it was a masterpiece compared to this. Eragon suffers from many things, the first being how rushed it is.The movie goes by way too fast. The Harry Potter movies somehow magically (haha) were able to turn 700 page books into semi-coherent and not too rushed movies. Eragaon wasn’t. The movie starts out with a 3-minute montage that shows and describes the events leading up to the present time. In the book it took up about 15 pages.
The movie cuts anything that isn’t directly important to the plot, but then there’s absolutely no time for the characters to develop. At the end of the movie, I still felt like each character was a complete stranger to me. It’s a shame because the characters actually seemed pretty well cast. They just had so little material to go on. The entire movie was basically one battle, then another quick horribly written conversation about why the last battle was fought, and then another one.
It’s true that some things just don’t translate from text to a screen, and it’s a difficult task for the crapmakers to do this. But they did it with Harry Potter. They did it with Lord of the Rings. If only they could have done it with Eragon.
The special effects were okay. They weren’t bad, it was just that at one moment we saw this typical farm boy, and then all of the sudden he was flying on a dragon. This made it play out like a TV movie. In fact, it should have gone straight to DVD. All the movie did was give a brief synopsis of the book, only with much more woody dialogue.
Perhaps if they had taken the time to actually think about how they would make the movie instead of just putting it out as fast as possible, the crapmakers would have a decent movie right now. But that’s not what happened, and it’s happening more and more these days. The Maximum Ride series is being made into a movie and I doubt that it will be any good at all.
I’m so glad that I didn’t see the movie in theaters, because it was really just terrible. Don’t see it. It’s too fast paced, incredibly cheesy, has absolutely no character development, and terrible dialogue.
[rating:1]
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Did you see Eragon or read the book? What did you think? Was my review biased? If you have an opinion, then post it in the comments!
I agree with most points you made. This movie should either have never been made, or split up into at least 2 parts. I went to see this movie in theaters with 2 friends, and the 45 minute ride home was spent listing off all of the things that were in the book that were left out in the movie. Lets just say that we had quite the ist by the time we got home.