Review of The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising (2007) by Mizell W — 14 May 2008

I don't know who to be pissed off with about this film. Is it market forces, is it some staggeringly unimaginative "creative" people, is it the decade we live in? Is it bean-counters who think if they ape Harry Potter they will be in like Flynn, never mind the source material is about a hundred times richer and better? Here's what I think happened.

Someone with no imagination got hold of this book and said "Hey, we've got a story here that we could make into a sub-Harry Potter! And because that film's full of annoying Brits, let's make this one with an American hero! What, in the book he's from an established rural English family? The book sucks! Let's make him the son of a professor from the US who has to move to England!" Never mind that's the most cockeyed unlikely scenario you can imagine.

I mean a professor with two kids might think about upping sticks for Blighty, but a professor with eight children, most of them hulking teen boys - wouldn't they have minded slightly the idea of moving three thousand miles?? And he's supposed to have a son who was abducted, too - is he supposed to move away even though the boy might try and find him in the US? I read the book "The Dark is Rising" when I was a child and I loved it.

I can even still quote the poem from it about the signs. It's the kind of book you would read at Christmas time because it's full of snow and cozy English villages and eccentric British goodies and baddies.

This film rips out all the quirkiness and fun, all the time travel elements are stripped back to nothing, the buxom lass in the book with the rural accent is just some wispy gorgeous babe with a nondescript English accent.

Crap!!! And the cast of adults are wasted. Christopher Eccleston should go back to being in Doctor Who, all his roles since have been in embarrassing parodies of English characters, he's a bit of an Uncle Tom of a British actor, dancing to please his American masters.

The continuity in the film is really bad, too. In many scenes, the backup goodie characters appear to be in real peril, and in the next scene they are fine and winking at Will, so you think, huh? If nothing is real, how can you care about their peril in the next scene? And there was so much blinding lighting, and slow-mo flying through the air, it was all far too stylish and slick and without substance.

I guess this is the last time I try and watch a movie version of a book I really loved. If I hadn't read the book I might have liked this more, as it is I just want to slap JK Rowling and her mediocrity that's infected every corner of fantasy films for children.

And I just want to slap her generally, for becoming the "standard" of all such films. Susan Cooper was around years before JK Rowling was! The original book was set in the 1970s! The main character, Will, was a good actor, and the score was amazing.

Evocative. But this should never have been made. It would have been better as a BBC TV adaptation in the 1980s. Making it now has meant it's just going to get compared to Harry Potter. Pah! Not impressed.