Eragon

December 14, 2006 - Big-budget fantasy epics have come waltzing into cinemas in time for the Christmas rush on an annual basis since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Last year's epics were King Kong and the opening act of The Chronicles of Narnia. This year, fledgling auteur Christopher Paolini's Eragon book one of The Inheritance Trilogy leaps from page to screen, hoping to wrangle fans with the same high-fantasy fervor as Tolkien's works.

And although it is obvious that first-time director Stefen Fangmeier has sifted through and dissected Jackson's work, he flounders badly and never achieves the same awe that it aspires to generate. The problems are numerous and severe, and most can likely be attributed to the director's relative inexperience and extreme oversimplification of a story that demanded more than the 104 minute running time afforded to it. Eragon, the film's namesake, played by 18 year-old newcomer Ed Speleers, is a simple farmhand working with his brother and uncle on a farm in the idyllic countryside.

Things go awry when he goes hunting in the wee hours of the morning and ends up coming home not with deer meat, but rather a large, sapphire-blue egg, teleported to his location by Arya the fleeing elf princess (and apparently, love interest). However, gone is the dark-haired beauty described in the books (a pointy-eared rip of Arwen with a dubiously similar name), instead replaced by the breathless, human-eared, and uncharacteristically rough-looking Sienna Guillory. This is but one of many changes to Eragon, straying from the writer's original vision and likely tainting the series forever in the minds of many fans.

We're certainly not spoiling anything by telling readers that there are no dwarves to speak of in Eragon, and a scant number of elves though, you'd be hard-pressed to spot them. The Urgals have been replaced by bald, greasy bikers, proving that not even the forces of evil are free from artistic corruption at the hands of the producers. Of course, there is no denying that Paolini's work itself is derivative stuff much of his place and character monikers are pulled almost directly from Tolkien.

However, this doesn't excuse director Fangmeier for mimicking the look and feel of the costumes, characters, sets and sequences. For instance, the battle of Farthen-Dur, feels like a two-bit Helm's Deep, complete with pounding drums and overwhelming odds. And early in the film, as young Eragon stares out over the land at sunset either pondering his fate or thinking about cheeseburgers, the sun is low on the horizon and soft, melancholy music carries the tone of the scene.

We've been here before, in the opening moments of another classic trilogy. In fact, Eragon also draws much from the Star Wars mythos to the point where audiences will be looking around for uncle Owen and wisecracking droids. The characterization is noticeably absent, the editing itself is jumpier than a caffeine addict, and dialogue exchanges are generally unremarkable.

Speleers spends a good portion of the film smoldering quietly, seeming to have taken a few notes from the Hayden Christensen school of cardboard acting.