Eragon - reviews - Page 2

Re: Eragon - reviews

Just felt this should get a double post, and placed at the top of the next page, as a convenience.

But it still might be mindless fun. Even Godzilla 1998 was fun a few times when I watched it.

Re: Eragon - reviews

Again, this was written by a 15 year old kid. His whole mind was probably full to bursting with names and plots from fantasy books and movies.

And Narnia was awful. If this is worse, I'll not even waste my time.

Re: Eragon - reviews

I'm gonna have to strongly disagree Malcolm. Sorry it wasn't your thing, but definitely not "awful" imo.

I thought it was very well done.

Re: Eragon - reviews

Well, I wouldn't call Narnia awful either. But it really didn't do much for me. I had seen the old version, which IMHO was way too cheesy. But I gave this a fair view going in and the production values were great, so no negative bias there. But the story just didn't grab me, I never really felt much for the characters, a bit for the kids, much less for any of the characters in Narnia.

Re: Eragon - reviews

I thought Narnia was well-done, with it's heart in the right place. I found it a bit dull, but it's a competent film.

Sorry Josh...I only bring Pan's up when someone else does For me, it's not quite as good as The Fountain, but it is MUCH more accessible. It just belongs in discussions with The Departed and United 93. Not Eragon.

Back to Eragon, Malcolm nails it. It was written by a 15 year old. I wrote stuff ripping off Aliens when I was 12. While it sucked, it was probably better than Alien Resurrection Long story short, if you think it'll be good...maybe you'll enjoy it. I think it would be awful, so for me it probably would be.

I would like to hear more HTF reviews. I thank Simon for his...I am not surprised at his opinion.

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I wouldn't say it surprised me either, but I'm going into it with low expectations, and taking a group of kids. As long as they like it, it will be a successful outing.

I'm not so old and set in my film watching genre's (not trying to imply that any of you are either) that I can't admit to enjoying some children's stories brought to life.

I already mentioned that I thouroughly enjoyed Narnia. I also am a huge fan of the Harry Potter films. Any of you remember The Neverending Story??? LOVED IT!


Since I will not be seeing the film until Saturday or Sunday, I can't say where this one will fall on my kid's fantasy tale movie list.

I'm still going to give it a chance. And I look forward to more reviews over the next few days.

Re: Eragon - reviews

If "The Hobbit" movie ever gets made, you're not going to like Smaug very much.

Re: Eragon - reviews

This was one of the blandest looking films I've seen in quite a while. The color palette was dour and dank in many spots, and the daylight scenes weren't all that good either.

Jeremy Irons does his yeoman's best, but can't quite elevate the material, and the guy playing Eragon, Ed Speleers, isn't all that interesting and the director/writers are perfectly okay with just putting him in scenes that just plod along with nary a thought given to time and distance covered by characters in impossibly short spans just to keep the film moving. Robert Carlyle chewed up the scenery, but wasn't all that nefarious as the Shade stooge of the king.

You could tell that many characters got the short-shrift towards the last half hour of the film, minimal character introduction and then the big finale that didn't live up to the build-up.

The dragon herself looked okay in closeups, but the flight sequences have a lot of hazy shots with not much details. It didn't look like state of the art 2006 CGI, more like 1996 CGI.

I give it 1.75 stars, or a grade of C-.

Re: Eragon - reviews

Thanks for the response Simon.


Hey Josh and Chris. I'd love to go into detail as to why I think Kong is better than Narnia, but you know someone on this forum will say that I am straying off the topic since this thread is about Eragon. So I'll just end this by saying when it is all said and done I'll take the big ape over Qui-Gon Lion anyday of the week .

Re: Eragon - reviews

Ironically....

Tolkien cribbed Gandalf and all the dwarf names from Norse mythology (The Elder Edda).

Re: Eragon - reviews

I had to laugh when Eragon was over (and it was a 2/3 filled theater) and someone tried the slow clap to get people to applaud the movie, and 5 seconds of singular clapping resulted in silence amongst the rest of the audience trying to leave ASAP. Funny stuff.

Re: Eragon - reviews

I forced myself to watch 40 min. then my Mother & I left. Its really a kiddy movie. Are they marketing it to the wrong audience?

Re: Eragon - reviews

While I didn't hate the movie, I have absolutly no good feeling about it either.


With respect to comparing the movie to the book.
If you read the fourth Harry Potter then saw the movie, thats the way this was as compared to the book. It hit on all the key points but did it in a very rushed way. The movie was under 100 minutes long, so just in that respect it shows they geared this toward the younger audience. They could have easily added an extra 45 minutes in developing the other major characters and sub-story that was in the book but not even mentioned in the movie. And the races all just seem to be different shapes of human, there are no dwarves, there are no Elves, and the Urgals are just Fat men with beards.

I would say destruction of the story line from the book to movie was as bad as Timeline was but not as bad as Starship Troopers.

As for the movie itself;

Very poorly made and edited together. There are a couple of major areas where reality doesn't seem to flow well. Especially in one scene, I was wondering how that guy got into the room when there was only one way in and it was blocked. very disjointed altogether.

On the real life Cinematography, it was on par with Dragonslayer, in quality and content. very poor

On the costumes, very poor and doesn't do much for making me feel like part of the movie.

On the CGI, some parts were good, while others were horribly lame, especially some centered around the Durzha. Dragon looks good, and I felt most of the scenes with the dragon were done well enough that it wouldn't ruin a good movie.

The acting was fine and wouldn't have deminished a good movie, good by the ones you would expect to be good and fair by the newcomers.

I'm just very dissapointed with the way the movie went. The book was good in my opinion and the changed to many things. I enjoyed the Harry potter books and the Movie. Whoever was responsible for adapting the book to a movie took to many liberties and destroyed what could have been a great set of movies. I mean if you have dwarves and elves in a book how do you not have them in a movie, and if a race is supposed to 7+ feet tall how do you figure just having fat people play the role will suffice.

Very poorly done.

Re: Eragon - reviews

Sounds a lot like that Dungeons & Dragons movie a few years back.

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Saw this today, and I have to agree with the reviews here. Very mediocre. I have not read the book, but I did get the feeling that we were seeing a "highlight reel" of the source material, with no character development at all other than what was cribbed from Star Wars.

What Eragon proves is what a singular achievement Peter Jackson's LotR trilogy is. Eragon tries hard, but just doesn't measure up. Bill mentioned the costumes. Ngila Dickson's costumes (and the Weta armor) were thoroughly convincing without being showy. They looked lived-in. The costumes in Eragon just look like they came off the rack.

Also, there's just no sense of scale here. The battles feel like they're being fought by only a few people, as opposed to what we saw in LotR. Even in the one scene near the end where the Carlysle character rallies his supposedly huge army (a direct rip-off of Saruman doing the same in TTT), almost half the screen is empty. What, they couldn't afford a few more runs of Massive to gen up some more critters??

And while I love Rachel Weisz, her VO performance as the dragon just doesn't work. I suspect they parked her in a sound booth, had her read all of her lines, and sent her on her way. Her lines just sound dropped into the soundtrack. There's no sense of conversation between the dragon and the boy. I don't blame Weisz, this is just bad voice direction and sound editing.

The biggest problem is, of course, the source material, which is unbelievably derivative even by Hollywood standards. I don't blame the young author of the book - this is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from a teenager. However, the adults who made the decisions to publish the book and make the movie really should have known better.

Finally - everyone's mentioned the ripoffs of Star Wars and LotR. But the whole concept of dragon & rider being linked telepathically is lifted intact from Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series. McCaffrey's books would have made a good basis for a film franchise. That the powers-that-be have ignored her classic novels, and greenlit this tripe instead, just underscores how many idiots there are in Hollywood.

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Dang, you would think creating names would be easy. Reading aintitcoolnews review, well this has got to be one sad movie. I'd buy it just to crack jokes at it. The article stated that it's a good thing that Fox own the thing, yet I feel something disturbing in the George Lucas Force.

Re: Eragon - reviews

This may be the first time I've ever been talked out of going to a movie. The response here was sooo incredibly bad, that I lost all hope it could be a good watch. Instead we took a group to see the Holiday, and Master Timobi Wan and I headed to see Blood Diamond. More to come in that thread.

I'm gonna save Eragon as a renter

Re: Eragon - reviews

I really need to get those books. Sounds like a better way to spend my time.

Great comments, btw. Tells me I need to give it a miss. I'll be watching Krull instead.

Re: Eragon - reviews

Without reading anyone elses review...

I have only read a small portion of this book. I read up to the part where Brom meets Erragon as he is getting supplies to leave Carvahall.

My first impression was that it just dragged. They didn't take the time to develop much of anything about the characters, so I didn't care too much about them. They didn't even bother to go into Roran's girl and his leaving. I sort of felt why even bother to have him in the film if they weren't even going to disucss his story.

My second impression was the acting was absolutely horrible. Jeremy Irons is the worst over actor alive. I thought they all pretty much stunk. Whoever wrote the screenplay, did a horrible job.

I sat there basically bored out of my mind. My husband who has read all the books thought it was absolutely cheesy. he was so disappointed. I think everyone who was in the theater that night felt pretty much the same way.

Re: Eragon - reviews

This is a good barometer for Fantasy movies. If it has a talking Dragon its for kiddies. I'm going to keep this in mind from now on.

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I'm pleased to read no defense of this movie of the "hey, I turned off my brain and enjoyed my popcorn" type.

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I am blown away at the fact that with as diverse a viewing group as we have here on the HTF, not ONE person has given a good review of this film.

I'm glad I didn't go see it. Thanks to all for the honest reviews. You saved me $8.00 and a lot of misery it appears.

JC

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Pffft. Everybody knows dragons are covered in dandelions, not scales. And they breathe garlic-bread, not fire.

Really, why is The Neverending Story the only movie that has the imagination to make a dragon that doesn't look Reign Of Fire-ish.

Sorry about the thread fart, back to your discussion.

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The publishers were his parents, who own the publishing company that printed his book, and paid for all the advertising. It's a stretch to say the author achieved his position by his own means.

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I had no idea. I stand by my original statement that it was a bad idea.

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Actually, I believe his parents owned a PR firm (or perhaps a smaller publishing label), but knew someone that owned the larger publisher that ended up publishing the books.

In any case, the whole Eragon "15 year old author" news story frenzy that followed resulted in a large slate of copy-cat publishers pushing books by "the youngest author ever" - of which, most are pretty much just trash.

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The version of the story I read is that yes, nepotism got Paolini's foot in the door, but he became a best-selling author in his own right later. The original edition of Eragon was self-published by his parents. However, during his marketing efforts (which included doing readings in school libraries), his story caught the attention of a kid who just happened to be the son of another author, who brought it to his publisher's attention, and the rest is history. I haven't read the books, so I'll give Paolini the benefit of the doubt. I'm even willing to assume "Eragon" isn't so much a rip-off of "Aragorn" as much as simply a slight alteration of "Dragon", given the deep connection dragon and rider share.

As for the movie...

It Wasn't That Bad™

Yes, it's a poor man's version of the original Star Wars, clothed in Tolkienesque stereotypes. And 15-year-old author or not, I would have expected a grown-up screenwriter to be able to do a more mature rendering of the basic hero's-journey-lite premise. Too much exposition and too little character development. "Turning off your brain and enjoying the fireworks" won't work, as even a turned-off brain can't be fooled THAT much.

And yet... There's a pretty cool adventure flick screaming to get out from under the dull script and the music video direction. Jeremy Irons makes up for D&D with a strong performance as Brom (Mr. Kenobi if you're nasty), and Robert Carlyle chews up the scenery, the script, and his co-stars as Durza, right-hand man to the REAL bad guy, who in true Sauron/Palpatine fashion, spends most of the movie speaking of how evil he is, but never actually doing anything even mildly mean.

I've read many scathing reviews of Ed Speleers' turn as Eragon, but all things considered, he did as well as could be expected from the lines he had to speak.

The dragon was lovely, though the CGI pales in comparison to that of LOTR, HP, and Narnia, but I enjoyed Rachel Weisz's vocal performance.

Is it as good as LOTR? Boy, don't make me laugh. Is it as good as Harry Potter? Not in this life. Is it as good as Narnia? C. S. Lewis sez "bitch, please". Star Wars? Look, poo-poo on GL's writing and direction all you want, he still runs circles around Eragon. Big, fat, wide, Pluto-orbit-sized circles.

But... There's something there. I would be interested in an eventual extended cut. And it should look gorgeous in BD.

I can't recommend this film in good conscience. But I like it, in its own way. I might get the DVD (or BD, if I crack and buy a player by then).

Re: Eragon - reviews

The film's Friday-to-Friday box office business dropped by nearly 70%. Apparently, word of mouth is fatal.