Eragon

Ok, let's keep this short and to the point, I want to sleep and the idea that writing about this of all movies is going to keep me up makes me nearly sick. Eragon is a book about a boy who finds a dragon egg and becomes this dragon riding warrior who is fated to overthrow an evil empire. The author, Christopher Paolini, began writing it at age fifteen and has since published a sequel, called Eldest, and is working on the final book in what he calls the Inheritance Trilogy. You might think that having a best seller at age seventeen is thrilling, but Paolini's real accomplishment is the way he manages to steal elements from practically every popular epic adventure (ie Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, etc.) and present his books, with a straight face, as if they were his own original ideas. The only things he comes up with really are the names which tend to feature about sixteen consonants for every one vowel, don't even start trying to figure out the ratio when it comes to the magic spells, I tend to read those as more of an elaborate sneeze than anything else. The point of all this is that I read the books because they are so bad that they become like a car wreck you can't not look at. It's all so wildly "Eragon" with the supposedly elevated dialogue and "shocking" plot twists. I'm glad to report that the movie was just as bad as the first book, despite the fact that they totally shredded the original story, keeping the bare necessities and beyond all possible belief filling in the gaps with material that is even worse than the source. If a person has read the books and really liked them, or has not read the books at all, I cannot comprehend them liking the movie, because it makes all the faults of the books painstakingly obvious. But if you are one of the few who, like me, read the books because they were so sensationally corny, then it is the perfect movie to accompany the literature. The special effects are terrific (I seriously want a baby dragon, and a full grown one for that matter) and the acting isn't really bad, while John Malkovich destroys what might have been a dark and evil emperor character, new comer Ed Speleers plays the title role of Eragon with much more feeling and depth than Daniel Radcliffe showed in his first two Harry Potter outings, and he's got the two elder children from Narnia beat by a long shot. The most surprising elements of the movie are the cinematography and direction by first timer Stefen Fangmeier who brings an aesthetic elegance to the scenes that could never be predicted. The worst thing about the movie is the script, meaning the dialogue, the pacing and the plot, but these were all problems with the book in their own special way. In short Eragon is one of those "so bad it's good" movies, and despite being absolutely horrified at the inane nature of it all, I had one of the giddiest times watching a movie that I've had in a long while.

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