Review of Eragon (2006) by Robertc. — 16 Dec 2006

I'd like to call this film the most mentally challenged fantasy film I have ever seen. Horrible editing, god-awful script, and considering how embrassingly simple the story is, it somehow still manages to not make a whole lot of sense.

The movie essentially follows the successful template of Star Wars plot-wise, but it's so muddled and derivative that you just want it to hurry up and end. Though I haven't read the book, I heard that they couldn't even follow IT accurately, so one wonders what the studio was thinking.

The actors were piss-poor; John Malkovich had as much intimidation as Andy Dick in the single minute that he's on screen, Honsou was completely useless, the main character is irritating, and Jeremy Irons, who deserves so much more than this, seems to be the only one that attempts anything that can be considered a performance, which is a testament to the type of actor that he is.

The dragon Saphira, admittedly, is an impressive CGI creation, and Rachel Weisz does give the creature a certain etiquette about her, but the decision to have her speak in a telepathic voice is just ridiculous.

Either have the creature actually speak (Dragonheart showed that you can pull it off), or at least give it enough expression to just pantomime through the feature. While this is a more picky complaint, it's just the way they present the voice, especially with the craptastic dialouge, is winch-inducing as if it were a 1980s afternoon fantasy special.

I usually avoid using this term to describe a movie, but I have no choice: it's retarded. It's as if Lord of the Rings was dropped on its head if it were a baby. I don't rate it a zero because while it's a curse to the genre, it could also be a blessing in disguise.

I'm sickened because there are so many other great sci-fi/fantasy stories out there that deserve the film treatment and THIS flavor-of-the-month gets a $125M budget and a December release. BUT because it should do wonderful in the box-office, the studios could start grabbing more and more fantasy stories; which is a good thing because any other story would be better than this idiotic cesspool of cliches and shoddy dialouge.

I haven't hated a movie like this since Timeline.