Bad movie

A week or two ago Becca and I received the movie Eragon in our Blockbuster-by-Mail queue. Becca and I are fans of young adult literature in general, having read a lot of it growing up. We still read a lot of YA stuff, and a lot of it is quite good.¹ We both read the book Eragon a few years ago but we never saw the movie, so we put it in our queue. If you're not familiar with this book or movie, you probably will hear more about it soon. The third book in the series is scheduled to be released on September 20.



For those of you not in the know, Eragon was written in 2002 by Christopher Paolini, then a teenager from Montana who wanted to write a book he would like to read. It's fairly unimaginative fantasy stuff -- dragons, young heroes, quests, evil magicians, etc. Paolini basically took all the basic archetypes and slapped them together. His writing isn't terrible, and it got better in the second book, but it's not what I would call great literature. Still, I was interested to see how the movie makers approached the film adaptation. I hadn't heard much about the movie because I was in law school at the time, so we started watching it with no preconceived notions.



It was awful. I mean absolutely wretched. I can't even think of the last movie I saw that was that bad. From the hurried voice-over in the beginning to the out-of-place Avril Lavigne song playing in the credits, almost every moment of this movie was just plain bad. The writing was dismal, with awkward dialogue and unbelievable situations and sequences. The costumes were surprisingly bad (they looked like something a teenager would make to wear to a Renaissance festival). The acting was mostly pretty bad, although Jeremy Irons was okay.² But with the campy lines, they didn't have much to work with. A lot of the props were equally dumb -- the dragon's egg at the beginning of the movie looks like a giant jellybean. Even the special effects weren't very well done. They weren't awful, but they were pretty fakey-looking in most parts, leaving the movie bereft of even some believable eye candy.



All in all, I thought this was a profoundly bad movie, and I'm not alone. Apparently Eragon's sole contribution to society was taking part in the best movie theater prank ever.



UPDATE: I just realized that this post is the first one in a long while to include a picture. Sorry for the boring blogging!

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¹ I'm convinced that books receive the label "Young Adult" purely based on whether or not they have sexual, violent, or other mature themes or language. There are plenty of complex and nuanced books in the Young Adult category that are more adult than most of adult fiction. They simply choose to express those themes in an indirect or subtle way.

² I can't ever hear Jeremy Irons without thinking of this. I do love his voice, though.