Badmovies.org Forum

Derivative.

Pedestrian.

Cliche.

Star Wars rip-off.

These are just the few of the many adjectives used by reviewers who survived face-to-face meeting with "Eragon". Others went mad. If their words hold true then, verily, we live in dark times when the biggest studios are willing to give cash to directors coming up with such crappy ideas as this one. I haven't seen this movie yet, so I can't speak for myself. But the image that emerges from these reviews is gloomy, as gloomy as the dark reign John Malkowitch holds over the land of Alga-something-esia.

 Is there, among us readers, lurkers, and even spammers on this forum to come forth and face this beast alone in the cinema? Or is there anyone who already managed this feat?

Isn't  an Eragon a shadowy lobster like creature bred for food by intergalactic teenagers?

^^ you forgot one word: Crap

I have braved the terror that is Eragon (my daughter is into dragons; what could I say?).

***SPOILER-ishness***

It is indeed all that the critics have proclaimed it to be. Cliched (the writing is horrible). Derivative (every easy-to-spot "twist" you've ever seen used in a bad movie is used here: the hero foolishly rushes in to save the girl against impossible odds, and succeeds, but only at the cost of his mentor; the hero is amazingly adept at things others take years to develop; the hero saves the day and his best friend in totally unsurprising ways, despite the attempt to make it surprising, etc.). Pedestrian (I wanted to walk out. Oh, wait that's not that means. But it was pretty bland storytelling as well). Star Wars rip-off (too many details to go into. After the movie, my daughter was telling me about all the stuff they changed from the book. If they added in all the stuff she told me about, critics would also be calling it a Lord of the Rings rip-off).

Oh, and John Malkovitch must have really needed a paycheck. I wouldn't have believed someone with his acting ability could have been so painfully horrible to watch; he was reciting cliche after cliche so woodenly I was looking for him to pull off a rubber mask to reveal himself as really being Ben Affleck.

Haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book.  It's very derivative, most obviously of the Pern series (though not as much as you might think), LOTR and Star Wars. 

It's still a brisk, entertaining read, and a good accomplishment for a 17 year old's first novel. 

Film I'll probably see when it hits DVD.  I'm a sucker for dragons too.

Wasn't the book written by a 15 year old?

Anyways, I haven't seen it and don't really care to, but my friend [who is a Star Wars nutso] thought it was fun enough, even despite the terrible Star Wars rip offs, so I suppose there isn't all bad news for Eragon I suppose.

Note: I have not seen the film, only read about it a few places and here.

I wonder if the reason it is so close to the fold for "Star Wars" is the original writer's age.  I think a lot of writing comes from the author's experiences.  While I am an amateur, the varied life I have seen through the Marine Corps and friends has to have helped my writing.  Rather than a limited pool of events, people, and places to pull from, it has provided a  lot of variables.  The author of Eragon would not have such a mental reference library.

Not that some teenagers would not out-write and out-think me, but certainly a person's life must have something to do with what they write.

Dude...you're not an amateur!
You've been writing here for what...8 years now?

I would not call that amateur.

Yeah, I've too began meddling with letters when I was young - in fact, I've started writing when I was younger than Paolini - but from what I remember, the things I've written back when I was fourteen of fifteen were already - I can't say "mature", but they already were explorations of abstract/philosophical concepts rather than rip-offs of other people's writing. Example? Unfinished novel "Songs of the desert": a man receives a letter from an old friend who's living a secluded life in a manor in the woods. The friend urges him to come to his abode as soon as possible - and our protagonist does, only to find the friend killed by some monsters/supernatural forces... So far, it was a clear rip-off from Lovecraft. But what followed wasn't: having fled from the manor our protagonist finds himself on the verge of some kind of desert. A man he meets there informs him that the place he found himself in isn't really a place - rather, it's a plane where the time had been transformed into space (hence what he perceives as space is really - time). The man (I still remember his somewhat oriental name - "Krong") acts as his guide in this - uh - temporal plane of existence. On their way through the desert (I no longer remember where they were going to, or why) they encounter such places and people as city where men worship themselves as gods.

 When I've written it I was either fourteen or fifteen, very into Lovecraft, and didn't know about concepts such as divinity of man, inherent in the teachings of old, gnosticism in particular. I wrote it at the very same age when Paolini started to create his (allegedly, still have to read it for myself) cliched epic. Young age is no excuse for being derivative; sci-fi and fantasy genres give us chance to explore the abstract possibilities, a chance missed by most of the authors.

  Nowdays I write rather sparsely; in most of my stories I focus on the characters, on what happens inside people's head, on their feelings and emotions, including those that cannot be clearly labeled or described. Sample of my present style can be found at this URL: http://www.kult-rpg.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=1312 but beware, the english is my second language (I happened to have been born in the Eastern Europe). Come to think of it, perhaps I should have followed in Paolini's footsteps, namely: be born in USA, into parents running publishing business, write a book that's shallow but entertaining, get it published and make cash. Who cares about psychological complexity anyway?...

Please note that my harsh review is for the movie, not the book. I can respect a young man who has, if nothing else, the stick-to-it-tiveness to complete multiple publishable works, derivative or not. My problems with the movie involve professional script writers who seemingly cannot write dialog worth listening to. The movie obviously cuts out huge amounts of developmental material with no exposition to cover any of it. This leaves most of the moments that are supposed to be emotionally moving seeming hollow and even more cliched. It makes the movie feel rushed, and this is a problem with the script and director more than a problem with the original source material. My own publishing history is sparse: I have had works printed in a few college publications, though none of them have any great reputations. I kind of gave up a few years ago on finding my niche in the world of published fiction. However, as an English teacher with a degree in Creative Writing and Literature, I think I am fairly well qualified to judge what passes for decent dialog and story structure. Eragon the movie is deficient on both counts; the dialog is stilted and riddled with cliches, which good script writers should have fixed, and the storytelling seems so intent on getting to the big scenes that the journey to develop those scenes gets left out and everything (the characters, the situations, the fictional universe) seems very sketchy. I hope the book does a better job at least with developing the characters and situations in the story; the movie has taken away any interest I might have had in reading it.

Not when you do so well!  8 years Bad writer=Amateur, 8 years good writeing,= NOT amateur!
Truse me on this...

OK, I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, but can offer one insight into this.... the book sells like bloody hotcakes.  As the scheduler for Australia's largest RFP book printer, I can tell you that if I had a dollar for every copy of the book (and the sequel, "Eldest") that we have printed in the last couple of months I would be a very rich man!  I think we had 5 separate orders for reprints of it in the two weeks leading up to Christmas alone!  This would be close to this year's Da Vinci Code (extremely popular despite questionable literary merit).

I had to laugh the other day when they played an ad for it, saying it was "hailed by critics" or some such crap.  It was funny because I'd just been reading the reviews, almost all of which were negative.

A little bit more of a comment on the book...  Still haven't seen the movie, but from what I gather it does have more character and plot development.  The villain also doesn't appear in the first book at ALL.  He is just referenced.  And the final battle in the film was made up for the film. 

In particular, they spent quite a bit more time on the book in the dragon growing up, which apparently is played as if it happened in a single day in the film. 

Okay, now I made the connection.

While I had heard of a teen-age author who had written a book and had it published, and I had heard of "Eragon," I never connected the two.

Which means I'm slightly more impressed with his second novel, "Eldest." When I first picked it up, not recognizing the author was so young, I thought: "This is not written very well. I'm not impressed."

On the other hand, reading alot of fantasy, about 60% of everything I do read is fantasy, these are the authors who do impress me.

1.  For the ability to write a good, even a great, action scene.
a. Terry Brooks
b. Dennis McKiernan
c. Douglas Niles
d. Clifford D. Simak

2. For the ability to write great characters.
a. David Cook
b. Troy Denning
c. J. Robert King
d. Mary Kirchoff
e. Richard A. Knaak
f. Chris Pierson

3. For the ability to write charcters with which I identify.
a. Tonya R. Carter
b. Fergus Ryan
c. Paul B. Thompson

4. For the ability to write a scene as real as it gets.
a. Nancy V. Berberick

5. For the ability to write a sex scene, that doesn't make you want to hurl.
a. Margaret Weiss

6. And just because.
a. Tracy Hickman
b. J. R. R. Tolkien

And the greatest of these is . . .
Tolkien

And the name of the land in "Eragon" is Alagaesia. Rhymes with milk of magnesia.

How about authors that take a good idea and unnecessarily stretch it out to hideous lengths in order to generate more income:
Robert Jordan
Terry Goodkind
Janny Wurts
 :wink:

I like to read a book series once it is finished, thus I have been waiting years to read Jordan's Wheel of Time. He is finally writing the last book, but with him now suffering from some rare blood disease (which has no cure) I wonder if he'll live long enough to complete it.

Add Piers Anthony to that list.

Thanks... I can now avoid Eragon, and watch something that is, you know, BAD.   :twirl:

I'm a sucker for anything that features mythological creatures, dragons in particular, ever since I first saw most of Ray Harryhausen's movies when I was a kid.  But I'm not going to see this one...for pretty much the same reason I avoided "Reign of Fire"...just as the latter tried to sell Matthew Mconaughey as an action hero, Eragon is trying to convince us that John Malkovich can make a good head villain. 

Among all the mythological creatures that have appeared in film, Dragons have always gotten the shaft.  In the past they were nothing but evil characters, and even now when some of them are good, they usually play second fiddle.  You can make a case for Dragonheart, but still, Dennis Quaid was the main character in that one. 

Look at it this way...Unicorns get saved by Tom Cruise, mermaids get to swim off with Tom Hanks, and even evil Leprechauns get to enjoy multiple sequels  :bouncegiggle:...Sure, the Dragon in Shrek ended up with Donkey, but her screen time was virtually non-existant, especially in the second film. 

And it seems that Eragon is continuing this trend, which is a shame, because I've heard that Rachael Weisz's voice work for the dragon is the lone bright spot for this movie. 

Given enough fans and time, most fantasy authors seem to stretch things out to the extreme.  Consider Eddings and Brooks.  I very much enjoy the first three Shannara books, along with Eddings Belgariad and Malloreon series.  Trying to read some of their latest work has made me actually work to read a book - not good.

Jordan's padding of his storyline is so crazy as to be a joke.  I often refer to them as the Dragonball of the fantasy world.  If he had kept the series focused, I think it would be a favorite of mine.  Instead, we are up to something like twelve books, when I think it should have been resolved six novels ago.

Amusingly, one of my favorite classic scifi/fantasy series falls into this same trap.  Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote too many Barsoom books.

I'd forgotten to mention this in my commentary; I hated the dragon's voice. It sounded exactly like the producers were able to get a (kind of) big name actress on board to add to the star power of the movie. The voice, to my way of thinking, should have had a quality of resonant majesty (a bit of an aristocratic tone with possibly a bit of reverb added to enhance the enormity of the dragon); Weisz's voice has a flat and decidedly dead quality. She may be a good enough actress to appear on screen (I've enjoyed her in her other movies), but she doesn't have the experience to make a good voice-only actress. I don't mean to belittle her ability; I just think that the casting director for this movie should have gone with a voice actor rather than a screen actor; there is a difference. Some people can pull off both; most cannot.

So have I made it clear yet that I didn't particularly care for this movie?  :teddyr:

I think Eddings has reached his creative pinnacle. The Belgariad and Mallorean were great. The Sparhawk books were ok, but it seems everything since then has been retelling the same basic story, only with different names and locations.

I haven't even picked up a Shannara book since...the final book in the "Scions" series. I used to love epic fantasy, but have not read such a book in ages.

My 17 y.o. son has read the book.  (It was recommended by a friend.)  HE says it is derivative, immature and painfully cliched.  (He took a 'writer's craft' course for grade 11 English AND he has read Orson Scott Card's book on writing SF...so he does have some idea. He says the book had all the typical weaknesses listed by Card.)

But the family probably will go see the movie.  The kids are into dragons after all.

I haven't read Card's advice to writers book (seen it at the library though, might give it a look), but considering how painfully bad the final entry in the Ender's Game series is, and how many mistakes he made with it, I'm not so sure his advice is really that useful.  Maybe he uses Children of the Mind as an example of what NOT to do?

It's amazing that he wrote Children of the Mind, considering how stunning Ender's Game is.  I'm amazed they're by the same author.

In The Line Of Fire proved he's got the chops to hang, IMHO, but hey.  Me, I kindasorta want to see Eragon, but the general consensus seems to be that it's a massive trainwreck on celluloid.

I faced the beast known as ERAGON this afternoon. And here's what I think:

-What exactly is Rachel Weisz's Accent? The accent she gives Saphira the Dragon seems to switch between Scottish and British. There was even once I swear it sounded Irish. Also, was Rachel Weisz really the best choice for the voice of a dragon? She sounded a tad too gentle and motherly for such an aggressive creature. And let's not forget that the Saphira is the film's most likable character.

-If your fantasy movie doesn't take place in modern times, there should NOT be a pop song in the end credits. ERAGON does not follow this rule and confused me about what film I just watched for a second when the credits roll and the country gutair comes in.

-So the bald warrior bad guys can easily be killed by a seventeen-year-old boy and an elderly man, and yet several fit, middle-aged men pose little challenge to them? That's what I like to call the "Orc Effect".

-When filming someone jump into a pool of water, don't do it in slow motion or the audience will laugh. I laughed, at least.

-Those mummy guys covered in maggots and bugs sorta looked like the Predator in distance shots.

-One more thing about Saphira: I thought her voice kind of sounded like the lead singer of the Cranberries. There was more than one occasion when I half-expected her to burst out singing "Zombie"
"Another Mother something something something something..." Sorry, I don't know the song very well. :bluesad:

Overall, I guess it wasn't such a bad movie. Thing is, it wasn't so good, either.

Weighing in waaaaaayyy late, we just watched Eragon tonight.  Rented it for $1 from one o' those cube machines in the grocery store.

It was okay.  It was cliche' and stamped-out, but decent pace, CG, etc.   It had a seriously fast-forwarded feeling, and since I haven't read the books I figured major chopping out of detail was done.

I mean, it wasn't as bad as Dragonheart was.  =)

I better watch it, starting out those comparatives here.

Next on the block:  Spider-Man 3, No Country for Old Men, and Evolution.

I liked the part when the bad guy had just mortally wounded Jeremy Irons and says something to the effect of "You'll have to do that", and then the hero immediately shoots him in the head with an arrow. If only the bad guy had been killed by that the film would have had a better ending.

Rarely do you see a film as by the numbers as this one, whoever wrote and directed this thing must be more or less total hacks.

Do you know what I really, really hated the most about Eragon?  (Aside from the whole, "Galbatorix is evil because ... uh ... Eragon and the terroristsrebels are the good guys because ... uh ..." thing.)

That scene, that very last scene at the end, when Galbatorix reveals that he has AN ENORMOUS DRAGON OF HIS OWN.  He could gone out on the damn thing to kill Eragon and Sapphira and been done with it in about an hour or so.

Somebody should have read the Evil Overlord List:
"40. I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve."
But I suppose that would tend to make for much shorter movies.

I watched it on theatre. Bad idea. I'm not exactly among those who like to wear in Star Wars costumes and hail George Lucas for his talent (I think he is an OK writer and a bad film director), but watching this ridiculous remake of "A new hope" I couldn't but silently pray for Lucas to sue these guys, and to finally accept that as lame as "A new hope" seems to me (it's my least favourite SW film) it can be done much, much worse.

I'll give them just one credit, though: Sienna Guillory is sexier than Carrie Fisher.

I noticed something a while ago, shame I didn't know about this thread

Dragon
Eragon

He didn't even really try to create a different name for the main character.

Anyhoo, I never really noticed the similarities until they were pointed out but now I realize how ripped off it was.  I'm not saying it wasn't a good book or movie because it kind of was in a sense, however, I however am writing a book of my own and I do hope it is as popular as this one, but of a better quality and reviews :bouncegiggle:.

Next one should be called "Fragon". Sounds just like a detergent brand  :bouncegiggle: