Review of The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007) by Karina W — 09 Oct 2008

Yet another one of those kids' fantasy movies about some sort of Chosen One fighting a generic unseen evil, The Dark Is Rising has considerable trouble distinguishing itself from more popular (and bigger-budgetted) films like Harry Potter. The story, characters and action sequences are all pretty unengaging, but chiefly, the film suffers because it's rarely clear what the nameless characters are rabbitting on about.

Will Stanton (Alexander Ludwig) and his enormous American family have moved to an English village. On Will's 14th birthday he starts noticing monsters and "Signs", and he's immediately told that he is a Seeker: the seventh son of a seventh son, an Old One, destined to champion The Light against The Dark by travelling through time to find the Signs. He is pursued by The Rider (Christopher Eccleston), a villain frequently on horseback, who masquerades as the town doctor but, for some reason, never engages in battle with the Old Ones, until it suddenly occurs to him to give this a try.

Lost yet? The film devotes a fair amount of time to explaining things, which is pretty brave for a ninety minute movie, but it still doesn't make sense: it's an amazing mixture of patronisingly simple and utterly convoluted. For all the hot air about Light and Dark, it's never clear what those things actually mean, or what kind of peril the world is in for if the Old Ones don't do whatever it is they're supposed to do to save it. The characters occasionally jump from one time to another without apparently doing anything. I eventually gave up trying to follow it.

The film constantly sets things up that never come to fruition. Will gets superpowers that he doesn't do much with; the Old Ones comprise half a dozen people who are barely named, let alone developed, and it's not clear whether they have superpowers too; at the end, when Light and Dark face off, as well as being anticlimactic, it's not clear what's been achieved. The film has all these lazy fantasy archetypes and refuses to elaborate on them. Will does at least ask what this whole Dark thing is about, but he doesn't get an answer. We get an impression that some of this made sense in the book, but quite a lot's been lost in translation. The script is courtesy of John Hodge, who successfully adapted Trainspotting and can do a lot better than this.

The cast don't have much to work with, and there are too many of them. Ian McShane blethers vaguely as Will's Obi-Wan style mentor, and Christopher Eccleston has the thankless villain role: by the luck of the draw he gets all the worst dialogue, although it might be his phoned-in delivery that kills it dead. He appears in disguise sometimes, which would be an interesting ruse if anyone else did that, or if it was clear what he was up to. His henchmen include people made up of snakes and birds, although whether this means he can control animals is, like a lot of things going on here, unexplained.

There's virtually no characterisation, the dialogue is ropey, and most of the explanations seem to hang on the optimistic crutch of a possible sequel to explain things in. Judging from the film's poor performance at the box office and with critics, that won't be happening.

Despite it all, The Dark Is Rising isn't horrendous. There are clearly some ideas at the heart of it, although they appear to have been blandified Hollywood-style, much to the presumed chagrin of the book's fans. Alexander Ludwig isn't detestable, which is something to be thankful for in a child actor; he's better than the Harry Potter lot, at least. And the time zooms by fairly quickly, although that may be due to the zippy, unexplained time-jumps in the plot. (Time is one of the film's major problems: characters keep warning Will that there are only X many days left, *but he can travel through time*, so what's the rush?) The film is quick and watchable enough. But I did often wonder if the actors had any idea what the dialogue meant.

I was surprised to learn that The Dark Is Rising, or The Seeker as it was called in America, is based on a series of books some thirty years old. The film's plot is so sketchy, unimaginative and contrived that it sounds like a first time author's dashed-off after-school project. Indeed, there's a whiff of Eragon in the so-called plotting. This is forgettable and anonymous stuff, that very few will be moved to seek out. I doubt people will be rushing off to investigate the books, either.